For over 30 years John M. Floyd, a writer you’ve never heard of, has published over 1,000 short stories—mostly in crime fiction—in over 600 publications. Here we analyze his career and extrapolate effective craft and process rules. Further, Big Philly recalls his correspondence with Mr. Floyd and shares some insider tips on how to up your short fiction game. You can find Mr. Floyd’s short story collections for purchase HERE.

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Philip “Big Philly” Smith reflects on the potential deleterious effects of entering his adolescence at the exact moment Kurt Cobain and his ilk commandeered the culture. The ethos of Nirvana was toxic garbage that destroyed rock music forever—rock is dead.

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Megan Abbott is the Gen X queenpin of literary noir crime fiction, and not enough appreciative readers know it. Abbott writes smoldering, classic noir New York suits foolishly package as everything from YA adjacent high school angst to wine-soaked mom drama.

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In this installment of the gonzo off-week podcast, host Philip “Big Philly” Smith shoots the manure about classic literary stories that entertain nearly as well as genre fiction… plus he confesses to a forbidden guilty pleasure.

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A discussion of Raymond Chandler’s sweeping essay on crime fiction, The Simple Art of Murder (1944). How do the master’s ideas apply today? Chandler argued, among several other things, sanitized murder mysteries are lame, good formulaic fiction is hard to write, and detectives should be the moral centers of their stories.

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Philip M. Smith is the name on his sub-500 credit report, but the real ones know him as Big Philly. The home offices of Vigilante Crime and Pulp, in consultation with Philly’s psychiatric care team, authorized a new series of bonus episodes where America’s favorite blue collar scholar goes hog wild on random topics between main episodes. This week: the trauma of a violent Christmas vacation murder is softened by the literary condom of a cute dog and gorgeous Alpine locale.

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Horace McCoy is now best known for his depression era classic They Shoot Horses, Don’t They (1935) and its 1960s film adaptation starring Jane Fonda. But Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye (1948) is a shocking cocktail of brutal violence, loose sex, and corrupt elites. Author and Editor Philip M. Smith (“Big Philly”) discusses the novel’s place as foreshadowing of the literary darkness to follow in the form of one Jim Thompson.

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Couched between his traditional black-and-white noir The Wrong Man (1956) and his vibrant action and espionage thriller North By Northwest (1959), Alfred Hitchcock made a smoldering, genre-bending meditation on anxiety, loss, and desire called Vertigo (1958). The film combines elements of hard-boiled detective, occult detective, gothic, and everyman noir, and it comes to life through a popping Bernard Herrmann score and performances by James Stewart and Kim Novak. Listen to Big Philly’s take on his frenzied favorite from Hitch.

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Alfred Hitchcock didn’t merely have an eye for what worked on camera, he was one of the greatest curators of commercial crime and suspense fiction of the twentieth century. In this episode, we discuss the writers behind the director. From icons like Patricia Highsmith, Daphne Du Maurier, and Cornell Woolrich, to hidden figures like Robert Bloch, Charles Bennett, and John Michael Hayes, Alfred Hitchcock was a brilliant literary talent scout.

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We review and analyze Alfred Hitchcock’s favorite of his own films. Starring Teresa Wright and Joseph Cotten, and co-written by Our Town playwright Thornton Wilder, Shadow of a Doubt (1943) is a domestic noir of family secrets and violent urges. It’s a tale of two Charlies — one a sadistic uncle, the other a spunky niece who rises to the violence of the occasion. Also, we announce our forthcoming Hitchcock short story anthology and call for submissions.

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