Books of Soul

New African American Books: Mystery

Black Pulp

April 20, 2013
BLACK PULP is a collection of stories featuring characters of African origin, or descent, in stories that run the gamut of genre fiction! A concept developed by noted crime novelist Gary Phillips, BLACK PULP brings bestselling authors Walter Mosley and Joe R. Lansdale, Gary Phillips, Charles R. Saunders, Derrick Ferguson, D. Alan Lewis, Christopher Chambers, Mel Odom, Kimberly Richardson, Ron Fortier, Michael A. Gonzales, Gar Anthony Haywood, and Tommy Hancock together to craft adventure tales, mysteries, and more, all with black characters at the forefront!

“Literature for the masses kindled the imagination and used our reading skills so that we could regale ourselves in the cold chambers of alienation and poverty. We could become Doc Savage or The Shadow, Conan the Barbarian or the brooding King Kull and make a difference in a world definitely gone wrong.”
Walter Mosley from his introduction.

Between these covers are 12 tales of action, adventure, and thrills featuring heroes and heroines of darker hues that will appeal to audiences everywhere! BLACK PULP! From Pro Se Productions!

Black Pulp
Walter Mosley (Author), Christopher Chambers (Author), Michael Gonzales (Author), Gar Anthony Haywood (Author), Ron Fortier (Author), Joe R. Lansdale (Author), Gary Phillips (Author), Mel Odom (Author), Tommy Hancock (Author), D. Alan Lewis (Author), Derrick Ferguson (Author), Kimberly Richardson (Author), Charles R. Saunders (Author)
CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
April 17, 2013
Paperback

Article – Black Pulp Fictions: Yesterday and Today by Gary Phillips

March 16, 2013

A web article looking back on the origins of black crime fiction.

When I was a teenager growing up in South Central Los Angeles in the ‘70s, there was a type of paperback novel you couldn’t find at the B. Dalton or Martindale’s. You found these books on the spinner rack in drugstores and bus station newsstands, and even in grocery stories. They had titles like Eldorado Red, Trick Baby, and Death for Hire. This was crime fiction with black protagonists and anti-heroes published by the L.A. based, white owned Holloway House whose specialty, in their words, was being “the world’s largest publisher of black experience paperbacks.”

It was not the black experience my librarian mother had introduced me to in the pages of Langston Hughes and Anne Perry, but it did reflect an undercurrent arising out of the tumult of the Black Power and Civil Rights era. Not to say that the aforementioned Eldorado Red—about heisters who take down a numbers house, written by former pimp and ongoing heroin addict Donald Goines—was full of role models to be emulated. But the energy that came out of those movements, the desire to take it to the man, such sentiment fueled in part the works of Goines and his Holloway House cohorts Roland Jefferson (The School on 103rd Street), Robert Beck, and Joe Nazel.

Read more at
http://www.criminalelement.com/blogs/2013/03/black-pulp-fictions-gary-phillips-nelson-george-donald-goines-chester-himes-robert-beck-joe-nazel

Little Green: An Easy Rawlins Mystery by Walter Mosley

March 3, 2013




Easy Rawlins is back (almost literally from the dead after the car wreck that ended Blonde Faith, his last outing) and cruising the hippified streets of the Sunset Strip circa 1967, in search of a young black man who has gone missing — and maybe of his own rebirth.

Walter Mosley burst on the literary scene in 1990 with Devil in a Blue Dress (recently named one of the L.A. Times’s best novels about L.A.), the first Easy Rawlins mystery, a combustible and irresistible mixture of Raymond Chandler and Richard Wright that future president Bill Clinton picked up on, as did hundreds of thousands of other readers. Eleven books later, Easy Rawlins is one of the small handful of private eyes in contemporary crime fiction who can be called immortal. So it is great news on every front that this major figure’s new mystery features the return of his signature and most resonant character.

