If you're looking for some tough guy literature, you owe to yourself to check out some Heath Lowrance. He is easily top five talent amongst the underbelly of the hardboiled/noir genres. Rejoice, he has not one, but two new books out. CITY OF HERETICS and BLUFF CITY BRAWLER as a part of the vaunted Fight Card series.. He also blogs out of Psycho Noir, one of the most renowned stops on the web. He is truly a cult writer with breakout potential. I'm glad he found time to stop by my humble abode.
Order BLUFF CITY BRAWLER here
Order CITY OF HERETICS here
TOUGH GUYS, by Heath Lowrance
I like stories about tough guys, but you know, there really aren’t that many of them that are convincing. In the eighties, the hey-day of so-called tough guy movies, screens were jam-packed with muscle-bound men shooting guns and rocket-launchers, kung-fu-ing the hell out of 30 guys at once and walking coolly away from exploding buildings and helicopters.
That is not what I mean by tough guy. A true tough guy can handle himself, sure, but he’s not super-human. If he was super-human, he wouldn’t have to be a tough guy. The sort of bad-ass I have in mind is one defined not so much by ass-kicking ability (although they often have that, more than the average fella). No, I’m talking about resilience. Stoicism. Taciturnity. Those are the three qualities that make up the classic tough-guy.
And you know what? I find older tough-guys far more convincing than younger tough-guys. A younger man doesn’t generally have the real world experience to make him truly stoic, or truly resilient. The younger tough-guy is concerned with his hair, and his muscle-tone. The older tough-guy is concerned with… getting shit done.
Look at Liam Neeson in the movie Taken. Or Terrance Stamp in The Limey. That’s what I’m talking about. Old guys who are singularly focused on a specific task. They don’t get distracted. They don’t cave in.
The protagonist of my new novel, CITY OF HERETICS, turns 50 years old halfway through the book. His name is Crowe, a hard man just out of prison and back in Memphis to even the score against his former Mob employers. But before he can accomplish that task, he gets sidetracked onto the trail of a serial murderer, a trail that leads him to a sinister secret society of killers masquerading as a Christian splinter-group. Crowe’s encounter with the Heretics forces him to examine the darkest parts of his own heart and mind, and to discover the last remnants of humanity still deep inside him.
Through it all, Crowe is resilient. He’s stoic. He’s taciturn. His aging body betrays him at every turn, but he doesn’t stop. He doesn’t know how to stop.
Crowe is no hero—in fact, he’s closer in spirit to the Heretics than even he realizes—but he IS a tough-guy. Make no mistake.
CITY OF HERETICS is available now from Snubnose Press. I hope you check it out
That is not what I mean by tough guy. A true tough guy can handle himself, sure, but he’s not super-human. If he was super-human, he wouldn’t have to be a tough guy. The sort of bad-ass I have in mind is one defined not so much by ass-kicking ability (although they often have that, more than the average fella). No, I’m talking about resilience. Stoicism. Taciturnity. Those are the three qualities that make up the classic tough-guy.
And you know what? I find older tough-guys far more convincing than younger tough-guys. A younger man doesn’t generally have the real world experience to make him truly stoic, or truly resilient. The younger tough-guy is concerned with his hair, and his muscle-tone. The older tough-guy is concerned with… getting shit done.
Look at Liam Neeson in the movie Taken. Or Terrance Stamp in The Limey. That’s what I’m talking about. Old guys who are singularly focused on a specific task. They don’t get distracted. They don’t cave in.
The protagonist of my new novel, CITY OF HERETICS, turns 50 years old halfway through the book. His name is Crowe, a hard man just out of prison and back in Memphis to even the score against his former Mob employers. But before he can accomplish that task, he gets sidetracked onto the trail of a serial murderer, a trail that leads him to a sinister secret society of killers masquerading as a Christian splinter-group. Crowe’s encounter with the Heretics forces him to examine the darkest parts of his own heart and mind, and to discover the last remnants of humanity still deep inside him.
Through it all, Crowe is resilient. He’s stoic. He’s taciturn. His aging body betrays him at every turn, but he doesn’t stop. He doesn’t know how to stop.
Crowe is no hero—in fact, he’s closer in spirit to the Heretics than even he realizes—but he IS a tough-guy. Make no mistake.
CITY OF HERETICS is available now from Snubnose Press. I hope you check it out