Switchblade
Switchblade is a noir imprint showcasing the grittiest in new work, illuminating the lamentably unavailable classics in the genre, and highlighting the shadows on the margins of the dark end of the street.
Series Editors: Gary Phillips and Andrea Gibbons
1. The Jook - Gary Phillips
2. I-5: A Novel of Crime, Transport, and Sex - Summer Brenner
3. Pike - Benjamin Whitmer
4. The Chieu Hoi Saloon - Michael Harris
The Jook
By Gary Phillips
ISBN: 978-1-60486-040-5
Published March 2009
Format: Paperback
Size: 5 by 8
Page count: 256 Pages
Subjects: Fiction, Thriller
$15.95
Zelmont Raines has slid a long way since his ability to jook, to out maneuver his opponents on the field, made him a Super Bowl winning wide receiver, earning him lucrative endorsement deals and more than his share of female attention. But Zee hasn’t always been good at saying no, so a series of missteps involving drugs, a paternity suit or two, legal entanglements, shaky investments and recurring injuries have virtually sidelined his career.
That is until Los Angeles gets a new pro franchise, the Barons, and Zelmont has one last chance at the big time he dearly misses. Just as it seems he might be getting back in the flow, he’s enraptured by Wilma Wells, the leggy and brainy lawyer for the team--who has a ruthless game plan all her own. And it’s Zelmont who might get jooked.
About the Author:
Gary Phillips' 25 years of community activism in Los Angeles on issues ranging from affordable housing to gang intervention to neighborhood empowerment served him well when he began writing crime novels. He has worked as a union organizer, political campaign coordinator, radio talk show host and teacher. He has written op-ed pieces for the L.A. Times Magazine, San Francisco Examiner, Washington Post, Baltimore Sun, Miami Herald and other newspapers. His novels include: The Perpetrators (2002), Bangers (2003) and the seven books in the Ivan Monk and Martha Chainey series. Gary has also contribued to and edited many short stories collections such as: The Cocaine Chronicles, Politics Noir, Orange County Noir, and The Darker Mask.
Praise:
"Phillips, author of the acclaimed Ivan Monk series, takes elements of Jim Thompson (the ending), black-exploitation flicks (the profanity-fueled dialogue), and Penthouse magazine (the sex is anatomically correct) to create an over-the-top violent caper in which there is no honor, no respect, no love, and plenty of money. Anyone who liked George Pelecanos' King Suckerman is going to love this even-grittier take on many of the same themes."
--Wes Lukowsky, Booklist
“Enough gritty gossip, blistering action and trash talk to make real life L.A. seem comparatively wholesome.”
--Kirkus Reviews
“Gary Phillips writes tough and gritty parables about life and death on the mean streets--a place where sometimes just surviving is a noble enough cause. His is a voice that should be heard and celebrated. It rings true once again in The Jook, a story where all of Phillips’ talents are on display.”
--Michael Connelly, author of the Harry Bosch books
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I-5: A Novel of Crime, Transport and Sex
By Summer Brenner
Published April 2009
ISBN: 978-1-60486-019-1
Size: 5 by 8
Page count: 256 Pages
Subjects: Fiction, Thriller
$15.95
A novel of crime, transport, and sex, I-5 tells the bleak and brutal story of Anya and her journey north from Los Angeles to Oakland on the interstate that bisects the Central Valley of California.
Anya is the victim of a deep deception. Someone has lied to her; and because of this lie, she is kept under lock and key, used by her employer to service men, and indebted for the privilege. In exchange, she lives in the United States and fantasizes on a future American freedom. Or as she remarks to a friend, "Would she rather be fucking a dog...or living like a dog?" In Anya’s world, it’s a reasonable question.
Much of I-5 transpires on the eponymous interstate. Anya travels with her “manager” and driver from Los Angeles to Oakland. It’s a macabre journey: a drop at Denny’s, a bad patch of fog, a visit to a “correctional facility,” a rendezvous with an organ grinder, and a dramatic entry across Oakland’s city limits.
About the Author:
Summer Brenner was raised in Georgia and migrated west, first to New Mexico and eventually to northern California where she has been a long-time resident. She has published books of both poetry and fiction and given scores of readings in the United States, France, and Japan. In addition to I-5, her nine books include: Ivy, Tale of a Homeless Girl in San Francisco, Dancers & the Dance, and The Soft Room.
Praise:
"Insightful, innovative and riveting. After its lyrical beginning inside Anya's head, I-5 shifts momentum into a rollicking gangsters-on-the-lam tale that is in turns blackly humorous, suspenseful, heartbreaking and always populated by intriguing characters. Anya is a wonderful, believable heroine, her tragic tale told from the inside out, without a shred of sentimental pity, which makes it all the stronger. A twisty, fast-paced ride you won't soon forget."
