I am proud to receive for the first My Dark Pages, Thomas Pluck who has taken the web by storm lately with a fiction that's features strong but beat up people, looking for a better life in all the wrong places. His latest story THE UNCLEARED is on A Twist Of Noir. You should check it out, because when he's going to beat Cormac McCarthy in sales and make Oprah cry on live television, you can say you've learned about him first here.
When Ben asked me to write about the novel that turned me into a crime writer, three books by my literary heroes immediately came to mind. 8 Million Ways to Die by Lawrence Block, Down in the Zero by Andrew Vachss, and Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett. Dash's novel is the hot,dirty spring in which all yeggs are hardboiled, after all. When I sat down to write about it, I remembered where I truly cut my teeth:Encyclopedia Brown and Agatha Christie. Not exactly what you were expecting, was it?
I don't have real mystery cred. I've never read Sherlock Holmes. But Encyclopedia Brown was a hero who solved crimes by knowing scads of ephemera. He didn't have fancy powers of deduction or wear a silly hat. Like me, he read reference books for the joy of knowledge,because we were both huge nerds. I quickly outgrew them after I could figure them out. I moved on to the only mysteries the school library had, which were by Agatha Christie. Miss Marple, queen of the cozies.I was living at my grandmother's house at the time. Maybe I idolized the tough old broad.
I read Ten Little Indians. Hell of a body count, for a kid. For a book report on The Mirror Crack'd, I pasted together a huge poster of a Rolls Royce grille splattered with a crushed old lady's blood, her smashed spectacles embedded in the prongs. My teacher thought I was part of the Addams family. Now that I think back, I don't recall if anyone was killed by being pushed in front of a car in that book.Murder fueled my imagination. Maybe I mixed it up with Gatsby. Who cares, I still got an A and my class had to look at a car accident during roll call.
I sated my bloodlust with Stephen King. When the Fletch movie with Chevy Chase came out, I discovered Greg MacDonald's books, which led me to the mystery section at my local bookstore. Titles like Nibbled to Death by Ducks. Bordersnakes. A Ticket to the Boneyard. Then a friend dragged me to a little movie called Reservoir Dogs. We walked out stunned. After that we dived face-first into Hammett, Block,Vachss, Eugene Izzi, Ed Bunker and the like. I haven't surfaced for breath since.
Thomas Pluck lives and writes in New Jersey. His stories have appeared in Crimespree, Beat to a Pulp and Powder Burn Flash. His home on the web is http://www.pluckyoutoo.com/