Larque Press | The Digest Enthusiast | Pulp Modern
Category

Interviews

Category
Rick Ollerman
Interviews

Elements of The Magazine

The Digest Enthusiast #7 coverExcerpts from the interview with Rick Ollerman, editor of Down & Out: The Magazine, appearing in The Digest Enthusiast No. 7.

TDE: What are the core elements of The Magazine?

RO: I knew that I wanted to cross-pollinate fanbases as much as I could, and to promote the authors and their stories—especially when they write a story with their series’ characters—as much as their own fanbases would support the magazine.

Another was kind of the unspoken notion of size; we just sort of knew it should be a digest-sized magazine without ever really talking about it.

Another thing I want to do that many new magazines in the POD era don’t do is offer subscriptions, something we will definitely do, probably starting with the second issue.

We’ve also got a non-fiction column by J. Kingston Pierce, who used to write for Kirkus Reviews before they reshuffled.

Another hopefully unique feature answers that burning question you never knew you wanted to ask: what happened to short crime fiction after Hammett and Chandler left the pulps for the slicks and nov- els and Hollywood? Obviously, the pulps kept going, but who kept them going with the two big stars gone?

The page count is right around 170 for the first issue. I think we’ll wait on reader response to see if that moves, and by how much.

Masthead
Interviews

Starting The Magazine

Down & Out: The Magazine No. 1Excerpt from Rick Ollerman’s interview from The Digest Enthusiast No. 7. Here he talks about the origins of Down & Out: The Magazine.

“I had been thinking about all of the latest wave of magazines that have hit the marketplace, mostly made possible by newer technologies like POD and the ability to do layouts and upload .pdf files to a publisher, etc. and wondered why they seemed to have a limited shelf life.

“I bumped into Eric Campbell from Down and Out Books at Bouchercon in New Orleans. And I told him, ‘You should do a magazine.’ He took a sip of something that wasn’t Kool-Aid and said, ‘That’s funny, I’ve been thinking the same thing.’ I told him I’d be interested in editing it and putting it together.”

The first issue of Down & Out: The Magazine debuted in the summer of 2017.

Novel Title
Interviews

B.K. Stevens’ Jane Ciardi

Interpretation of Murder by B.K. StevensAuthor B.K. Stevens shared her thoughts on Jane Ciardi in her interview in The Digest Enthusiast book six, excerpted below:

“My first novel was Interpretation of Murder, published by Black Opal Books in 2015. That novel has a tie to AHMM, too: The protagonist was introduced in a 2010 story that won a Derringer—or, to be more precise, half a Derringer (it was a tie). The protagonist, Jane Ciardi, is an American Sign Language interpreter who takes a freelance job from a Cleveland private detective and promptly gets drawn into dangers, ethical dilemmas, romantic entanglements, and the other sorts of challenges amateur sleuths tend to encounter. I think the novel’s a solidly constructed, satisfying whodunit, I think it’s got plenty of humor, and I hope it offers readers some insights into deaf culture and sign language interpreting. Our older daughter, Sarah, is a nationally certified ASL interpreter—she’s the one who first suggested that I try using an interpreter as a protagonist in a mystery—and our younger daughter, Rachel, has serious hearing loss. So hearing-related issues are important to our family. My husband, a fifth-degree black belt, contributed by choreographing the action scenes—the novel’s a true family effort. And it’s set in my favorite city, Cleveland. It hasn’t burned up the best seller lists, but I’m proud of it.”

AHMM Oct 2002 masthead
Interviews

B.K. Stevens’ Leah Abrams

AHMM Oct 2002
AHMM Oct 2002 Cover by Dave Cutler

Author B.K. Stevens shared her thoughts on Leah in her interview in The Digest Enthusiast book six, excerpted below:

“One of the things I enjoy most about this series is Leah’s relationship with Detective (later Lieutenant) Brock. Amateur sleuths wouldn’t get far without a source of police information, and many amateur sleuth series involve female sleuths who have romantic relationships with male police detectives. But Leah’s happily married, and so is Brock—his wife never actually appears in the stories, but he mentions her often. So Leah and Brock are simply friends who like and respect each other. He’s more practical and sensible, and she’s more imaginative. He brings her down to earth when she gets carried away, and she helps him see possibilities that hadn’t occurred to him. Together, I think, they make a good detective team.”

