Court Merrigan is a crime fiction writer based in Wyoming, but he spent about a decade in East Asia before that. His stories go from rural noir to dark and gritty Asian noir, set in Thailand or in the Japanese underbelly. He's got two full manuscripts and about two dozen short stories, which you can read here. He's currently available for representation and here are his dark pages...
I grew up on a steady diet of Stephen King and Tolkien and David Eddings, but somewhere along the line I got convinced that literature was not meant as mere entertainment, and that crime fiction meant Agatha Christie and Angela Landsbury and Sherlock Holmes.
For years tried my hand at highfalutin literary fiction, chasing the contrails left in the firmament by Faulkner and Proust and Nabokov and Dickens. Basically, if the writer was alive and his name wasn't Cormac McCarthy, I was suspicious. I thought I wanted to write the kind of stories English professors analyze after you're dead.
Only trouble was, my sentences kept on not probing the gossamer mysteries of existence. No, somehow I kept on writing stories chockablock with bullets and blood and fucking. At one point I remember thinking that I had to stop relying on the "crutch" of violence in my writing, that I had to get past all that. Where to, I don’t know.
Then I picked up the short story collection Controlled Burn, by Scott Wolven.
Hold on a goddamn minute, I thought. This ain't no Agatha Christie.
I trooped along with Wolven’s measured Hemingwayesque cadence on an unflinching march down a locked and loaded barrel. Read the whole collection nonstop but for one bourbon refill. Then I put the book down, slowly. Polished off my bourbon. Picked it up again.
Controlled Burn consists of stories, plain unadorned stories. With no posturing and no pretense they burn like bellied bourbon on a howling January night, but this isn’t minimalism. Everything you need to know is right there. There’s no subtext. There’s no symbolism. There’s just story.
Sometimes people get shot in Controlled Burn. Mostly they talk about shooting. I learned that from Wolven, too. Noir doesn't have to be all guts trailing slick on the floor. Sometimes noir can a sick old woman who's hired someone to cut down her trees, as in “Taciturnity”. Sometimes it’s a copkiller on the lam in Nevada getting deputized by an Old Testament sheriff, as in “Atomic Supernova”:
The sheriff climbed in behind the wheel and lit a cigarette. "If I'm not here day after tomorrow," he said, "you go ahead and kill Bob Burke and we'll figure it all out later."
"Okay," I said.
"You're going to like it out here in the West," he said.
"I like it already," I said.
Possibly my favorite bit of dialogue from the book, if not anywhere. The lines rattled around in my head for weeks and then one day I was clicking around in some old files and stumbled across a story I’d discarded two or three years ago for being too much story, not enough art. It was about a crank dealer’s last ride. It had potential. I set to work.
That story, “The Cloud Factory,” went live at PANK in September. I like to think it’s cast in Wolvenesque granite. I’ll be proud if you agree.