MURDALAND
Rising up from Baltimore and Pittsburgh’s bullet-riddled streets like a prophetic junkie, Murdaland is a blood-soaked blessing for anyone who loves crime stories as much as Frank151 does.
Recently named Best Literary Journal 2007 by Baltimore’s City Paper, the mag collects some of the best hardcore crime fiction around, from both undiscovered talent and highly respected authors; the second issue also featured a first hand nonfiction narrative, from an anonymous US military official currently stationed in Iraq.
Frank’s been digging the first two books pretty hard – we loaned our copy of the first out so much, the cover’s probably fallen off by now. Needless to say, we jumped at the chance when Murdaland Editor-in-Chief Michael Langnas took time out to sit down with Frank151 and talk shop… which apparently meant talking about beer commercials, Ernest Hemingway and “festering lust” in an Olive Garden. Enjoy.
FRANK151: First, I gotta ask… did you do anything special for Mickey Spillane’s birthday the other week?
MICHAEL LANGNAS: Geesh. When was it? No one tells me anything.
FRANK151: March 9. His real name was Frank, actually. He would’ve been 90.
MICHAEL LANGNAS: God, that’s poignant. I was so proud that I hadn’t forgotten Day Light’s Savings Time. Little did I know when I was smugly holding down that tiny button by my car’s clock that I had totally forgotten Big Mick’s birthday.
FRANK151: Why, would you have celebrated?
MICHAEL LANGNAS: I probably would’ve thought about beer commercials. I’m more interested in him – to whatever extent I am – as sort of a phenomena. The guy was this endearingly over the top Cold War schlockmeister… though, yeah, with a certain undeniable, queasy pulp power. Then he did some beer commercials in the ‘70s, where he played himself with a wit, irony and graciousness that’s totally lacking in his writing.
Still, his Mike Hammer private-eye novels represent a serious development in the history of the genre, for good or bad. As an event, they’re very significant – even if they lack the moral complexity of his Miller-Lite commercials. It’s interesting. The guy played a major part in a genuine indigenous American art form. That can’t be denied. He could be featured in a Ken Burns documentary for PBS.
FRANK151: About the private-eye novel?
MICHAEL LANGNAS: Well, that too. But really, the beer commercials. They can’t be seen drinking alcohol and they can’t use athletes who are currently playing, so you had all these aged jocks in this fantasy schlub world. Some black guys, but never too many – never too prominent.
They had to establish lite-beer as manly, back in the day, so you ended up with this incredibly bizarre, “only in America,” pre-Viagra male utopia. Hot women as decoration – these blonde, breasty babes giggling at Mickey’s one-liners while John Madden and ex-Steelers great LC Greenwood debated the whole ”less filling / tastes great” dichotomy. Jesus, Ken Burns could do a lot with that, don’t you think? The brazen racial tokenism alone of the early ‘80s stuff. The camera scans a pic of LC Greenwood’s noble face while Wynton Marsalis plays something strong yet poignant on the soundtrack. A littleTom Hanks narration. Be great.
FRANK151: No doubt! But to get off the beer, and back to the topic at hand… what attracted you guys to crime fiction as a genre? What does crime fiction offer that other genres don’t, or can’t, or won’t?
MICHAEL LANGNAS: Well, for one thing, crime fiction offers an audience. I don’t want to be cynical, but I can’t stress that enough. People care about it, enjoy and – God willing – buy it when it’s well done. That’s hard to find for most literature these days. It’s often plot-dependent, and the way a talented author navigates that within the limited space of a short story can be quite interesting. Something very bad happened or is going to happen. That gives it a jolt of dread that makes it both compelling and an interesting aesthetic proposition. There’s a chance to investigate various psychological and sociological realities. A chance to get to the darker stuff.
FRANK151: So, from a historical perspective, where do you guys see yourselves in the evolution of the genre?
MICHAEL LANGNAS: Okay, deep breath. Here’s the spiel.
Ernest Hemingway created a hero who was this good, basically moral guy living in what may be a godless world – certainly an amoral society. The guy, the Hemingway hero, did things well. He had his own code. I’d argue that Hemingway was the most influential writer of the 20th century, if only for this. Every Bruce Willis movie, every cop show, every doctor on TV who doesn’t care about the regulations and performs the live-saving surgery anyway, Goddamn it, is doing the Hemingway thing. Where ever you see this sort of cool, ultra-competent, stoic but moral guy, you’re looking at that archetype…. They have their own moral code, even if the society around them is totally corrupt and they’re probably doomed. It’s beyond huge – this thing that Hemingway came up with, out of his own psychic wounds and the trauma of the first World War.
