TTA Press

Ed here: This is an outright plug for one of the most interesting and innovative small publishers in the world. TTA Publications. Black Static is horror-oriented with cutting edge fiction and numerous columns, most notably by the always enlightening Christopher Fowler. One dazzling issue after another.

Crimewave is one of the most consistently rule-breaking collections of crime fiction being published anywhere. Last night I started reading it but had to stop after reading the first story, Plainview by David Hoing. I stopped reading because the story is so good, so rich, so lyrically told reading anything else for the night would have been a waste of time. When I went to the back for the author bios I found that Hoing lives in Waterloo, about seventy miles from Cedar Rapids. I just got off the phone with him. I'm sure I sounded like a fan boy.. He's done quite a bit of science fiction, he told me, but this was his first attempt at mystery. What can I tell you? His story is so good I almost decided to quit writing. What's the point? THIS IS HIS FIRST MYSTERY STORY!!!!!!!!!

Get to know your local TTA Publications dealer. They've got the real stuff.


Crimewave
Crime & Mystery Crimewave 11 out now
Current Issue

Crimewave 11: Ghosts Out Now
18th Nov, 2010



Cover Art:
The evocative wraparound cover art is by Ben Baldwin.



Stories:
Plainview Part One: The Shoe Store by Dave Hoing

Friday, November 28, 1975
• The owner of the shop, a local eccentric named Kohlsrud, had liver spots on his hands and nicotine stains on his fingernails. He held the shoehorn in his right hand and cupped it over Leslie’s lower calf before slowly sliding the metal down to her heel. His wrist brushed against the smooth and supple contours of her leg. As he guided her foot into the loafer she noticed several scabs on the top of his head. What little hair he had was wiry and longish and white.


Wilkolak by Nina Allan

Kip knew the man was the monster as soon as he saw him. He was coming out of the convenience store attached to the garage at the bottom end of Lee High Road, his shopping in an old Tesco bag. Kip uncapped the Nikon and took his picture; the click of the shutter release sounded loud to him, even above the noise of the passing traffic. Kip lowered the camera, suddenly afraid the man might turn and see him, but that didn’t happen. Instead, the man crossed the garage forecourt, ignoring the cars parked at the pumps and heading off up the road in the direction of Lewisham. He was of medium height, but skinny, with gangling limbs and a jutting Adam’s apple and reminded Kip of Tom Courtenay in The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. He wore tatty old Levis, and an army surplus jacket that was too big for him around the shoulders. He seemed lost in thought, cocooned in it, shut off from his surroundings, from Kip, from everything.


The Conspirators by Christopher Fowler

At the next table of the hotel restaurant, three waiters took their places beside the diners, and with a synchronised flourish raised the silver covers on their salvers. A fourth appeared, bearing a tray containing a quartet of tiny copper pots. Each waiter took a handle and proceeded to pour the sauces from the pots onto the salvers from a height of not less than eighteen inches. They might have been tipping jewels into coffers.


Who's Gonna Miss You When You're Gone? by Mikal Trimm

The trailer sat at the end of an unpaved stretch of hard-packed red sand and crushed oyster shells. Desmond Fells drove slowly through the gulf-spat detritus that served as dirt in the Florida panhandle, taking home the groceries in his parent’s ancient International Harvester station wagon. The shocks screamed in protest as he hit another hole in the road. Something clinked ominously against the hatch.


Holderhaven by Richard Butner

In 1911, Nerissa and Jorn Holder move into Holderhaven. • In 1966, Nerissa Holder dies, having outlived her husband, both sons, and a son-in-law. • In 1983, Holderhaven opens as a country house museum. • In 2003, Rudy needs a summer job. His friend at college, Bill Mills, says he can pull some strings. Bill does not need a summer job. Bill’s family is not quite as wealthy as the Holders had been, but they are rich enough. Bill’s father is Ol’ Dick Mills. Dick Mills’ house does not have a name. It is much smaller than Holderhaven, but it still has a tennis court, a swimming pool, and a separate climate-controlled warehouse for his collection of vintage Jaguar convertibles. Ol’ Dick Mills knows everyone in the county. Everyone who matters, at least. He places a call to Harriet Diamond, supervisor of operations at the Holderhaven House Museum.


Eleven Eleven by Cheryl Wood Ruggiero

Of course the old man should never have sold Alsie the gun. She was twelve years old today. She had no ID. But she had often hung around in the pawn shop when it was really cold outside, and the old man had let her stay because he was a kind man, even if he did take all kinds of bad things in for pawn and never asked where they came from.


Where the Bodies Are by Ilsa J. Bick

There’d been snow the night before, heavy and wet, another twelve, thirteen-inch dump added to the two feet already on the cemetery. Gulls screamed against a pewter sky, and the keen tang of crushed alu minum promised more snow on the way. Blades of an icy wind off Lake Michigan hacked Miriam’s cheeks, cutting tears. • An engine grumbled to her left. Blinking against salt-sting, Miriam watched as a mud-spattered flatbed skidded off thick slush before passing through a gate that was never locked. The truck was Stan’s, the Hebrew cemetery’s gravedigger-slash-maintenance-guy – and Miriam thought, with all apologies to Queen: And another one bites the dust.


