A new crime fiction print mag seeks submissions

It’s the brainchild of Baltimore-based Cortright McMeel and Tristan Davies, and from the missive McMeel sent me, I’m already super excited for this mag’s prospects. The submission call appears below:

Murdaland:
Crime Fiction for the New Century will feature the best and most
derelict, deranged, bareknuckled honest voices to bring about a
renaissance of crime fiction. Currently, the predominant “mystery”
magazines are two lame, staid, old fogey establishment publications:
Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine and Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine.
Both are put out by the same publisher and stuck in a timewarp of
1950’s schlock. They even have mystery crossword puzzles catering to
nuns living sober lives in the cornbelt.

Murdaland
will not be kin to this kind of writing or experience. More risk taking
in nature, possessing the kind of vision and rebellious attitude as
such rogue presses as Olympia (Naked Lunch, Burroughs), our
mission will be to free American crime fiction from the cage of
civility where it now rots. Murdaland is a beast of three parts: part
literature, part rabid dog, part sad whiskey shot spilled on the
barroom floor. The final result will be in the tradition of crime
writer David Goodis (Shoot the Piano Player), as he was once described
by Kerouac: “the poet of the losers.”

We are calling for stories that will help redefine the Noir/Hardboiled genre and take it to new literary heights. Stories don’t
have to be about boxers, PIs, pimps, hookers, bank robbers and drug
dealers, as much as they should be about exploring characters in a
violent modern world existing on the margins of society. Above all,
it’s about the writing. The prose must be high and tight.

We plan to go to press in April so any story received should reach us by March 1, 2006.

Send manuscripts to:

Cortright McMeel

1218 Wine Spring Lane

Baltimore, Md. 21204

Or email submissions to fiction editor Eddie Vega at  vegae@pbcc.edu.

Payment is $100 per story. There’s no word count limit, because as McMeel puts it, “there are no rules. We just want good writing.”