Little Green: An Easy Rawlins Mystery
Walter Mosley
Doubleday
Available May 14, 2013
Kindle Edition

Laws of Depravity by Eriq La Salle

September 16, 2012
In a 30-year murder spree, the Martyr Maker has left behind a legacy of torture and fear: 36 clergymen butchered in twisted scenes reflecting the martyrdom of the twelve Apostles. The same M.O. — Twelve murders. Every ten years. All of the victims preachers and priests. And now, the Martyr Maker is back.

The recent murder of a local priest signals the beginning of another three-week kill cycle. It falls to NYPD detectives Quincy Cavanaugh and Phee Freeman and FBI agent Janet Maclin to catch the killer even though dark family secrets, the need for revenge, and hidden agendas frustrate the team at every turn. If they stand any chance of stopping the relentless serial killer, they each must first confront their own depravities that threaten to destroy them as readily as the monster they are chasing.

This is the first in a trilogy.

CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
Available June 1, 2012 in Paperback

Broken Dignity by Michael J. Lando

August 5, 2012
How do you rebuild a normal life when the world refuses to forget who you were? For Cristal Caprice, it seems impossible.

It took nearly a decade for Cristal to escape the control of a sadistic tyrant named Mason, who refused to let her leave the sex industry alive. Three years later, Cristal re-emerges with a new identity in a new home, the small town of Thornwood. There, her new neighbors and friends know her only as Bianca Nubreze.

Struggling to come to terms with her shameful past and adapt to a new life, Bianca isolates herself from the world and slowly sinks into a deep depression. As she teeters on the brink of suicide, Bianca finds acceptance and optimism in a Christian evangelist named Robyn. Even so, her new found hope in life is short-lived as her secret is exposed. Revelations about her past involvement with US Congressman Adrian Reese ignite a national media scandal, and her new life is turned inside out overnight.

With her true identity and whereabouts exposed, Bianca becomes the town’s pariah and is once again relentlessly hunted by Mason. As her life spirals out of control, her only hope for redemption lies in her new found faith in God, Robyn, and a shrewd political strategist named Tamara who will do whatever it takes to protect Congressman Reese’s career … at any cost.

Monkology: 15 Stories from the World of Private Eye Ivan Monk by Gary Phillips

June 2, 2012
In this collection you’ll encounter starry-eyed sinners, street corner revolutionaries, Hollywood hustlers, over-heated politicians, right-wing a**holes, a ghost or two, cavorting cops, architects with issues, and a little old lady with a popgun — all out to make their mark in the city of dreams and despair.

Monkology: 15 Stories from the World of Private Eye Ivan Monk
Gary Phillips
Rare Bird Books
August 14, 2012
Paperback

A Cold Piece by Ni’cola Mitchell

March 18, 2012
Lisa Oliver had it all. A beautiful home, luxury cars, a lavish lifestyle, and a wonderful husband Anthony who loved and adored her until…. That dreaded morning when her perfect life spiraled into extinction, right before her eyes. After hiring a private investigator, Anthony learns about her dark hidden secrets, and comes up with a plan to get away from this evil seductress.

Serving her with divorce papers after a passionate morning sexapade, Lisa is on wits end because Anthony would not give her a reason and shut her out of his life completely. Solitude makes Lisa go crazy and is on a rampage to get her man back — at any cost. After two years Anthony has gone on with his life, but everything changes when everyone around him comes up missing, hurt, or dead.

From the pen of award winning, bestselling author Ni’cola Mitchell comes a cold, gritty tale that takes you into the mind of a woman that has lost everything and there is only one to blame. This suspenseful thriller will remind you of a cross between Obsessed, Single White Female and The Hand that Rocks the Cradle.

NCM Publishing
March 31, 2012
Paperback

Blood & Tacos #1

March 1, 2012
There was a time when paperback racks were full of men’s adventure series. Next to the Louis L’Amours, one could find the adventures of The Executioner, the Destroyer, the Death Merchant, and many more action heroes that were hell-bent on bringing America back from the brink. That time was the 1970s & ’80s. A bygone era filled with wide-eyed innocence and mustaches.

