"I eat this wimp's will power for breakfast, John-bo."

WAY BACK IN THE 20TH CENTURY, I had a freelance job writing web site reviews, and I came across a contest for Best Hollywood Movie Pitch. Looking at previous winners, it seemed the funniest entries won. So, I dashed off the first thing I thought of: “A vicious serial killer is electrocuted while at the same time, miles away, a standup comedian electrocutes himself while ironing. Through the wires, their souls get switched! How will the killer deal with being a single dad? Will the standup comedian think hell is funny?” It was so basic and so ridiculous, I was surprised Adam Sandler hadn’t made a movie of it—yet (starting countdown . . . NOW). I won the contest—receiving the ephemeral-yet-ever-lovely prize of bragging rights—but more importantly the idea stayed with me, maybe because it was so basic and so ridiculous. Like a pop song that just won’t leave your head unless you knock it out, some story ideas won’t go away unless you do something with them—or you drink a lot. I decided to do something with it.

So a few years ago I sat down and wrote a story to go with my contest-winning Hollywood pitch, adding names, filling out characters, but removing the whole cliché trip to Hell. (Free advice to writers: “Hell’s been done.”) The idea was still so silly I made sure to put in a lot of humor, something I usually am frugal with when it comes to noir (mustn’t let laughs get in the way of a good murder). The story ended up as an odd mashup of Wes Craven’s Shocker and Freaky Friday (the 1976 version with Jodie Foster, please) and a little of Tom Hanks’s Punchline, which I shall not link to. My girlfriend at the time suggested the perfect title: “Zinger.” Now all I had to do was find the story a home.

But who publishes darkly comic crime fiction with a supernatural twist? I submitted. Horror magazines turned it away—“Too crime fictionish.” I submitted. Noir magazines didn’t want anything to do with slipstreammery. “Just guns and gals, please.”

I . . . All right, I didn’t submit that hard, but it gets frustrating when no one wants your baby. So the story got buried for a long while . . .

But then last year I was looking through my stories to put together my ebook noir compilation, Roachkiller and Other Stories. I had 10 stories ready to go, but I just before I sent them to the publisher I realized one story was noirly, but not as noirly as the others in the book. But if noir=dark, then “Zinger”—even with its scene of a serial killer doing a stand up set—was noir. So I decided to include it in my collection. In fact, it became a selling point, as all the other stories were previously published and may have been already read by my fans (big shout out to both of you!), and this was a story no one had read before.

Now I’m just waiting for someone (Mr. Sandler, I’ll take your call now) to option the story and make it into a great big B movie. I can already picture it at my local video store, with a lurid cover, a giant discount sticker, and starring Louis C.K. (in either role).

You may also want to check out a previous post I wrote on Ms. Abbott’s blog about my short story “Juracán,” which is also included in the Roachkiller collection.

Here is the press release (Anthony Neil Smith and Manuel Ramos were kind enough to allow me to use their words to help promote the book):

The debut collection of short stories by dynamite noir writer R. Narvaez

March 26, 2012: available for immediate review

Anthony Neil Smith, the author of Yellow Medicine, said about the story “Roachkiller”: “If there is any justice in the world, [R. Narvaez] should become a giant on the literary noir scene within the next couple of years.”

A pregnant single mother who becomes a numbers runner in 1970s Brooklyn; an ex-con fighting against insurmountable odds not to kill again; a middle-aged tax lawyer who’s discovered the secret to happiness—at any cost: these are just a few of the hard-luck characters you’ll meet in Roachkiller and Other Stories, the debut collection of short stories from exciting noir writer R. Narvaez. Included are 10 hard-boiled tales, many with a dash of dark humor. Get-rich schemes gone violently awry. A slacker detective far out of his depth. A reformed criminal who can’t get past his killer instincts. The action moves from Brooklyn to Puerto Rico, from the ’70s to the near future, from deadly divorces to homicidal hipsters. Narvaez travels down the dimly lit side streets of noir you’ve never seen before.

Contents
“In the Kitchen with Johnny Albino”
“Juracán”
“Roachkiller”
“GhostD”
“Santa’s Little Helper”
“Unsynchronicity”
“Ibarra Goes Down”
“Watching the Iguanas”
“Rough Night in Toronto”
“Zinger”

These are many of my first crime fiction stories. I could not help but revise some of them, in some cases viciously, before putting them into this collection. The last story there, “Zinger,” is brand new and never before published.

If you want to be a completist, you can also get the T-shirt.

Suburbs of suspense! Freeways of fury! Levittowns of lust! Garden Cities of greed! (I'm pretty sure that cover shot is from Long Island City, which is actually in Queens, but hey it's still connected to the glacial moraine that is Lawn Guyland.)

