Tag Archives: Thomas Pluck

Guest post: AC/DC noir

cover-pluck-bad-boy-boogie-600x900pxI am very happy to welcome crime writer Thomas Pluck to Pulp Curry this week. He’s got a new crime novel out called Bad Boy Boogie. He’s based in New Jersey but is also a massive – and I mean massive – fan of the iconic Australia rock band, AC/DC. You reckon the book and the band aren’t connected? You reckon wrong.

I’ll let Thomas explain.

PluckI remember first hearing the snarl of Bon Scott’s voice on the radio in my grandmother’s basement. I promptly wrote “Dirty Deeds – Done Dirt Cheap” on a scrap of lumber and put out my shingle on her desk, waiting for clients who needed whatever help a nine-year-old raised on Encyclopedia Brown could offer.

I didn’t get to give anyone concrete shoes or use TNT. I think my sister hired me to find her imaginary dog. But AC/DC stuck with me. They sounded like no other rock band I’d heard before. And I wasn’t totally sheltered. My uncle ran bars in Manhattan and the jukebox service was mob controlled, so you played what records they gave you and when they swapped them out, he came home with shoeboxes of KISS, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Marvin Gaye, Wings, and Steve Wonder.

But no AC/DC.

I wouldn’t hear much of them again until high school, when I had my own money from delivering papers and occasionally working off the books on construction sites.… Read more

Noir Con or bust guest post #5 Protectors: Stories to Benefit PROTECT

For my fifth ‘Noir Con or bust’ guest post, I’d like to welcome New Jersey based crime writer Thomas Pluck.

Pluck’s stories have appeared in PANK, Crime Factory, Spinetingler, Beat to a Pulp, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Utne Reader, to name a few.

I’ve been pimping my own work a lot lately, but I was keen to get Pluck to write a guest post so I could shill for his latest project Protectors: Stories to Benefit PROTECT, which he’s the editor ofSeriously, this anthology contains some seriously good writing talent doing a mixture of crime, science fiction, Western, noir and other stories. I mean serious. There’s a copy on my Kindle.

I’d try and explain why there’s other good reasons you should buy the book, but Pluck does a better than me. Read his post, then buy the book. 

“Hemingway once wrote, ‘The world is a fine place, and worth fighting
for.’ I believe in the second part.”

That’s from the screenplay of Seven, written by Andrew Kevin Walker. I
don’t know if Hemingway actually wrote what he said he did, but that’s
a great line and it explains how I can write hardboiled fiction and
not eat a gun in the morning. As writers, we peer into the dark heart
of humanity and the abyss winks right back.… Read more