AHMM Feb. 1998 Leah Abrams #1 “Death on a Budget”
AHMM Jan.1999 Leah Abrams #2 “Death on the List”
AHMM Oct. 2002 Leah Abrams #3 “Death of the Guilty Party”
AHMM May 2006 Leah Abrams #4 “Death on a Diet”
AHMM May 2010 Leah Abrams #5 “Death in Rehab”

Genre vs Mainstream
Interviews

Edd Vick on genre

Arcane Arts
Arcane Arts Anthology (2017) with Edd Vick’s “Prophet Motive” Cover by Lieu Pham

Edd Vick’s comments on genre fiction, an excerpt from the interview conducted by D. Blake Werts, for The Digest Enthusiast book six:

“Mainstream writers start with character. Genre writers start with situation. That’s why people who mostly read genre stories can get bored and think too little is happening in a mainstream novel, just as a mainstream reader gets whiplash and feels there’s too little character development in a genre novel. This is a hugely gross generalization, and of course every writer comes up with their own melding of the two. It’s a continuum.”

AHMM masthead
Interviews

B.K. Stevens’ Iphigenia Woodhouse

AHMM April 2000Ex-cop turned private detective, Iphigenia Woodhouse, premiered in the Mid-Dec 1991 edition of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, in a story called “Night Vision.” Her assistant, Harriet Russo, appears on the cover of AHMM April 2000, painted by Tomek Olbinski, for the sixth mystery, “A Wild Justice.”

Author B.K. Stevens shared the series origins in her interview in The Digest Enthusiast book six, excerpted below:

Iphigenia Woodhouse began, in part, as a response to some of the fictional female private detectives who became popular in the 1980s and 1990s. I enjoyed many of the novels and stories about those detectives, but their lives seemed very different from the lives of most of the women I knew. Usually, these detectives had no family obligations: Their parents were dead, their husbands (if any) divorced, their children nonexistent. If they liked, they could choose mentors they found compatible, have sex with men they found attractive, offer guidance to young people they found interesting. All their relationships were voluntary and temporary: They didn’t owe anybody anything and could move on whenever they chose. If they decided to fly to another city to pursue a lead, they didn’t have to coordinate schedules with anyone or arrange for childcare. In those respects, they had more in common with traditional male fictional private detectives than with most women today. That’s fine—it’s probably healthy to fantasize about complete independence from time to time. But I thought it might be interesting to write about a female private detective whose life is both enriched and limited by deep, lasting ties and obligations.

AHMM Mid-Dec. 1991 Woodhouse/Russo #1 “Night Vision” reprinted in Women of Mystery, ed. Cynthia Manson (Carroll & Graf, 1992)
AHMM Dec. 1993 Woodhouse/Russo #2 “Sideshow” reprinted in Women of Mystery II, ed. Cynthia Manson (Carroll & Graf, 1994); reprinted as “Une simple diversion” in Histoires d’homicides a domicile (Livre de Poche, 1995)
AHMM Dec. 1994 Woodhouse/Russo #3 “Death in Small Doses” reprinted in Women of Mystery III, ed. Kathleen Halligan (Carroll & Graf, 1998); reprinted in translation in a collection published by Livre de Poche
AHMM May 1996 Woodhouse/Russo #4 “Butlers in Love”
AHMM Jun. 1998 Woodhouse/Russo #5 “The Devil Hath Power”
AHMM April 2000 Woodhouse/Russo #6 “A Wild Justice”
AHMM May 2003 Woodhouse/Russo #7 “More Deadly to Give”
AHMM May 2008 Woodhouse/Russo #8 “Table for None”
AHMM Jul/Aug 2013 Woodhouse/Russo #9 “Murder Will Speak”

