Let’s roll the clock back a few years…okay, quite a lot of years. Its 1984, I’m fifteen and my face times its breakouts to co-inside perfectly with any social event involving the opposite sex. I steal cigarettes from my pal’s mom, because I think smoking them makes me look cool (trust me kids, it doesn’t, but you’ll probably still do it anyway.) I have a leather jacket, bad grades, and an unhealthy obsession with Pat Benatar. In the middle of all this, Bruce Springsteen releases the BORN IN THE USA album and for me, nothing is ever quite the same again. Here was a dude singing about Vietnam, blue collar Joes and the broken American dream. I may have been living an ocean way, but those songs spoke to me, and I mean directly to me. Dancing in the Dark? You better believe I was. Bruce told me how it was and I listened—I have been listening ever since.
Roll
forwards again to 2014. I’m forty four. The acne is long gone, but now my face
has a permanently bewildered look that comes from the realization I’m middle
aged. I have a pack a day habit that I can’t kick, a wife that I love, a job I
hate and an unhealthy obsession with Pat Benatar. I got to chase my own runaway
American dream for a while and I know that my glory days are largely in the
rearview mirror. I’m good with that (most of the time.) I’m still dancing in
the dark, but I’m a goddamn writer now, so the world can go suck it.
Bruce
Springsteen has now been providing the sound track to my life for better than 25 years
and it should be pretty obvious to most of you that he is a huge
influence on my work as a writer too. He’s the finest storyteller I know (and I
know Isaac Kirkman.)
Anyhow,
last year I was shooting the shit with Joe Clifford and we got to talking about
how much we both dug Bruce Springsteen, and how his songs have many of the same
qualities present in good crime fiction. Boom! We suddenly hit on the idea of a
crime fiction anthology with stories inspired by Springsteen song titles. Joe was
up for editing it, my ZP brother and fellow Springsteen fan, Brian Panowich was
in like Flynn too. The rest of the Zelmer guys weren’t far behind. We started
to invite a few people to contribute stories and the response was completely
overwhelming. Who knew so many top crime writers were Springsteen fans?
What
we first envisaged as a cool little anthology soon became something way, way
bigger than any of us could have imagined. The eight months that followed have
been full of lawyers, contracts, frayed tempers and frustrations, but thanks
largely to Joe’s dogged determination and Ryan Sayles’ unfailing optimism, we
made it. Like the song says: Talk about a
dream, try to make it real.
