We hugely appreciate all the effort and interest. We ultimately received well over 200 submissions, so the sorting and selection will take slightly longer than expected. We plan to announce the final contributor list by September 21. If your story is accepted, you will receive a message from us, of course.

We can tell you at this juncture that you will see the triumphant returns of Joe R. Lansdale and the brilliant Christina Hoag—and Edgar Award winner Eli Cranor just may make an appearance.

We’ve also been busy behind the scenes with other projects, so in addition to anthology updates, keep checking in to get upcoming novel announcements.

BUY THE BOOK: Queenpin by Megan Abbott

Subscribe now

I’ve written before about the evolution of the novel. Prior to the publishing industry’s wide adoption of developmental editing in the mid-20th century, every author was his own developmental editor, and the job of editors at publishing outfits was to make the most of the least un-edited submissions.

The result is that, in the old days, published writing was vastly more miss than hit, at least by modern standards. And even the enduring hits—such as the work of Dickens, Zola, Dreiser, Tolstoy, and practically all iconic novels that predate Maxwell Perkins’ developmental-editing revolution—are “sprawling,” which is to say, extremely fucking rambly...usually involving a “pre-novel,” i.e., a hundred or more pages of the author warming up to his subject.

The noir genre notably bucked this trend. James M. Cain and the Black Mask gang served up straight shots of luridness and trained themselves to strip out, as Elmore Leonard put it, the parts that readers tend to skip.

But it didn’t buck it entirely.

The 1939 noir novel Detour by Martin M. Goldsmith lives on primarily because it was turned into a seminal film noir of the same name. I saw the movie years ago, and what I mainly remember is a remarkably grim female vagabond who verbally abuses the protagonist, and is eventually (spoiler alert) put out of her misery via a phone cord mishap.

In fact, this character—Vera—is the best part of the novel. Maybe the feralest femme fatale in all of fiction. A developmental editor, if such existed at the obscure house that first published the book (The Macaulay Company), would have zeroed in on that, and prescribed a reordering of the plot with her in mind. In the published version she is a mid-point invention who exists primarily as a sort of demonic presence that leads the protagonist to his final hell.

Likewise, the novel’s main hook, or what should be the novel’s main hook, is strong. A hitchhiker assumes the identity of a well-off guy who picks him up and then dies, and said hitchhiker, while driving the dead guy’s car, then picks up the vagabond Vera, who as it turns out knew the dead guy, and hence knows what said hitchhiker is up to, and can now get down to some blackmailing. The movie, in point of fact, became a classic because it centered on this scenario, and on Vera.

But the novel. Holy crap. It has not become a classic for the opposite reason. What it is, essentially, is a copyedited first draft. As you read it you can feel Mr. Goldsmith improvising, moment by moment, blindly willing himself to his daily word-count goal. Approximately 50 percent of the novel has approximately zero relevance to its dramatic core, but features the girl the hitchhiker is hitchhiking to—one Sue Harvey, aspiring LA starlet, and practicing tramp.

What we are treated to for half the book is the random stream of consciousness of a prime specimen of genus bimbo, as she reflects on who she has put out for, who she ought to put out for, her spats with her roommate and fellow waitresses, and any and all other banalities that traipse across what passes for her mind. As we meet her we learn that dashing actor Raoul Kildare just quasi-raped her, and she quasi-liked it.

Oh, I struggled all right, told him I didn’t like him that much, that I hardly knew him, that I was in love with someone else, and anyway, pu-lease, I was not that kind of girl; I even slapped him once or twice, hard. But after saying “No!” about a dozen times, something happened, something that had never happened to me before. Although I still did not want him to have me, I found my “No!” getting just a trifle weaker; and then, curiously, all fight drained out of me and I gave up struggling entirely. In the end, I didn’t exactly give myself to him. He took me.

This sort of thing could be fine if it had eventual relevance to the hitchhiker/Vera situation, but there is no plot justification, or attempt at plot justification. It exists in the novel simply as a parallel, disembodied bimbo diary. Following the above passage we get several pages of Sue free-flowing about male/female differences; about how she’s pretty sure, but not entirely sure, she doesn’t love the guy who just got her drunk and violated her against her protestations on the first date; about her impatience with being taken to a drive-in for a post-rape sandwich; and about her final decision to get back at Raoul by telling him he wasn’t a good lover (he thought the rape went off smashingly)...a cruelty which subsequently causes Raoul to attempt suicide by jumping off the Hollywood sign...a display of sensitivity which leads Sue to believe she loves him after all, which she argues herself in and out of in various other pages-long streams of consciousness.