My story “Ending in Paumanok” will appear in Long Island Noir, due out this May from Akashic Books. The anthology is edited by Kind Kaylie Jones and also features the works of Jumpin’ Jules Feiffer, Madcap Matthew McGevna, Nice Nick Mamatas, Quick Qanta Ahmed, Chummy Charles Salzberg, “They Call Him Mr. Coleman” Reed Farrel Coleman, Tough Guy Tim McLoughlin, Sweet Sarah Weinman, Jazzy JZ Holden, me, Smart Sheila Kohler, Jolly Jane Ciabattari, Snazzy Steven Wishnia, Kinetic Kenneth Wishnia, Amiable Amani Scipio, and Timeless Tim Tomlinson. Pre-order a copy now. As with other books in the Akashic city series, the stories in this book take place in different towns and neighborhoods in the given locale. My story takes place in Southhampton and Riverhead but most of all in Stony Brook. Here’s an excerpt from the beginning of my story:

ENDING IN PAUMANOK

by R. Narvaez

Mary hated driving so close to the water. She couldn’t even see it—an incoming storm blackened the sky and the sea beneath it—but she could sense the Atlantic pulsing out there, just off the passenger side, moving like some great predator teasing its prey. “Out of the cradle endlessly stalking,” said Mary to herself.

She stepped on the gas. There was no traffic to weave through that early in the morning.

She took Dune Road to the reservation, then turned on to Old Point Road. Tommy Hawk’s Trading Post was just where Lawrence said it would be. A weathered cigar store Indian leaned on its side in front.

When Mary shut off the car, her hands were shaking.

For the whole story, buy the book!

I’ll be doing readings and signings this May in the City and on the island. Stay tuned for details.

MY KOOKY, BAWDY, college-educated Aunt Terry and I had often discussed our family’s Taíno roots. My family comes from Puerto Rico, and the Taínos were the Native Americans who inhabited the Greater Antilles and Puerto Rico in the Caribbean at the time when Christopher Columbus arrived to gentrify the ‘hood. Some say every trace of Taíno blood was erased by the Spanish and by time. But, according to the study funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, 61 percent of all Puerto Ricans have Amerindian mitochondrial DNA. Indeed, Taíno showed on the faces of all the women in my family, especially Terry, high cheek-boned and reddish skinned.

Read the rest here.

THE HOLLOW MAN, John Dickson Carr

The Hollow Man would make Raymond Chandler kick a hole in a stained glass window. The book’s protagonist, Dr. Gideon Fell, is one of those idiosyncratic, overly clever characters who exist only in cozy mysteries, someone you would never want to know socially in real life — because wherever he goes someone dies. He is also exactly the kind of fellow Chandler decries in his essay “The Simple Art of Murder”: “The hero’s tie may be a little off the mode and the good gray inspector may arrive in a dogcart instead of a streamlined sedan . . . but what he does when he gets there is the same old futzing around with timetables and bits of charred paper and who trampled the jolly old flowering arbutus under the library window.”

But in trying to write my own crime fiction, I have been intrigued by the idea of clues, of leaving evidence around to engage and perplex the reader. TV’s Columbo is one of those types of clue-strewn mysteries. After Columbo, ahem, I mean Peter Falk died, I read an interview with one of the shows co-creators, William Link. Link mentioned that his writing partner Richard Levinson and he were influenced by Carr, someone I’d never heard of. Curious, I Googled Carr and found that he was quite popular in his the 1930s and ’40s and that one of his best known works was The Hollow Man (aka The Three Coffins) . . . I had to read it.

Read the rest here.

Joan Jett, eat yer heart out

I’ve a new story in Black Heart Magazine’s Noir issue, edited by Jailbreakin’ Jimmy Callaway and featuring Daniel B. O’Shea, Cameron Ashley, AJ Hayes, Jonathan Woods, Nik Korpon, Chris Deal, Alexander Kraft, Chris Benton, Kieran, Garnett, Keith Rawson, among many others. And it’s only $2.99! Download it already. Here is a teaser from my story:

Monkey in a Barrel
By R. Narvaez

A NAKED WOMAN with a gun can be a lot less interesting than you’d think. When the gun is pointed at you. And when the lady in question — as lovely as she is with high, pointed breasts, razor-sharp hipbones, and knee dimples cuter than Minnie Mouse — has killed twice before, without pause, without guilt.

“I like you, Kempe,” she said, not getting any closer, but getting slightly colder, it seemed.

“This is sad to me.”

“I’m not exactly doing cartwheels about it myself.”

“You’re a waste of good material.”

“Sure. Like an ugly blonde.”

For more, go here.