Joe Rey: Growing Old Disgracefully

“The sea looks grey and inhospitable, as breakers hit the beach, frothing and fading on the dark sand. Somewhere across town a prowl car siren wails. At least someone is having a worse fucking day than us.”

The new cover of Slop Shop helped to shift a few units last month, so I thought I’d overhaul a couple more of my least favourite e-book covers: Slab Rats and Skeleton Crew.

Looking at them side by side, I like the way Slab Rats depicts a young, lean 20-something Joe Rey and Skeleton Crew depicts a grizzled 40-something ex-con Rey, complete with scruffy beard and prison muscle!

As regular readers will know, there are a few key (oft-referenced) Joe Rey storylines that haven’t actually made it into print yet, so I’m aiming to fill in the blanks this year. Watch this space!

In the meantime, you can check out the new e-book covers here (UK) and here (US).

(Note: if you bought them the first time round, the covers should automatically update on your Kindle.)

2018 In Review

This time last year I remember feeling distinctly underwhelmed by my written output in 2017, and wanted to step up my game in 2018.

I have no such misgivings about my written output in 2018, and probably wrote more fiction last year than I have at any time in the last 15 years – which I’m very happy with.

New material aside, I also managed to finish a handful of long-abandoned projects – by hacking them up for parts and stitching them together in grisly new combinations, which was similarly satisfying. In some cases, decades-old antagonists were lifted out of botched books and given a new lease of life in alternative narratives.

My first two books (not written in 2018 admittedly), Meat Bubbles & Other Stories (Close To The Bone) and Repetition Kills You (All Due Respect) were released in June and September, respectively.

I also self-published a trio of e-book novelettes, Snuff Racket (also included in Meat Bubbles), Slug Bait and Spine Farm, all of which complement and expand the Paignton Noir universe explored in the books. Spine Farm is a direct sequel to Snuff Racket/Meat Bubbles, and paves the way for the events depicted in the upcoming Boneyard Dogs.

Slug Bait is part of a different (post-Repetition Kills You) timeline, and a number of supporting characters will also appear in future books. Of the three novelettes, this one sold the best, so something about the story must have piqued people’s interest. Either way, this narrative isn’t dead and buried – unlike half of the characters!

The novelettes are great fun to write – and have probably replaced my enduring obsession with flash fiction – although I still managed to notch up a handful of short stories across the course of the year:

XXXmas Boogaloo (Close To The Bone, January 2018)

Oozy Rat In A Sanitary Zoo (Spelk, February 2018)

Murderers I Have Known (Horror Sleaze Trash, June 2018)

Dirty English (Close To The Bone, July 2018)

Venus In Fake Furs (Retreats From Oblivion, August 2018)

Jingle Bells, Shotgun Shells (Punk Noir Magazine, December 2018)

Looking ahead, I have at least two books coming out in 2019 (watch this space for more details), and I would like to find a home for a couple of extra novellas too – which is easier said than done!

Thanks for reading!

Small Town Horrors: splicing genres in Meat Bubbles and Other Stories

“In recent years my pure, undiluted approach to crime fiction has started to blur at the edges: the story titles have got more visceral, the antagonists more ghoulish, the imagery more horrific and the sense of foreboding more pronounced.”

The Meat Bubbles promotional bandwagon rolls on…!

Many thanks to David Spell for letting me contribute a guest post to his site, The Scary Reviews. You can find the full feature here.

Snuff Racket: Paul D. Brazill Recommended Read

This week Brit-grit luminary Paul D. Brazill gave my recent novelette Snuff Racket a once-over. Here’s what he had to say:

“Hapless Paignton PI Joe Rey is hot on the trail of a rare and much sought after ’70s Giallo video film when he is quickly dragged down into a whirlpool of violence and sleaze. Tom Leins’ Snuff Racket is even better than his debut Skull Meat. There’s blood, guts, cracking one-liners and a hell of a lot of dark humour here.”

Check out Paul’s review here!

Interview @ Roughneck Dispatch

“The story which kicked it all off was one called, appropriately enough, ‘Paignton Noir,’ which was published by a Canadian literary magazine called Front & Centre back in 2007. That pretty much set the template for suburban intrigue, bloody violence and off-kilter investigations. Although, now I put my mind to it, I actually published a story called ‘Sleepyhead’ back in about 2004, which was a weird arthouse revenge story that took place on Winner Street, and took in local video shops and chain pubs, so I’ve been peddling this shtick for a while!”

This week, California crime writer Matt Phillips – author of Redbone, Bad Luck City, Three Kinds of Fool and Accidental Outlaws – gave me the Q&A treatment over at his Roughneck Dispatch blog.

We discussed the murky origins of Paignton Noir, the crime fiction protagonists that have influenced Joe Rey and my three main rules for writing. Check it out here.

Interview @ Messy Business

“Some of my favourite antagonists are the ones in J.G. Ballard novels – charismatic psychopaths who are fully committed to their lunatic visions. Men such as Dr. Robert Vaughn (Crash), Anthony Royal (High-Rise) and Bobby Crawford (Cocaine Nights). His everyman narrators are always drawn into the queasy orbits of these fascinating nut-jobs, and that is something I’m attempting with a couple of works-in-progress right now. Deranged antagonists are fascinating to write, but I do think that you need a stable footing before going off at the deep-end.”

Another day, another feature!

Many thanks to Jason Beech – author of the forthcoming City of Forts – for giving me the Q&A treatment over at his Messy Business blog. He has even cooked up a cracking Paignton Noir-esque introduction to make me feel right at home. Check it out!

The Anatomy of a Story: Snuff Racket

Today I have a nasty little SNUFF RACKET feature over at Jotters United!

It includes an excerpt from the book’s Italian prologue, a little bit of background information on the project and an extract from the story itself.

Cheers to editor Nick C. Gerrard for running the piece!

Buy:

UK

US

In my second feature of the day, Marietta Miles invited me to join Gabino Iglesias, Steph Post, J.J. Hensley and Michael Pool over at Do Some Damage to discuss our writing wishes. It’s a great feature – check it out!

Snuff Racket @ Unlawful Acts

My new e-book SNUFF RACKET was given the Unlawful Acts treatment by top US crime reviewer David Nemeth last week.

He said: “There’s noir and then there’s Paignton Noir. If you have never heard of this type of noir before that’s okay Tom Leins invented it. Leins takes a tourist town on the southwest coast of England and turns it into a cross between Boston’s Combat Zone and San Francisco’s Tenderloin where killers, pornographers, pedophiles, gamblers, and drug addicts are the everyday people in the streets and bars.”

Check out the full review here, and make sure you take a look around David’s site. He has tipped me off about some great books over the last year.