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.
6/11/09
NYC Thing to Do: Food, Film, Crime?
Saw that they're doing the NY Food and Film Festival again. Back when I was working as a chef full-time, I contracted to write a series of food articles for Taste of the Bay Magazine. One time... up against a deadline and completely blanking...I jammed out at article on food in the movies. Now looking back, half of the films I recommended had a seemy underbelly of crime laced through them. Go figure. Restaurants (it's no secret) are home to some pretty shady characters. Double dealings, vendor cheats, greasy kickbacks, gambling, drugs, casual violence...recently I tried to touch on this in my story Angelover on Tony Black's Pulp Pusher. But this crime/food connection is not a recent revelation for me. Way back when I was sixteen and weighing portions and slaughetering lobsters in a seafood restaurant, I actually had a conversation with a co-worker telling me he could arrange a beating for a guy who was giving me trouble. Talked about the foreign scallop boat fishermen who tore up the bars in Pt. Pleasant for a night or two and then split for sea, never to be heard from again. I think at the time the price was a hundred bucks, no questions asked--a lot of money for me back then. I passed.
Anyway, makes me hungry...now I just have to write a story about the two line cooks going after each other--one with a knife, the other with a crème brûlée torch. Or maybe the time when those two dingbats tried to steal the bar safe, broke some glasses and bled all over the dining room....or the time....