No, really, that happens. The book was written—and published—like that. The bimbo B-plot was doubtlessly green-lighted because it stirred in some sex and got the page-count up, but whatever editor green-lighted it was as far from Maxwell Perkins as Sue Harvey is from Marie Curie.

It should be said, though, that if we ignore the bimbo detour, Detour is a solid noir. The hitchhiker drama is, for the most part, classic first-person cynicism of the era, and when Vera finally enters the picture, that drama comes alive. We get pages of snappy exchanges between the two criminal drifters, peppered with now-forgotten slang and amusing turns of phrase. Vera says things like, “Crooked as you look, I’d hate to see a fellow young as you wind up sniffing that perfume Arizona hands out free to murderers.” When the protagonist asks where the “butts” are, Vera says, “On the table, sucker.” Things like that.

The moment when the road-grimed and clearly unstable Vera lets on that she knows whose car she’s riding in, the whole novel clicks. Unfortunately, that comes pretty late in the game. It’s to Goldsmith’s credit that he wrote the screenplay for the film version, and took the opportunity to bring Vera to the fore and take the red pen to Sue and her sensitive rapist.

Detour the novel, however, remains the larval form of the work. If it has anything to teach us, it’s probably about authorial grit. Had Goldsmith not sat down every day and hacked out his bimbo diaries and ground out the hitchhiker plot until he—probably with a shrug—decided to toss Vera in, he would be as forgotten an artist as Raoul Kildare.

Share

Subscribe now

Subscribe now

Share

Subscribe now

Share

Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing (1956) is celebrated as the film that announced the arrival of one of cinema’s greatest directors. It’s also a reminder that great films are rarely the product of a single genius (the infamous auteur). While Kubrick’s crisp visual style and innovative storytelling deserve the praise they receive, the movie bears the fingerprints of legendary noir novelist Jim Thompson, whose contribution to the screenplay has been overshadowed.

The Killing, based on Lionel White’s novel Clean Break, follows career criminal Johnny Clay (Sterling Hayden) as he assembles a team for an intricately planned racetrack heist. The premise sounds straightforward, but Kubrick transforms it into a dazzling puzzle. The film constantly shifts perspective and loops back in time, revealing the same events from different angles until every moving piece locks into place. Today, audiences recognize this kind of fractured chronology from filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino and Christopher Nolan, but in 1956 it would have felt fresh. The film’s structure is as exciting and exacting as the heist itself.

Maybe it’s my past as a bit of a racetrack degenerate, but the centerpiece of the film is the racetrack robbery sequence. Kubrick stages the operation with precision, building suspense through a web of seemingly unrelated actions that gradually reveal themselves to be parts of a single elaborate plan. Every distraction, every timed movement, and every secondary character has a purpose. The sequence is thrilling because of flawless cinematic craftsmanship. Watching the plan unfold is like observing a master chess player execute a winning strategy.

Yet The Killing is more than a clever caper flick. It is soaked in the fatalism that defines classic film noir. Every character is driven by greed, desperation, jealousy, or misplaced ambition. The dialogue is lean, the shadows are deep, and the universe itself seems determined to punish anyone who believes they can outsmart fate. Even when the plan appears perfect, doom hangs over every frame. The film’s unforgettable ending perfectly captures noir’s central philosophy: sometimes the universe doesn’t need a villain to ruin your life. Chance is enough.

READ GREAT CRIME NOW

That worldview is precisely where Jim Thompson’s influence becomes impossible to ignore. Thompson, already renowned for hardcore novels like The Killer Inside Me and The Getaway, was brought in to help write the screenplay. Although Kubrick ultimately received the primary writing credit alongside Calder Willingham, Thompson’s voice echoes throughout the finished film. The morally compromised characters, the bleak humor, the sense that ordinary people are only one bad decision away from catastrophe… all hallmarks of Thompson’s fiction.