Those stories are back! The new quarterly magazine Blood & Tacos is bringing back the action, the fun, and the adventure. Also, the mustaches.

In each issue of Blood & Tacos, some of today’s hottest crime writers will choose an era and create a new pulp hero and deliver a brand-new adventure. Each issue will include 5-6 stories featuring action-packed mayhem written in the style of that bygone era. The stories might not always be politically correct, but whether satire or homage, they will deliver on every page. Fast and fun, action and adventure, Blood & Tacos.

Featuring stories by Gary Phillips (“The Silencer Strikes”, with a nod to Holloway House), Matthew C. Funk, Johnny Shaw, Cameron Ashley and other talented writers.

If the stories weren’t enough, Blood & Tacos will also feature fine pulpy art, reviews of some of the fine (and not so fine) novels from the same period, and maybe even a recipe or two.

So enjoy this serving of Blood & Tacos. And remember, if it’s too cheesy, it’s a quesadilla.

***

Blood & Tacos is the brainchild of Johnny Shaw, screenwriter and author of the novel Dove Season: A Jimmy Veeder Fiasco. When he’s not writing or teaching, he is usually in an undisclosed warzone working as the demolitions expert in the mercenary group, The Bushmasters. He also enjoys badminton. His website can be found at Johnnyshaw.net. Or follow him on Twitter at @BloodandTacos.

Blood & Tacos is published by Creative Guy Publishing, the company that brought you such fine books as Amityville House of Pancakes (Vols 1-3), Stays Crunchy in Milk, Installing Linux on a Dead Badger, Brine, and many others with odd titles but excellent stories.

Kitty-Kitty, Bang-Bang: A Novel (Zane Presents) by Cairo

February 29, 2012
With murder, mayhem and hot sex, Kitty-Kitty, Bang-Bang is a wickedly delicious sequel to The Kat Trap.

It was her cutthroat ambition and ruthlessness that got Katrina — or Kat for short, out of the hood and on top of her game. Once a murderer on a seductive prowl with two missions in mind — satisfying her insatiable libido and killing unsuspecting marks — Katrina has lain down her guns. Having once used her alluring charm and exotic beauty to lure men to their deaths, Katrina has had a change of heart.

She’s settled for a simpler life and traveling, partying, and shopping have become her only guilty pleasures. In addition, she’s avoiding relationships and men like the plague. For her, life couldn’t be any sweeter — at least that’s what she wants to believe.

But, when drama rears its ugly head, Katrina returns with a vengeance. There’s the issue of confronting her ex-friend who she learned had slept with an old boyfriend. Then there are her three aunts — who are angry with how she treated her mother. And now she has to face her family, her demons, and the woman behind them — reopening old wounds, trying to mend new ones. Ultimately Kat has a new mission: to find the man behind her mother’s death and serve him up a dish of her own justice the only way she knows how — with a bullet to his head.

Kitty-Kitty, Bang-Bang: A Novel (Zane Presents) by Cairo
Strebor Books
November 1, 2011 Paperback

In this sexy, raw debut novel, a vivacious young murderess seduces her unsuspecting victims to their own deaths. . . .

Katrina is a self-proclaimed hood goddess. With her razor-sharp attitude, alluring charm, and exotic beauty, she is willing to do whatever it takes to climb — or kill — her way out of the hood. With two bodies already on her hands by the age of twenty, she gets the opportunity of a lifetime when a mysterious man invites her to be the first female killer on his multimillion-dollar team of professional assassins.

Kat tempts her victims with her irresistible charm, but she cannot resist the rush that satisfies her hungry libido with each murder and makes her crave more and more power. Disturbingly witty and devilishly enticing, The Kat Trap lures readers into a deliciously cutthroat criminal world of money, glamour, and ultimate self-destruction.

The Kat Trap: A Novel (Zane Presents) by Cairo
Strebor Books
July 26, 2011
Mass Market Paperback

Treacherous: Grifters, Ruffians and Killers by Gary Phillips

February 6, 2012
Perfect Crime Books
January 23, 2012
Paperback