A parallel indie lit scene labors beside us, and the cross-traffic ain’t enough to satisfy a muddied-water type like me. I’m talking the people of the night, those unafraid to cozy up to labels such as crime, noir, mystery, slash-and-burn, thug lit, or kill-for-thrill.

The Blake Butler of this shadowy world is Plots with Guns honcho Anthony Neil Smith, a ne’er-do-well graduate of Frederick Barthelme’s storied (and soon-to-be-gone, if the rumors are true) graduate program at Southern Miss, a place where a stripped-down violent prose would likely feel at home. Smith has nurtured plenty of online writers toward the big leagues — notably Scott Wolven, who appeared in six straight editions of Best American Mystery Stories on his way to a deal with Scribner’s, and, more recently Frank Bill, the phenom factory worker from Corydon, Indiana, whose novel Donnybrook is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus, Giroux. (I’ve read it. It’s hot as hell. It’s kin to Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God and Donald Ray Pollock’s Knockemstiff.)

Other players in the online crime writing scene: David Cranmer’s Beat to a Pulp; Keith Rawson’s Crimefactory; the recently and sadly shuttered ThugLit, edited by Todd “Big Daddy Thug” Robinson; Crimewav.com, a series of crime story podcasts edited by Seth Harwood; A Twist of Noir (a blogspot site, charmingly low-tech like Dogzplot) and Murdaland, the online archive for the sadly defunct glossy mag that published the likes of Mary Gaitskill and Don Carpenter.

Be on the lookout for such up-and-coming crime writers as Jedediah Ayres, Keith Rawson, Greg Bardsley, Paul David Brazill, Steve Weddle, Patti Abbott, Kieran Shea, and Anonymous 9, the pool from which might come our next James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, Big Jim Thompson, or Patricia Highsmith. I admire what they’re doing so much, I tried my hand at the form, too. More HTMLGiant types ought to. You’ll find an eager, smart audience willing to receive experiment, so long as it’s dark experiment. Let the cross-pollination begin.

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