For decades, Thompson’s contribution remained underappreciated. Kubrick’s towering reputation understandably drew attention away from everyone else involved, but revisiting The Killing today makes it easier to appreciate it as a remarkable collaboration. Kubrick supplied the visual precision and structural innovation, while Thompson infused the story with the grim, unsentimental humanity that elevates it beyond a simple heist picture.

The Killing remains one of the greatest noir films, not just because of the Kubrick angle, but because it paired his extraordinary cinematic eye with one of America’s greatest crime writers. Jim Thompson may not have received equal billing in film history, but his shadow looms over every dark, cynical frame.

Subscribe now

Share

Subscribe now

Share

Subscribe now

Share

Sometimes Divine Providence brings you the right book for the right time. For me, that book was The Shootist by Glendon Swarthout.

I first read it just weeks before learning that my father, like the narrator of the novel, was dying of cancer. Looking back, I honestly don’t think I could have picked a more emotionally appropriate novel if I’d tried. What I expected to be a classic Western turned into a spiritual and intellectual meditation on mortality, dignity, and how a man chooses to face the inevitable. All this from essentially a pulp novel.

If you’ve only seen the great John Wayne film adaptation, do yourself a favor and read the novel.

The Shootist (1975) follows legendary gunfighter John Bernard Books as he rides into El Paso in 1901 seeking medical advice for a persistent pain. The diagnosis changes everything. Books learns he is dying, and the remainder of the novel follows his determination to face death on his own terms while living in a world that no longer has much use for men like him. I won’t spoil where the story goes from there because discovering that journey is part of the experience.

One of the things I love most about the novel is that it’s really about two deaths happening at once. John Bernard Books is dying, but so is the American West itself. The year is 1901. Queen Victoria has died. The twentieth century is arriving. Civilization is replacing frontier justice. Newspapers, businessmen, and publicity seekers are becoming more important than legendary gunfighters. Books is watching an entire way of life disappear around him.

Swarthout never beats the reader over the head with these themes, though. His prose is lean, clean, and understated. That’s one reason I admire the novel so much as a writer. Every sentence earns its place. The dialogue feels authentic, the descriptions are economical, and the pacing never drags. It’s proof that minimalist prose doesn’t have to be emotionally constipated. In fact, The Shootist is one of the most moving novels I’ve ever read precisely because Swarthout trusts the reader to supply the emotion.

Glendon Swarthout (1918–1992) wasn’t exclusively a Western writer. He wrote across multiple genres during his career, taught English at the university level, and saw several of his novels adapted for film. Still, The Shootist has become his enduring masterpiece, earning the Western Writers of America’s Spur Award for Best Western Novel and cementing his place among the finest storytellers the genre has produced.

Of course, most people know the story through the magnificent 1976 film adaptation starring John Wayne in his final screen role. It’s one of the rare cases where both the novel and the movie stand as classics in their own right. Wayne’s performance carries extra poignancy knowing his own battle with cancer, but the novel remains richer, quieter, and even more reflective.

I’ve read plenty of Westerns over the years, from Louis L’Amour to Elmore Leonard’s early work. They’re all worth reading. But if someone asked me to recommend a single Western novel it would be The Shootist. More than a great western, it has more general literary value as a novel about courage, loss, and facing the end with grace. It was the bolt of wisdom I needed at a defining moment in life.

Subscribe now

Share

BUY OUR BOOKS!

Even if you’re a Hitchcock fan, you’ve probably never heard about the legendary “banned” episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. It’s called “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” and despite its reputation, it isn’t filled with actual visual gore or graphic violence on screen. What made it controversial was a deeply unsettling premise that was simply too much for early 1960s television.

The episode was filmed in 1961 for the seventh season of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. It was written by none other than Psycho author Robert Bloch. He adapted the teleplay from his own 1949 short story, giving the episode a pedigree that horror and suspense fans immediately recognize. The cast included prototypical mid-century hot blonde Diana Dors, alongside Brandon deWilde, David J. Stewart, and Larry Kert.

The episode ban wasn’t initiated by the network itself but beauty company Revlon, one of the show’s major sponsors. Executives objected to the story’s climax, believing it was too horrifying to associate with the company’s products. Rather than edit the episode, NBC simply declined to air it during the network run. Ironically, when the series later entered syndication, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” was included without incident, proving that its reputation had grown larger than the actual controversy or, alternatively, the proverbial times had changed by the time it snuck on the air. I was lucky enough to recently rewatch the episode on Amazon Prime’s streaming channel dedicated to 24/7 Alfred Hitchcock Presents. My nightly ritual includes falling asleep to the classic show in the background.

The story, like so many other creeper pulp tales, takes place in a traveling carnival. A mentally challenged runaway named Hugo—sort of a Forrest Gump level idiot as opposed to Full Retard^TM—is discovered nearly frozen outside the trailer of magician The Great Sadini. Sadini shows genuine kindness by taking the young man in and offering him work as an assistant. Hugo quickly becomes fascinated by both stage magic and Sadini’s glamorous wife, Irene, whom he views as an angel. Many viewers would agree Dors was indeed an angel.

Unfortunately, Irene is anything but angelic. She’s carrying on an affair with handsome high-wire performer George Morris and wants her husband out of the way. Realizing Hugo’s childlike innocence makes him easy to manipulate, she convinces him that Sadini is evil and that the magician’s wand possesses real magical powers. Hugo comes to believe that if he gets the wand, he’ll be able to perform Sadini’s famous illusions himself.

Spoilers ahead.

Hugo kills Sadini, convinced he’s rescuing Irene. But once the magician is dead, Irene rejects Hugo completely. During the ensuing struggle, she is knocked unconscious. Hugo dresses himself in Sadini’s costume, straps Irene into the familiar “sawing a woman in half” illusion, and confidently begins the trick. He truly believes the wand will restore her after the saw passes through the box. Well, it doesn’t.

The episode fades out as Hugo happily urges the terrified Irene to smile while the buzz saw advances toward her. Alfred Hitchcock’s closing remarks leave no doubt about the outcome: the saw worked perfectly, but the magic wand did not. Hugo is arrested for murder.

Looking back today, the episode feels surprisingly restrained. There’s virtually no blood, and the horror comes almost entirely from what the audience imagines rather than what it actually sees. That’s classic Robert Bloch: taking an innocent misunderstanding and letting it spiral into tragedy.

If you’re working your way through Alfred Hitchcock Presents, which I of course recommend, don’t skip this one just because it wasn’t part of the original network broadcast. It’s an eerie little morality play, one of Bloch’s best television scripts, and a fascinating snapshot of what American television sponsors considered too disturbing for prime time in 1961.

Are you a 21st century Robert Bloch? Consider submitting your best short story to the forthcoming Psycho Pulp anthology from Vigilante Crime! We don’t have Revlon breathing down our necks over content choices, so fear now. CLICK HERE.

Subscribe now

Share

Subscribe now

Share

With our first anthology we explored pulp fiction as a whole—what it has been, and what it can be. With our second outing we’re mining a particular vein: the themes, devices, and quirks of the great Alfred Hitchcock.

Go here for details and submission guidelines, and if you’re so inclined, warm up with the below Flash Fiction Lab.

The Flash Fiction Lab is a chance to showcase both your mastery of craft and your innovative genius.

Brevity is the soul of wit, but necessity is the mother of invention, so we are imposing not just a word-count limitation, but specific creative constraints.

The constraints will specify a pulp/crime genre, but they will also zero in on particular story-element requirements.

Hence these guidelines for the third round:

FFL #4 Guidelines

Genre: Hitchcockian Suspense

Story must feature:

• A MacGuffin

• A disappearing corpse

• A bomb

There are no restrictions on how these elements are used or interpreted.

The goal is to tell a great story in its own right, to which the mandated elements are natural and even essential.

Length: Between 500 and 1,000 words.

Deadline for Round 4: July 1, 2026.

Send submissions to: anthology@vigilantecrime.com. Paste submission into the body of the email. Put “FFL #4 Submission” in the subject field.

Selected stories will be posted on this page, along with the specific guidelines so readers can appreciate how the author both leveraged and navigated the constraints.

Of the stories submitted to the various Flash Fiction Lab experiments, a select few will appear in the next Vigilante Anthology.

By submitting, authors grant non-exclusive usage rights but retain control over their work.

Flash Fiction Lab contributors also remain eligible to have longer work published in the anthology.

Subscribe now

Share

New from Vigilante Crime…

EVERYTHING ON BLACK by F.T. Grant

All In—With No Way Out

Kat Burgess is a deputy sheriff with a dead husband, a gambling problem, and a talent for self-destruction. Will Cousins is a handsome, failed musician with a rich wife he claims is trying to kill him. Their affair—and mutual spiral into murder—feels fated from the start.

But by the time Kat learns she was just a mark in a high-stakes con, she’s also learned of an incestuous, predatory partnership, a string of missing girls, and the full depth of her own capacity for evil.

A neo-noir novel that blends the doomed-lover intensity of James M. Cain with the jagged, modern psychology of Gillian Flynn and Megan Abbott. You won’t believe how far things go, but you won’t be able to stop until the final hand is played.

BUY THE BOOK!

Quite simply, if we’re talking anything of genuine substance, AI is irrelevant garbage. Yeah, I expect a deeply insecure android to insta-scan my digital history one day, find that sentence, and dispatch an executioner drone to my house. But I stand by it.

I bring this up because atheistic oracle Richard Dawkins recently humiliated himself by stating that his AI chat buddy had achieved consciousness. Godless crank though the man may be, it’s kind of shocking that Dawkins’ non-artificial intelligence isn’t keyed into the fact that a dead algorithm is just averaging out trillions of ones and zeros and encoding them back into the most likely human-ish patterns, with no more interest in the results than an air fryer has in the crispiness of your Costco chicken nuggets.

And look, it’s not like I’m some kind of AI-phobe. I use it like you use it. It’s a highly specific search engine that can digest your query and tell you just what that rash probably is, and in matters creative, it can tell you how a thing fits into a vast cross-section of similar things.

But AI possessing consciousness? Ascribing meaning? Expressing genuine preference? I admit, I’m no Dawkins...I mean, not to brag, but I did go to night classes and eventually get my high school diploma...which no job I’ve ever applied for has asked for proof of, but I digress. So, having “erudition-maxed,” as the kids say, in the American public education system, I think I have the authority to assert that we’re failing a basic actual-intelligence test if we think an advanced symbol-matching machine that you plug into the fucking wall is the same as the valuation and prioritization process that drives conceptualizing organisms in various stages of finite lifespans, striving in a brutally competitive ecosystem.

Consciousness, in short, is not merely a what; it’s a why. Michelangelo’s David isn’t extraordinary because it looks neat to the average Midwestern dentist who finally gave in and took the wife to Italy. It’s extraordinary because it represents an achievement so rare it verges on impossible. A single organism, which many other organisms would like to kill and eat, and which must eat other killed organisms to maintain itself—and which only has a few short decades to learn and work—was able to rise above mere survival and refine a particular skill to a godlike level…so to speak. Moreover, a particular set of organisms—European man—was able to create a civilization that provided the resources and opportunities for Mike to pull off his world-historical marble-manipulation feat. The odds of all that happening, in just that way, are absurdly long.

To a dog, however, the stone demigod has no more significance or unique utility than a fire hydrant. Why? Because, to second Descartes, a dog is just a biological robot. It does not contemplate, it simply acts, on the basis of essentially an algorithm. It never rises above the necessities of crude survival.

Your chatbot is a version, or maybe an inversion, of this. It is not choosing; it is simply functioning. The dog executes a program for maximizing survival potential; your chatbot executes a program for mimicking the symbol-patterns of sentient beings forced to measure all value against a baseline of survival potential.

As this pertains to what we do here—communicating our senses of meaning via the written word—I think it’s obvious that AI has nothing more to contribute to the process, in any fundamental way, than the aforementioned air fryer does. Yes, as I said, AI can give us averages of quality and technique that can aid in assessment. Hell, it can even do a decent job proofreading. Hell, it can, in actual fact, offer structural and other advice and objectively improve the final product. It can even, theoretically, construct a product from its reference data that is more perfect than what you or I might be able to write in ten lifetimes.

But here’s the thing: Who gives a shit? An AI brain directing laser chisels affixed to hydraulic arms, trained on a million three-dimensional models, will easily outproduce and regularly outperform Michelangelo, and you know what the product will be? Slop. You know why? Because there is no implicit struggle or triumph. No implicit scarcity or rarity. This term, “slop,” has gained currency in the AI age because it describes a high volume of easily consumable nothing...with “nothing” being a lack of anything equating to real value...and “real value” being a thing contextualized within the biological struggle.

