Music seems essential to modern crime fiction settings. Not all but a good lot of the modern crime novels I read reference music in some way. Opening quote, background noise, off-handed remark, etc....hell, Ken Bruen is like a freakin' wedding DJ sometimes. Makes me wonder. Would Chandler have Marlowe feet up and playing air guitar along with the radio? Did he? Probably not. But since all the other cool kids are doin' it, below I've inserted some music as sort of a tie-in for a story on BEAT TO A PULP that will be up in a few days. Set on the Jersey shore, the tune below is described in the story's opening scene.
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Man, I so remember hearing this tune on AM radio as my Uncle Doc, fresh from Vietnam, wove up to the Bronx to see my grandparents in his mustard-colored Mustang, me in the black bucket seat all Bobby Brady-like, gap-toothed and dumbfounded by the city's massive canyons and raw decay, a strange afternoon away from my pummeling brothers. Boiled meat and doe-eyed saints on the walls....
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Anyway...the story this weekend. Meanwhile just sit back and enjoy the one hit wonders from novelist Dave White's precious New Brunswick, NJ...the 'burg of my own birth and a veritable shithole that, quite frankly, my parents couldn't leave for the shore fast enough.
BIO
KIERAN SHEA’s fiction has appeared in dozens of venues including Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Thuglit, Dogmatika, Word Riot, Plots with Guns, Beat to a Pulp, Crimefactory, and Needle: A Magazine of Noir ...as well as in some beefy-looking anthologies most of which will make you question the tether of his shiny, red balloon. To his self-deprecating astonishment he's also been nominated for the Story South’s Million Writers Award twice without sending the judges so much as a thank you note. He co-edited the satiric transgressive fiction collection D*CKED: DARK FICTION INSPIRED BY DICK CHENEY and his debut novel KOKO TAKES A HOLIDAY is out now from Titan Books. Kieran divides his time between 38°58′22.6″N- 76°30′4.17″W and 39.2775° N, 74.5750° W.