Then Dashiell Hammett placed that character, the Hemingway hero, in a plot-heavy mystery context with The Maltese Falcon. Raymond Chandler came along and riffed on it further. Hammett had a private-eye in San Francisco called Sam Spade. Chandler had a private-eye in LA called Philip Marlowe. Chandler plots weren’t as well done as Hammett’s, but he added the wise guy first person voice.
FRANK151: And that’s been hard to shake ever since, hasn’t it?
MICHAEL LANGNAS: In one form or another, it’s 95% of what’s out there now. The majority of crime fiction is simply just riffing on Chandler. Someone likeable encounters a crime and enters a sleazy world or flirts with danger, but they’re still cool and honorable and the audience relates. Spillane, on the other hand, sort of detoured from Hammett into something more overtly right-wing and angry. But it’s still the ultra-cool, competent guy the reader relates to.
Take No Country For Old Men. Cormac McCarthy – who’s obviously a better writer than Spillane – took two of these Hemingway types (the cop and the guy who finds the money), draped them in Faulkner-like prose and turned up the inevitable sense of doom even more than usual. But it’s the same character model for both writers. It all comes from Hemingway.
What we’re trying to do at Murdaland, basically, is we’re trying to get away from that. The whole Hemingway to Hammett to Chandler or Spillane or whatever crime tradition. We’re saying, Let’s have a crime story – a very dark crime story, but with no one who’s particularly cool, or sympathetic, or perhaps even competent. It has to be really well written, and, unless it’s going for and successfully achieving comic effect by not having them, there should be real psychological veracity and sociological details. If that leads to something where the plot isn’t neatly resolved, so be it. We’ll concede that bit of form. That’s the Murdaland story. That’s what we’re looking for.
And speaking of the Coen brothers (who directed No Country), Ethan Coen had a very funny story called “The Russian” in Zoetrope a few months ago, which brilliantly parodies this whole Hemingway / Hammett / Chandler tradition. It’s probably much too amusing to be anthologized in either a year-end literary or crime anthology, but it’s really worth checking out. I recommend it highly. A lot of fun.
FRANK151: You were talking about the sense of dread that hangs over crime fiction – knowing something bad happened or will happen. Could that also become a pitfall for your authors – that kind of plot anticipation? How do you guys make sure the material remains fresh and unpredictable while adhering to genre formulas?
MICHAEL LANGNAS: That’s a really a good question. Let me quickly get offended, then address the central issue, if I may.
FRANK151: Okay, shoot.
MICHAEL LANGNAS: We don’t adhere to genre formulas. Not in characterization, not in tone, not in construction. Though, yeah, we might flirt with those last two elements.
What’s more, if you have fiction about such dark things without a super cool or even sympathetic protagonist, there’s a level of veracity that extends from the situation through to the fate of the characters. By not having that ultra-competent Hemingway / Chandler hero, the prospect of ugliness and humiliation is much more real. It’s much more disconcerting without the figure of fantasy or reassurance. Much darker. And that’s really different from what out’s there. Even the more ostensibly nihilistic or hardboiled stuff tends to give you that manly whiff of the cool. We don’t.
FRANK151: Okay, that’s legit.
MICHAEL LANGNAS: In terms of your central question…
The fear of possible monotony or predictability is a real one. We don’t want story ending in doom followed by story ending in doom followed by story ending in doom. We don’t want it to seem tedious. The way we get around that is by being liberal with our definition of the crime story — we’re really casual about it. If it’s a fantastic piece, and it’s dark, and there’s something that’s technically a crime off in the corner, we’ll say, eh, good enough.
We’ll even accept an intense noir feeling or intense personal dissipation in lieu of actual crime. So not everything’s a classic crime or even a crime, and not everything’s resolved. That makes for a mix. And while, yeah, it’s all pretty dark, hey, the tone varies a bit, if only between the smartass, the slightly smartass and the overtly bleak. That creates variety as well, we hope.
FRANK151: You guys have been presented as an alternative to more traditional crime magazines like Alfred Hitchcock and Ellery Queen, as well as to other more mainstream crime writing – like serial detective stories. Can you speak to that difference a little? What sets you apart?
MICHAEL LANGNAS: If you’re a crime writer, the clear financial incentive is to try to get a series character out there, hope it catches on, and to then start pumping out novels with that character. We don’t begrudge anyone that. But it comes back to the whole Chandler from Hemingway archetype, with a sympathetic hero and everything. Maybe the writer makes the hero an elderly lesbian sculptor in the Berkshires or something seemingly far off from a tall male private-eye in LA, but still she’s moral and actually damn cool and most likely talking to us in a variation of that wisecracking Chandler first person voice. She navigates a realm of danger, and perhaps sleaze too, but constantly reaffirming the reader’s values. We give authors a chance to do something much darker and different. And they might be willing to give it a go with a short story as a one-off.
