Writing at the Dark End – Reading Party Event – The New Yorker

by Macy Halford It was criminal how sexy it was. Writers of different genres intermingling, their poisons of choice (Pinot Grigio, Pinot Noir) placid in Dixie cups. Bright lights, marble busts of dead authors, buttercream-yellow walls and crown molding, an overwhelming air of camaraderie. This was the scene last night at the old Mercantile Library, on East 47th Street, now the Center for Fiction and home (for an hour) to a reading of The End of a Dark Street. The editors of this decidedly transgressive anthology, S. J. Rozan and Jonathan Santlofer, stood and explained their reasoning: by bringing literary heavyweights (among them Madison Smartt Bell, Francine Prose, Amy Hempel, Edmund White) together with crime-fiction heavyweights (among them Lee Child, Laura Lippman, James Grady, Lawrence Block, Val McDermid), the literary legitimacy of crime fiction might be demonstrated: all the stories were so good, Rozan said, that one could not tell which were written by the … Read more

Dark End of the Street Release

I haven’t blogged or written on my website in a very long time and I apologize. It just got away from me. But I’m back and I’m going to try and keep this going. So, first off, TONIGHT is the launch party for “THE DARK END OF THE STREET,” the anthology SJ Rozan & I put together for Bloomsbury Publishing. It seems like yesterday that SJ and I were sitting in Grand Central Station talking about why crime fiction is considered 2nd rate, what we were going to do about it, and what we did: Invited crime fiction and literary writers to share a book, to write original stories on the twin subjects of crime and sex. At first we weren’t sure if the writers would agree, but just about everyone we asked not only said yes, but did so with enthusiasm, and they all turned in amazing stories. It took a year to put … Read more