Category Archives: Snubnose Press

Anthologies, my novel and more shameless self-promotion

Posted on October 17, 2012 by Andrew Nette| 6 Comments

In over a couple of weeks I will be jetting off to spend a couple of weeks in the US, New York mostly, followed by a few days in Philadelphia to attend Noir Con.

I-can-not-wait.

Several more ‘Noir Con noir bust’ posts are scheduled between now and when I leave, but I just wanted to take a short break from these to do a bit of shameless self-promotion. A lot of writing I’ve been working on for the last year is being released around the same time. By the end of the year it’ll be back to the drawing board, but for now I’ve got some serious pimping to do.

First up, is Crime Factory’s latest publication, Hard Labour, an anthology of 17 noir and hardboiled Australian short crime stories, edited by Cameron Ashley, Liam Jose and myself. We launched this baby last week at Grumpy’s Green in Collingwood.  A fine time was had by all and we managed to sell enough copies on the night to more or less pay the printing bill.

The print version of Hard Labour is now available from our website for $13.99 plus postage. The digital book is available on Amazon here for just $2.99.

It’s a bargain for crime fiction this good.… Read more

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Posted in Adrian McKinty, Angela Savage, Australian crime fiction, Australian noir, Crime Factory, Crime fiction, David Whish-Wilson, Garry Disher, Leigh Redhead, Noir Con, Snubnose Press

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Noir Con or bust guest post #4: “I Can’t Kill Him. He’s My Brother”

Posted on October 15, 2012 by Andrew Nette| Leave a comment

Fourth cab off the rank in my ‘Noir Con or bust’ series of guest posts is Baltimore writer Nik Korpon.

I’m looking forward to meeting this guy at Noir Con. Korpon’s got serious crime writing form. He’s one of those writers I’ve heard more about than I’ve actually read. But that’s changing. Earlier this year I read his knock out dystopian noir novella, By the Nails of the War Priest, and I’m half-way through his recently released short story collection, Bar Scars. Both are excellent. In the US I’m hoping to pick up a copy of his one novel that’s been published so far, Stay God.

I never thought of myself as a ‘theme’ writer. After I’d gotten over the delusion that I was saying Important Things About The Human Condition (like most new writers do, I think) I had no interest in commenting on anything other than the impact a good story can have and creative uses of a broken bottle. In my mind, I was writing about the people I saw as I wandered through Baltimore, only superimposing a more dramatic arc to their day. I was filling in blanks between the guy I saw at the laundromat, guardedly loading his clothes into the washer, and the woman with scratches on her forearms who was getting coffee at the 7-11 across the street.… Read more

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Posted in Crime fiction, Noir Con, Noir fiction, Snubnose Press

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Noir Con or bust guest post #1: Heath Lowrance

Posted on September 25, 2012 by Andrew Nette| 3 Comments

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned I’d be asking several US writers and bloggers I dig to guest post on Pulp Curry in the lead-up to my visit to the US to attend Noir Con in Philadelphia in early November. It’s a way of giving regular Pulp Curry readers a little taste of the crime writing scene in the US.

First up is Heath Lowrance, whose latest book City of Heretics has just come out through  Snubnose Press, the same publisher as my debut novel Ghost Money.

City of Heretics is about an aging con named Crowe, just out of prison and back in Memphis, ready for some payback against the criminals who got him sent up. Before Crowe can enjoy his revenge he has to track down a brutal murderer cutting a swath through the city—ultimately leading Crowe to confront a bizarre secret society of serial killers masquerading as a Christian splinter-group. 

It’s not the first time Lowrance has appeared on Pulp Curry. I reviewed his debut novel The Bastard Hand on this site last year. Lowrance writes across a number of genres, including crime fiction and Westerns. He’s one of those writers who combine the knack for telling a good hard boiled with excellent writing.… Read more

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Posted in Crime fiction, Noir Con, Noir fiction, Snubnose Press, Ted Lewis

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How I came to write Ghost Money

Posted on September 3, 2012 by Andrew Nette| 5 Comments

I started writing the book that eventually became my debut novel Ghost Money in 1996 when I worked for several months in Cambodia as a wire service journalist.

I’d first travelled to Cambodia in 1992 while living in neighbouring Laos. It was a desperately poor and traumatised country. The Khmer Rouge, responsible for the deaths by starvation and torture of approximately 1.7 million Cambodians during their brief rule in the seventies, were still fighting from heavily fortified jungle bases. The government was an unstable coalition of two parties who’d been at each other’s throats for the better part of a decade and whose main interests were settling historical scores and making money.

Phnom Penh, the crumbling capital of the former French colony, was crawling with foreigners; peacekeepers sent by the West and its allies to enforce peace between the various factions, and their entourage of drop outs, hustlers, pimps, spies, do-gooders and journalists. The streets teemed with Cambodian men in military fatigues missing legs and arms, victims of the landmines strewn across the country. There was no power most of the time. The possible return of the Khmer Rouge caste a shadow over everything.

When the opportunity arose several years later to fill in with one of the wire services, I jumped at it.… Read more

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Posted in Asian noir, Crime fiction, Crime fiction and film from Cambodia, Noir fiction, Snubnose Press

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Ghost Money now available (is that the sound of rubber hitting the road?)

Posted on August 22, 2012 by Andrew Nette| 2 Comments

My debut novel Ghost Money is now available through Snubnose Press.

You can get it on Amazon Books for $4.99. Other e-reading formats, Kobo, Sony, etc, to follow. If you haven’t got a Kindle, you can download an Kindle app for iPad and read it that way.

In case you haven’t already heard the pitch for Ghost Money, here it is.

Cambodia, 1996, the long-running Khmer Rouge insurgency is fragmenting, competing factions of an unstable coalition government scrambling to gain the upper hand. Missing in the chaos is businessman Charles Avery. Hired to find him is Vietnamese Australian ex-cop Max Quinlan.

But Avery has made dangerous enemies and Quinlan is not the only one looking. Teaming up with Heng Sarin, a local journalist, Quinlan’s search takes him from the freewheeling capital Phnom Penh to the battle scarred western borderlands. As the political temperature soars, he is slowly drawn into a mystery that plunges him into the heart of Cambodia’s bloody past.

Ghost Money is a crime novel, but it’s also about Cambodia in the mid-nineties, a broken country, and what happens to people who are trapped in the cracks between two periods of history, locals and foreigners, the choices they make, what they do to survive.

I’m happy to say it’s already getting some good reviews from heavy hitters on the local crime scene.… Read more

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Posted in Australian crime fiction, Crime fiction and film from Cambodia, Snubnose Press

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