My debut novella Heist – a cyberpunk dystopia set crime noir is now out through the always lovely Black Hare Press. Barker, a hardened criminal who is down on his luck, has a chance to recover his losses when a mysterious woman from his past Meera walks back into his life and makes him an offer he can’t refuse.
The story is basically a take on the classic crime thriller genre dominated by figures like the Westlake alias Richard Stark but placed in a dystopian late-stage capitalist hellhole version of a future Montreal. I borrowed a lot of the tropes of the crime noir (criminal antihero down on his luck, mysterious femme fatales, treachery, a past that comes back to haunt people, etc.) albeit set in a world more at home to a Richard Morgan or William Gibson story.
The process of writring this was interesting. I first wrote the majority of a first draft of it – albeit, aiming for a novel length story – two or three years back. It had a lot of the same elements as this version, but messier, sprawling, and without a clear sense of where it was all going.
I then rewrote the bastard a second time, but written in the first person rather than the third. And while it was a tighter story, it still didn’t fully work.
It was really only the third time I wrote it from start to finish, as a much briefer novella, that I managed to cram most of everything in there I wanted and somehow make it work.
In any case, I won’t necessarily argue the literary merits of this pulpy romp, but I will argue that it can make for a damn fun read.
Links to various Amazon domains and other places where you can pick it up are available through the publisher’s website.