Neighborhood Watch by Cody Goodfellow

This is a nice neighborhood: the houses upper middle class, postwar modern villa styles, big backyards, meandering drives up and down gentle hills that promise a spectacular view from any window. Quiet. To look at it on paper, you might think it was just another anachronistic suburb long since swallowed up by the city. The city peers over the low roofs and eucalyptus-lined avenues, but nothing bad from outside gets in, nothing but a hushed whisper from the freeway, so far as anyone who lives here knows.


K Love by O'Neil De Noux

Jodie Kintyre found the suicide note in a clear, plastic sandwich bag in the right front pocket of the jumper’s faded jeans. She carefully opened the bag and removed the handwritten note, laying it on the hood of the Humvee that had driven her to the scene. She put her useless portable radio on the note to keep it from flying away in the post-Hurricane Rita gusts that still blew across New Orleans. Behind her the three National Guard MPs, fresh-faced youngsters from Connecticut, stared curiously at her. They’d kept their distance from the body in the center of Bourbon Street.


Living Arrangement by Steve Rasnic Tem

Monte had never been a good father, in fact he had been pretty lousy by anyone’s standards, but after he lost his job and became too ill to work and the arthritis made it so he could hardly move his legs, his daughter pretended otherwise and asked him to come live with her, her young son, and the current boyfriend. “You always took care of me,” she said. “Let me do this for you.”


4am, When the Walls are Thinnest by Alison J. Littlewood

Stumpy Ellis told a lot of stories about how he lost his thumb, and they always seemed to involve violence, and grinding, and eyes. I was the only one who heard the real story, and I never would have told. Stumpy had a temper, and a man with a temper in prison is like a powder keg in a room full of lit matches.


The Hostess by Joel Lane

Not long after I moved to Birmingham in the 1980s, a family feud led to one of the worst crimes in my experience. It happened in Digbeth, an old industrial district now taken over by warehouses and wholesale businesses. The narrow backstreets and rotting factories hid a multitude of stolen goods. But most of the actual crimes happened elsewhere. The Digbeth police station was busier with drunks fighting in the Barrel Organ and the Railway Tavern than with professional villains.


We Are Two Lions by Luke Sholer

I guide the clipper up my skull, going against the grain. Hairs fall into the bathroom sink. Outside, a lean rain dusts the asphalt. People say you’re on your way. • I let the blade-guard ride the contours of my head, imagining you’re doing it, like you used to, your chest grazing my back. If it has to happen, I want it like that. Your lips and then the muzzle against my skull.


Plainview Part Two: The Blood Cools by Dave Hoing

Friday, July 3, 2009
• Mike Alexander and his wife Beth joined in singing hymn number 474 from the old green Book of Worship as the Frischel girls followed the casket of their mother up the aisle and out of the church. The girls were hardly girls anymore – Lindsey, the youngest, must be nearing forty by now – but Saint Andrew’s Lutheran Church hadn’t changed a whit since Mike left town in 1976. In fact, the pew in front of him still bore the marks he’d carved into the wood on his last visit, the now immortalized initials of his special girlfriends at the time, VK72 + LF75 + ML76. Thirty-three years later, no one had replaced the pews, no one had sanded the old wood, and no one, as far as he knew, had taken much notice of his handiwork. All somebody had done was to apply layer after layer of varnish until the etchings were smooth and shallow indentations, barely visible except to those who knew where to look and what to look for.


What People Say About Crimewave:
“Publications like Crimewave make me want to move to England”
— Bookgasm

“Crimewave goes further, and the quality is higher”
— The Times

“A must-have collection of the hottest crime stories around”
— Ian Rankin



“The best in cutting edge crime fiction”
— Ed Gorman


“Head and shoulders above every other mystery magazine in look, content and tone”
— Ellen Datlow

“The best crime magazine ever”
— Mystery Scene

“There truly is no other magazine that brings you the kind of stories you see here”
— SF Site

“You absolutely cannot hope to find a better collection of razor-edged roses anywhere on the planet”
— The Agony Column

“Absolutely outstanding, and deserves to be brought to wider attention. Be it as an anthology or a magazine, Crimewave 11 is something to be looked forward to”
— Suite 101


Format of Crimewave 11: Ghosts
Crimewave is published as an Americal Royal (229mm x 152mm) paperback, 240 pages on cream bookwove plus colour laminated cover.



How To Buy:
The cover price of Crimewave 11: Ghosts (ISBN 978-0-9553683-4-9), a limited edition large format paperback, is just £9.99. However, it might be difficult to find in your local shop. Therefore we recommend that you subscribe to four issues for just £26 (plus a little p&p for overseas readers) which gets you this 240-page book for just £6.50 as well as helping to ensure the continued existence of the series. Alternatively you can buy Crimewave 11 by itself. Click on the link below, the 'buy now' button top right, or the Shop link in the top bar.

Please help spread the word about Crimewave. Thanks for your support!

Subscribe to Crimewave/Buy Crimewave 11
Ben Baldwin
Dave Hoing
Nina Allan
Christopher Fowler
Mikal Trimm
Richard Butner
Cheryl Wood Ruggiero
Ilsa J. Bick
Cody Goodfellow
O'Neil De Noux
Steve Rasnic Tem
Alison J. Littlewood
Joel Lane
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