As far as Ellery Queen and Alfred Hitchcock, they’re really working classic genre forms. They’re like Dixieland bands or something. They’re revivalists. Well, revivalists of something that never totally went away… which is fine. They may work in a detail like “methlab” to make the story seem current, but that’s about it. Otherwise it usually could just have been “bootleg gin lab” instead and be set eighty years before. We’re trying to transcend the genre confines. They’re trying to do them well, while updating a detail or two. Finally, our authors are just much, much better in terms of prose, characterization, dialog and, well, pretty much everything. Though yeah, okay, I would think that.
FRANK151: Well, I believe you and [your publishing partner] Cortright McMeel both described mainstream crime outlets in various terms that involve the word “cute.” Can you explain what you guys are implying there?
MICHAEL LANGNAS: A lot of crime fiction is gimmicky. Especially in the short story form. Just trite, and forced. It’s trying to be “cute” in a bad way. Now, there have been some fairly solid anthologies with loosely based themes lately, which is nice to see. Stuff like Expletive Deleted (which was originally titled Fuck Noir), or Hell of a Woman, which had sort of a tongue-in-cheek title and looked at women in noir. Bleak House and Busted Flush Press put them out respectively, and they do some interesting stuff. Both anthologies had fiction of real merit. But the best of both tend to be exceptions. The short story in American crime fiction usually comes off gimmicky and fake. Bad writing about either clichés or people the author doesn’t know anything about, presented within a cheesy formula, often with a labored faux-comic cutesy gloss.
FRANK151: Got it. So what authors would you say do inform the Murdaland aesthetic?
MICHAEL LANGNAS: Within literary fiction – or, if that sounds pretentious, just fiction that’s not put off in the “Crime” section at Barnes & Noble – there are countless writers who fit in here. Dostoevsky, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Jane Bowles, Flannery O’Connor, William S. Burroughs when he bothered to be coherent, Harry Crews, Hubert Selby Jr., the stuff Richard Price did before Clockers, Denis Johnson, Mary Gaitskill, A.M. Homes, Gary Shteyngart. That represents just a handful of them. Within the crime tradition, you’re looking at people like James Cain, Patricia Highsmith, some George Simenon, Joyce Porter, George V. Higgins, Vicki Hendricks, the stuff Richard Price did from Clockers on, James Ellroy and Scott Phillips. In a few years Anthony Neal Smith may clearly be in that crime pantheon too.
FRANK151: Where do your submissions tend to come from? I read some quotes of Cort raging against the MFA as a prerequisite to finding a publisher in the literary market . . . but I imagine you guys would be very popular among college students. Where do you fall on that?
MICHAEL LANGNAS: We don’t think having an MFA should be a prerequisite for being published, but we’re not anti-MFA in the least. We just want the best stories. We get a lot of stories from MFAs, and a lot from people who aren’t in programs. We don’t care. Whatever our numerous failings as humans, we’re pretty good about not being snobs. Moreover, we’re not anti-snobs pulling some bullshit punk rock amateur-hour attitude either. We just want the best stories. You should probably sneer at anyone who judges a story, good or bad, on the basis of the author’s academic background.
FRANK151: So, what’s your editorial process like? How far are the stories we read in the book from where the submissions begin?
MICHAEL LANGNAS: It varies a lot. Sometimes there are a lot of rewrites. Sometimes almost none. The amount of rewrites really doesn’t reflect on the quality of the writer. A short story has to work as a whole in a way that a novel actually doesn’t. A novel can be a lot messier. In addition, in crime fiction there are issues of veracity and often dramatic incident that make the need for total cohesion that much more important. So if you ask an author to change one element in a story, it often means it’ll affect a lot of other elements. But everyone we’ve published has been very patient.
FRANK151: Tell me about Murdaland’s name. How’d you settle on it?
MICHAEL LANGNAS: I had nothing to do with the name. That’s from well before I came onboard. Cort, who lives in Baltimore, was planning a local crime magazine for a long time. He heard that word around town and just thought it’d be perfect. It was really just the phrase “murdaland.” In hindsight, I’m not sure if we’d go with it. It’s on some graffiti in the opening credits of The Wire, so now it’s really widely associated with Maryland, and there aren’t really the broader, vaguer, symbolic implications Cort had anticipated for the title and a literary crime magazine. I’d go with something else actually. FRANK151: Like what?
MICHAEL LANGNAS: There really isn’t a “could’ve / should’ve” name that we torture ourselves with. We may do self-defeating things on occasion, but there are limits to any actual masochism. So we try not to dwell on it. We started as Murdaland: Crime Fiction for the 21st Century, and I’ve actually been sort of tweaking the second part. The Crime Fiction for the 21st Century bit, which we’ve now replaced in some places with Dark Tales for Tawdry Times. If we could do it all over again, I guess it’d be Something : Dark Tales for Tawdry Times. And that something would be, yeah, evocative of crime and violence and trouble, but not a geographically specific area. Something that we could get the web address for with a minimal amount of trouble. What I lack in masochism I like to make up for with laziness.