Galaxy masthead
Interviews

Edd Vick on digests

Galaxy Oct. 1968Below are Edd Vick’s comments on digest magazines, from the interview conducted by D. Blake Werts, for The Digest Enthusiast book six:

When I was in high school I read all the digests I could lay my hands on, preferring one that’s no longer around named Galaxy. Where Analog tended to have more tech-oriented stories, and Fantasy & Science Fiction was usually more literary, Galaxy hit a sweet spot of SF focusing on characters and the soft sciences. I have a complete collection still, barring a couple of later magazine-sized issues from when it was being passed from one publisher to another.

The magazine nowadays that’s inherited that mantle is Asimov’s, where I’m very happy to have sold several stories. They’re a little more adventure-oriented, but that’s not an issue where I’m concerned.

BK Stevens quote
Interviews

B.K. Stevens on process

AHMM July 1991
AHMM July 1991 with B.K. Stevens’ “Final Jeopardy” Cover by Val Lakey Lindahn

An excerpt from B.K. Stevens’ interview from The Digest Enthusiast book six. Here she discusses her process, working out a plot, and weaving a list of suspects together.

It probably won’t come as a big surprise when I say my writing process varies significantly from story to story. Once in a while—and I wish it happened more often—I’ll get an idea for a story, devote only a little time to planning, plunge into the story, and write it straight through. Usually, the process isn’t nearly that simple and delightful. Usually, when I get an idea for a story—and it’s sometimes only a title, sometimes a murder method or a character or a plot twist—I write it down in a computer file titled “Notebook.” Ideas often languish there for years or decades—dozens still languish and will doubtlessly never go further. But sometimes I eventually think of a way to make the idea work, or I look through the notebook for inspiration, run across an idea I’d forgotten about, and see new potential in it.

When I decide I definitely want to try to turn an idea into a story, I sit down at the computer and start taking notes about it, using a method I called “focused freewriting” when I taught English: I stay focused on the story but write down virtually anything that comes to mind about it, from plot possibilities to bits of description to thoughts about theme. Sometimes, I’ll put together a list of major incidents in the plot; occasionally, I’ve used a variation on the “beat sheet” Blake Snyder recommends in Save the Cat; often, I don’t come up with anything that formal or orderly. For one recent story, I took a page and a half of notes; for another, I took forty- seven pages of single-spaced notes before finding the key to making the story work. (The second story was a whodunit—I have to take far more notes for whodunits than for other sorts of mysteries.) When I feel I have a clear idea of the story’s direction, I start writing the first scene.

There are three levels of looking at a story.
Interviews

Edd Vick on critique

Story Title
Asimov’s Sep. 2003 page 89

Below are Edd Vick’s comments on critique, from the interview conducted by D. Blake Werts, for The Digest Enthusiast book six:

“First, the more I critique other people’s work, the better I’m going to get at revising my own work. There are three levels of looking at a story. At the highest is to see it as a whole: is the idea interesting? Are the characters well chosen? Does the plot make sense? Is there a compelling theme? The middle level considers each scene: does some character change in some vital way from the beginning to the end of the scene? What is the emotional turn? How is tension ratcheted up or released? At the root level there are the individual paragraphs: is the language suited to the story? If alliteration or other clever manipulations of words are used, are they well-used? Sentence fragments? If so, appropriately used? A masterpiece is going to excel at all three levels. When I’m critiquing, I have to pay some attention to all three levels of storytelling, just as I have to when I’m writing.

“Second, critiquing is a give-and-take economy. If I don’t care enough to do a good job reviewing someone else’s story, why would they put themselves out to critique mine? Plus, I just don’t want to half-ass it; the world needs more good fiction.

“And last, giving critiques is a way of paying it forward. Writers like Joe Lansdale and Ardath Mayhar corresponded with me when I was a beginning writer, giving me useful advice. I’ve been going to science fiction conventions for decades where I can talk to great authors or attend informative panel discussions. When I critique at a con or when I appear on panels, it’s to help the next generation of writers.”