This collection celebrates the 15th anniversary of Jim Pascoe and Tom Fassbender's underground cult noir novel about a bowling alley, By the Balls (1998), as well as the birth of their crime fiction publishing house, UglyTown. Here are two novels and five stories featuring Testacy City, Nevada's Ben Drake, described as a cigar-smoking, Kant-reading, bourbon-drinking, Galaxie 500-driving detective. With their tongues well placed in their pulpy cheeks, these stories could be read as fairly faithful homages to the classic mystery noirs of the 1930s (and '40s, and '50s) as well as wickedly playful satires.
"We wrote in the spirit of the old pulps... often drunk and pounding the keys," Pascoe and Fassbender say by way of introduction. "Write something fun. And fast.... We thought we knew everything. We knew nothing." But they worked it out. All their first-person stories have the clip, pace and punch of classic Hammer, Spade, and Marlowe narratives. "I could detect the lust in the air," Drake says when he calls on the bowling alley's owner's widow. "Suzi Biggs was nothing like a mourning widow. She was more like a morning window and I could see right through her."
Atmospheric black and white illustrations by Paul Pope feel right out of the pages of Black Mask. In "Kind Words," past UglyTown authors and artists ruminate on what it was like during the press's and Drake's heyday. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher