We’re pleased to have an excerpt today from Ross McMeekin’s new book Below the Falls, set for release on March 22 on Thirty West. Of this collection, Tommy Dean wrote, “McMeekin writes with a steady and assured hand, with a patience for allowing scenes to develop naturally, for creating bright and dark settings teeming with life and menace.” Read on for a taste of what readers will encounter within this book’s pages.
The opening image of Billy Wilder’s film noir masterpiece, Sunset Boulevard, captivated audiences when it premiered in 1950: a man’s corpse floating in a swimming pool owned by a faded Hollywood starlet. How did he end up there? Who killed him? The tone was ominous, the danger real, yet due to decades of screen and print copycats, the same scene today has become a crime story cliché—think, for instance, of the needlepoint parody of the facedown murder victim in the […]