During my early teens, I subsisted on a steady diet of noir. Apparently that’s what happens when you never get into video games. I knew where it came from and, more importantly, thought I knew what it was all about: gritty settings, hard stories, down-and-out characters, witty dialogue, cool guys in fedoras, and a dash of violence. Tough, hard-drinking men who punched hard, didn’t take lip from anyone, and weren’t afraid to pull their gun out were a sine qua non element of the books I devoured. A few years later, I didn’t know what noir was anymore. That’s when things got interesting.
Fast-forward fifteen years. My ARC of Akashic’s Boston Noir 2: The Classics, arrived in the mail. I cracked it open and read the intro. “What is noir and what is not inhabits a similarly gray area,” wrote editors Dennis Lehane, Mary Cotton and Jaime Clarke. “Its definition is continually expanding from the previous generation’s agreed-upon notion that noir involves men in fedoras smoking cigarettes on street corners. Noir alludes to crime, sure, but it also evokes bleak elements, danger, tragedy, sleaze, all of which is best represented by its root French definition: black.”
“Until the blood starts to flow, it’s always a people situation.” – Everett
“Have you ever wanted to burn down your own home?”
The work of Joe Clifford shouldn’t be new to anyone who does much poking around in the online crime fiction community. In addition to his short stories routinely showing up places like Shotgun Honey, Thuglit, and A Twist of Noir, Joe is also the editor of the 
2012 was a pretty good writing year for me. I saw three books accepted for publication: Choice Cuts, my short story collection, which was released in August (to better-than-expected sales and reviews); Wake the Undertaker, an old-school, comic-book detective novel, slated for later this year; and Junkie Love, the darling the trifecta, my autobiographical drug novel and a book very dear to my heart (for obvious reasons), which will be coming out in 2013. 
Once a man finds himself out in the badlands, out beyond rule and law and custom, who knows what anyone might do?
I have become extraordinarily busy in recent weeks. Honestly, there just isn’t enough hours in the day. I’ve had to rearrange my filing cabinet, sort out my tax receipts, catalogue my new collection of classical music (chronologically, since you ask), and give the office carpet its annual vacuum.
This short novel, Beignet and Grandpa Au Lait, is told in first person by two dogs. It is actually very autobiographical, but was written in a fictional manner. 
The memories brought with them a host of southern belles. 
I had written several screenplays through the years, then I began my astrology series of thrillers (
I knew today was gonna be bad, but I never got close to this. – Jason Dean