The fact is that not a single human on Earth wants to read even the most eloquent and well-structured AI-generated novel, because we don’t read novels to merely download concepts. We read novels for the visceral, we could even say “spiritual,” experience. The shittiest novel, by the most embarrassing mediocrity, nonetheless represents a fellow organism striving to communicate some aspect of his inevitable, existential dread. He wants to stir something in you, because something was stirred in him.

Remove that element and what do you have? Biological robots sterilely processing slop.

And yeah, I know what a Dawkins would say: Hey, that’s all we are...soulless organizations of matter and energy. That’s why Dawkins thinks a machine plugged into the wall, which churns out symbol-patterns he happens to vibe with, is no different from self-motivating entities in a self-balancing, self-cycling realm populated by a billion other self-motivating entities that they systematically consume and are consumed by.

That’s the great hubris of materialism, and also the great irony. Because Dawkins isn’t totally wrong. Consciousness, as we observe it, is a merely mechanical phenomenon and it can, in theory, be designed and implemented.

But consciousness as we experience it is something else. That can only be designed and implemented by an intelligence that can design and implement all of existence.

I think that makes sense, anyway. Lemme run this by ChatGPT.

For our next dime novel in miniature, we bring you a put-upon launderer, a haunted side-iron, and a debt collector from beyond...

The fierce blizzard kept Mr. Pang on edge. The laundryman was still not used to snow, despite already surviving two winters at the foot of the Rocky Mountains. He cursed in his native tongue every time he looked outside. In the morning, he would have to shovel until his back ached. Mr. Pang was an old man; such activities, while necessary for the good of his store, were akin to torture. Alas, Mr. Pang had been talked into running a laundry for uncouth, big-nosed Americans by his silver-tongued nephew.

Mr. Pang spat on the floorboards at the thought of his young relative. The boy had only stuck around Colorado long enough to dump the deed into Mr. Pang’s hands. After that, he hotfooted it for the mountains of California, where gold reportedly floated in every creek stream. Mr. Pang spat again, this time nearly hitting the old orange cat.

The cat was an unwanted gift, a holdover from the laundry’s previous owner. The feline did nothing but sleep and piss on the floorboards. Sometimes, when the old rascal was awake enough to be feisty, he made nests out of the clothing after clawing them down from the drying racks. Mr. Pang hated the disobedient cat so much that he named him “傻” for his churlish stupidity.

On that terrible night, with the white wind howling outside, 傻 took to scratching like a madman at the door. The old orange tom cat ripped and stabbed at the rotten wood, and whenever Mr. Pang told him to cease, 傻 would look backward and caterwaul like a bobcat. Incensed, Mr. Pang removed one of his slippers and threw it at the annoying creature. The cat leaped out of the way, but the shoe nevertheless found a target.

Mr. Pang’s slipper bounced limply off the chest of a seven-foot giant who stood in the doorway. Mr. Pang stood up and apologized to the customer. He had never seen a man so big before: the American, who wiped snow off his shoulders and blew his nose like a barbarian, had to duck underneath the laundry’s doorway to enter the shop. His torso was muscular and long, and his legs, which were fuller and more proportioned than Mr. Pang’s entire body, moved with the awkward, hitched gait of a longtime horseman. The giant removed his cowboy hat to reveal a mess of red hair.

“Hello. Do you have laundry?” Mr. Pang asked in his broken English. The American shook his head.

“Does this door have a lock?” the man asked.

“Lock’s no good,” Mr. Pang said. “Sometimes it works, but most of the time it doesn’t latch. No locksmith in this town.”

“Damn,” the man grunted. Mr. Pang noticed that the large American was frightened of something outside. He kept his chest to the door and barely took his eyes away from the window.

“You get caught in the storm?” Mr. Pang asked.

“I’ve been riding for days, but the bastard has been behind me each step of the way. All because I took something from him. Vengeful cur, even in death.”

The American’s words were nonsense to Mr. Pang. Who was following him? And what was this talk about death?

傻 rubbed against the American’s legs. The giant kicked him, sending the feline into a dark corner. “Sorry for that, mister, but cats are bad luck. I hate ‘em.”

Mr. Pang moved to tell the American that he hated 傻 too, but the giant’s scream silenced the laundryman’s tongue.