FRANK151: Speaking of geography, we really enjoyed reading the Henry Chang’s story in issue two – it’s set in the L.E.S, pretty close to Frank’s Chop Shop. That got us wondering – does geography play a role in your selection process?
MICHAEL LANGNAS: With the debut issue, I really tried to get the crime story from Mumbai, the crime story from Moscow, the strippers in Portland story or whatever. And it just didn’t happen. I contacted all these native writers and foreign journalists, bloggers, all these people who really knew their milieus. I asked them if they’d like to try a crime story and a few people were excited, but pretty much nothing ever came of any of it. I wasted an unbelievable amount of time. But we got some really interesting stuff nonetheless. Someone wrote a piece on young junkies in Baltimore that was terrific. An ex-Sandinista guerilla from Nicaragua wrote an amazing story about the guys fighting the contras. Henry Chang gave us that killer piece on Chinatown that was in the second issue. But it was all people whose interest in writing dark fiction about the stuff they know so well preceded my sending them a flattering e-mail. And I think there was a real lesson in that.
FRANK151: Do you guys have a preference between urban, suburban and rural crime stories? Is there any emphasis on stories coming out of the major cities – like most classic crime fiction – or are you looking for more rural crime like No Country and Fargo, or Daniel Woodrell and Anthony Neal Smith’s pieces in your first issues?
MICHAEL LANGNAS: We – Sean O’Kane, my clever and relentless Assistant Editor, and I – are always looking for the best fiction. Right now, there’s a lot of good stuff from rural America. I’m not sure why that is. One rather depressing theory is that people with that kind talent would be doing something else if they’d grown up in another part of the country. But I’ll read anything that’s good. I always tell people I’d love to get a bloody story about rage, jealousy and festering lust at a Nebraska Olive Garden where everyone was in a foul mood because it was a dreary cold February and the staff was all working extra shifts to pay off Christmas credit card bills. I’d love to read about border guards in New Mexico or Algerian and Tunisian kids in the ghettoized suburbs of Paris or a rogue cokehead commodities trader in Chicago. But I’d want to read those stories by people who knew the characters and milieu. And who could write. That’s what’s most important: it has to be good. Sure, there are plus points for stuff we haven’t seen before. But I’m not making a list of what’s cool or what might make a great piece, and then trying to get those stories. I tried that with round one and it’s not something we can pull off.
We’ve had a lot of excellent urban stories, but there’s a group of young writers who really consciously model themselves on hip hop and they’re sold as paperback originals and marketed in a way that totally parallels the original pulps. That seemed like it might be interesting to look into and I made some contact and, oh man, I learned the hard way that people who are writing the contemporary pulp equivalent of hip hop aren’t interested in being in a small literary magazine. Fuck no. They want to have novels that become movies. That’s the goal. That’s the dream. Novels to movies, media empire to follow. That was made very, very clear to me. Fair enough. If the original pulp guys were around today, they’d have the same attitude. But it was another one like the Russian story or the one from Mumbai. We’ve learned we can’t order up good fiction. It doesn’t work that way.
FRANK151: So what can we expect to find in issue three? Will there be more nonfiction? Do you plan on revisiting authors you’ve already published?
MICHAEL LANGNAS: We were hoping to do two issues a year, but that might not turn out to be realistic. Right now we’re thinking issue three will probably be late summer or early fall. You can expect to find good, dark, really well written stuff. What else? We really didn’t want to repeat anyone from issue one in issue two, but we’re not adverse to having someone in issue three who we had before. Again – we just want the best stuff possible. We think we pulled off something that’s really heads above everything else out there, and we want to keep up that standard. I’d love to do more nonfiction, but I think time constraints might prevent that. We had a really fine piece from an officer in Kuwait for the second issue, but I don’t know if we’re going to be able to do more like that. We’d like to, but that might be something for further down the road. But, hey – if someone has something really good and dark we’d love to see it.
FRANK151: Well, cool. Maybe some of our readers will see that and you’ll be getting some true-life crime stories from the Frank fam. Whatever happens, Murdaland is great stuff – respect. You’re filling a crucial void, and it’s much appreciated… Let us know as soon as the next issue drops.
MICHAEL LANGNAS: Pleasure was mine. Thanks.
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As a special bonus for Frank readers who’ve gone this far with us, we’ve got a lil’ gift:
Aaron LaCrate’s classic “Bodymore Murdaland” right here.
