Hello World

Well this being my first blog entry I guess I should provide a little info on how I came to this point.

I have always been a reader. Having a one hour bus ride in the morning, and being shy, lead me to the world of fiction. I grew up a comic book and Hardy Boy fanatic. Eventually I moved on to Stephen King (Misery was my first "adult" book), S.E. Hinton (with The Outsiders being my favorite book growing up), James Patterson, and the John Sandford Prey series (Lucas Davenport is still one of my favorite characters).

Around the time I went to college my reading slowed to a few books per year while on Summer vacation and my comic book intake completely stopped (ladies didn't find the latest trials of Spider-Man all that romantic). Eight years later, in the Spring of '04, I started reading comics again (your wife has to love you unconditionally) and decided I'd neglected my novel reading for far too long. I was still only reading about 8-10 books per year but it was definitely a step in the right direction. Then, in '07, two things happened that led me to this post today.

I had been reading Ed Brubaker's run on Captain America, which was excellent, and picked up his independent series Criminal. He is a big Crime Fiction fan and this is his homage to the genre. I immediately became interested in this world and, after some research, came up with a list of a few titles I might be interested in.

Now the dirty little secret I've hidden up to this point is I'm a TV addict. Tivo destroyed what free time I had at night so my reading habits were still limited to the TV dead zone, AKA Summer. I had this world of PI's, criminals, antiheroes, and corpses waiting at my bedside but the latest episode of Everybody Loves Raymond sucked me in like a fly to shit. Then the Writer's Guild of America did me a huge favor, they went on strike! They took away my drug of choice. They stopped me dead in my tracks, cold turkey.

I suddenly had a lot of free time (at least all the free time a 6 month old will afford). My reading list grew and my research constantly dug up new authors I had to read. Chandler, Hammett, MacDonald, Cain, Marlowe, Goodis, Thompson, Woolrich, Block, Westlake, Parker, Bruen, Huston, Starr, and Swierczynski. I subscribed to Hard Case Crime and receive a Christmas present in the mail every month.

So, long story even longer, I'm a Crime/Hardboiled/Noir/Neo-Noir fiction addict. I read blogs written by some of my favorite current writers and some who are just fans like me and want to talk about all things Crime Fiction. I don't know what this blog will turn into but hopefully I can just contribute something to the community I've loved being a part of for the past year.