1. Plots With Guns

From Publishers Weekly
The short-lived e-zine from which this anthology takes its title specialized in firearm-fueled crime fiction. Smith has culled 24 of its best, and though a few seem stray shots, most hit their targets as bulls-eyes. Eddie Muller’s “Wanda Wilcox Is Trapped” is a steamy slice of period Hollywood sleaze in which a gun factors into a declining starlet’s rendezvous with her tawdry fate. In Jim Nisbet’s “Brian’s Story,” a pistol concealed in a car serves as a touchstone for a beautifully narrated memory tale of a white-trash kid’s revenge against the pusher who sold his older brother a fatal dose of heroin. The contemplative approach of these stories is counterbalanced by Kevin James Miller’s “Stealing Klatzman’s Diary,” a morbidly amusing caper with a Shakespearean body count in which two small-time thieves play crime kingpins and federal investigators against one another. Deceptively simple tales in which the gunplay is just part of a larger moral drama include Robert Skinner’s “Spanish Luck” and Sean Doolittle’s “Worth.” At their best, these stories demonstrate the breadth and creative reach of the modern hard-boiled tale.

Plots With Guns

His first published noir story appeared in Plots with Guns way back in '03. TEXT COPYRIGHT 2008 GARNETT ELLIOT. PHOTOS FOR #3 FRONT PAGE, TITLE BANNERS, AND INFO BY FAIRUZ SAMSUDDIN (PHOS GRAFIS CREATIVE). USED WITH PERMISSION. Yet gun control activists in and outside of government hoped to rewrite that principle when it came to the makers and sellers of firearms. During the 1980s and ‘90s, a coordinated series of lawsuits against the gun industry sought to hold these businesses responsible for the criminal acts third parties committed with firearms.