--Denise Hamilton, author of the L.A.Times bestseller The Last Embrace.
"I'm in awe. I-5 moves so fast you can barely catch your breath. It's as tough as tires, as real and nasty as road rage, and best of all, it careens at breakneck speed over as many twists and turns as you'll find on The Grapevine. What a ride! I-5's a hard-boiled standout."
--Julie Smith, editor of New Orleans Noir and author of the Skip Langdon and Talba Wallis crime novel series
"In I-5, Summer Brenner deals with the onerous and gruesome subject of sex trafficking calmly and forcefully, making the reader feel the pain of its victims. The trick to forging a successful narrative is always in the details, and I-5 provides them in abundance. This book bleeds truth--after you finish it, the blood will be on your hands."
--Barry Gifford, author, poet and screenwriter
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COMING SUMMER 2010
Pike
By Benjamin Whitmer
ISBN: 978-1-60486-089-4
Published July 2010
Format: Paperback
Size: 5 by 8
Page count: 224 Pages
Subjects: Fiction, Thriller
$15.95
Douglas Pike is no longer the murderous hustler he was in his youth, but reforming hasn't made him much kinder. He's just living out his life in his Appalachian hometown, working odd jobs with his partner, Rory, hemming in his demons the best he can. And his best seems just good enough until his estranged daughter overdoses and he takes in his twelve-year-old granddaughter, Wendy.
Just as the two are beginning to forge a relationship, Derrick Kreiger, a dirty Cincinnati cop, starts to take an unhealthy interest in the girl. Pike and Rory head to Cincinnati to learn what they can about Derrick and the death of Pike’s daughter, and the three men circle, evenly matched predators in a human wilderness of junkie squats, roadhouse bars and homeless Vietnam vet encampments.
About the Author:
Benjamin Whitmer was born in 1972 and raised on back-to-the-land communes and counterculture enclaves ranging from Southern Ohio to Upstate New York. One of his earliest and happiest memories is of standing by the side of a country road with his mother, hitchhiking to parts unknown. Since then, he has been a factory grunt, a vacuum salesman, a convalescent, a high-school dropout, a semi-truck loader, an activist, a kitchen-table gunsmith, a squatter, a college professor, a dishwasher, a technical writer, and a petty thief. He has also published fiction and non-fiction in a number of magazines, anthologies, and essay collections. Pike is his first novel.
Praise:
“Without so much as a sideways glance towards gentility, Pike is one righteous mutherfucker of a read. I move that we put Whitmer’s balls in a vise and keep slowly notching up the torque until he’s willing to divulge the secret of how he managed to hit such a perfect stride his first time out of the blocks.”
--Ward Churchill
"Benjamin Whitmer’s Pike captures the grime and the rage of my not-so fair city with disturbing precision. The words don’t just tell a story here, they scream, bleed, and burst into flames. Pike, like its eponymous main character, is a vicious punisher that doesn’t mince words or take prisoners, and no one walks away unscathed. This one’s going to haunt me for quite some time."
--Nathan Singer
"This is what noir is, what it can be when it stops playing nice--blunt force drama stripped down to the bone, then made to dance across the page."
--Stephen Graham Jones
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COMING FAll 2010 Los Angeles. 1992. Three people's lives are about to collide against the flaming backdrop of the Rodney King riots. Vietnam vet Harry Hudson is a rootless journalist fleeing a fear-ridden childhood, the specter of a civilian he shot in Vietnam for reasons he has yet to fathom, and the drowning of his 2-year-old daughter while he sat by drunk.
He stutters and wrestles with depression, aware he's passed the point at which victim becomes victimizer. Drawn remorselessly to the lowest dives where he feels at home, he meets Mama Thuy, a bombshell struggling to run a Navy bar in a tough Long Beach neighborhood, and Kelly Crenshaw, a prostitute whose husband is in prison.
The Michael Harris grew up in a little railroad town in Northern California, in the loom of Mt. Shasta, whose mystic influence shadowed him from the University of Oregon to Harvard to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. An army veteran of Vietnam, he has worked as a Forest Service aide, a janitor and an English conversation teacher in Tokyo. For 30 years, he was a reporter, editor and book reviewer for West Coast newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times. Like his alter ego, Harry Hudson, he stutters and is a gloomy cuss. He lives with his wife in Long Beach; they have a grown son. The Chieu Hoi Saloon is his first novel.
Switchblade - a different slice of hardboiled fiction where the dreamers and the schemers, the dispossessed and the damned, and the hobos and the rebels tango at the edge of society.