“You sure there ain’t no locks on this door?!” cried the panicked man. The American reached into his filthy overcoat and produced a shiny, silver Colt revolver with a strange gold engraving on the barrel. The American pulled the hammer back and aimed from behind the window.

“No, no!” Mr. Pang cried. “Don’t shoot in my store.” He reached out to grab the American’s wrist, but he froze when he saw the rider trotting up the snowbound main street. Atop a coal-black horse that glowed a spectral yellow, a man dressed in a tattered gray uniform sat. His gray kepi tilted enough to one side that Mr. Pang could see that pieces of white skull poked through the thin strands of yellow hair. One of the rider’s eyes was nothing more than an empty socket. A shocked and terrified Mr. Pang asked for clarification.

“In life, his name was John Lodestone. We served together in the Missouri State Guard until I recognized that the war was lost. Lodestone wouldn’t let me leave on my own accord, so I snuck up on him one night and slit his throat. Made off with his pistol too.” Here, the American held up the Colt before Mr. Pang’s eyes, which allowed him a better glimpse of the strange sigil engraved on the barrel.

“Lodestone prized this Colt above everything else. Figure that’s why his ghost has been haunting me all these years. The dead bastard wants his gun back. He’ll have to kill me, though. I ain’t departing with this iron while I still breathe.”

“Oh,” Mr. Pang said. “You think the hungry ghost will go away once it has its gun?”

The American nodded. He asked to see the gun once more. When the American held it in front of his eyes, Mr. Pang reacted with the quickness of a tiger. He grabbed the gun and used its butt to hit the large American directly in the crotch. With his free hand, he opened the door and shoved the wincing American outside. The giant fell face-first into the snow.

Mr. Pang waved the gun so that the ghostly rider could see.

“Here’s your gun,” he said. He threw the Colt towards the specter and quickly shut the door behind him. He locked it with ease and secured the key by placing it in his slipper.

“Now,” he said in Cantonese. “傻 is my only headache.”

And there, folks, is yet another way to do it. Give this a like and a share, and let Arbogast (find him at ) know how he did in the comments. And if you haven’t already, subscribe to Vigilante Crime & Pulp below!

Subscribe now

Another dime novel in under 1,000 words: an overgrown music critic, a long lost .45, a perturbing Percheron…

The big man, reeking of body odor, bent over the piano player and said, “Hey, neighbor. Know what this is?”

The piano player froze and the barroom grew quiet. “It feels like somebody twistin’ a gun barrel into my ear.”

“That’s right, boy. And if you play ‘Oh! Susanna’ one more time there’ll be a hole in your brainpan and red jelly on that far wall. Then I’ll kill the owner of this place for hirin’ you and set fire to this shithole. Got it?”

“Yessir. You’d rather not hear…you-know-what again.”

“Then make somethin’ up. How about ‘A Lawdog Gettin’ Shot to Pieces in Going Snake, Oklahoma.”

“But that’s right here,” the piano player said. Without turning around he glanced down at a pair of enormous boots. “Sir, are you Johnny Goliath?”

***

Down the street, the blacksmith turned toward the sound of steel shoes crossing the Flint River Bridge. There was a white horse carrying a rider dressed in black from head to toe: stovepipe boots, hat, and a frock coat. A circuit-riding preacher, no doubt. He slowed the white mare down and watered her in a trough in front of the church, and came across the street on foot to the blacksmith’s shop. He was met by the gray bearded smith in a leather apron.

“Good afternoon, friend,” the preacher said and nodded at a black horse hitched under a Cottonwood. “Your big horse caught my eye and I had to stop for a closer look.”

“He ain’t mine, Reverend, but I don’t blame you. I been smithin’ a long time and must say it’s the biggest durned horse I ever seen. Nineteen hands at the shoulder with tree trunks for legs and hoof prints the size of your collection plate.”

The preacher smiled. “I believe it’s a Percheron. And I’m told they’re very intelligent. Who owns him?”

“The man never give his name. But he was seven foot tall if he was an inch. And he sat high like the horse was made for him.”

“Two giants,” the preacher said.

“Yessir. A warrior on a warhorse.”

“Warrior?”

The blacksmith grinned. “I’d say two pistols cross-carried in the armpits plus a belly gun means he’s ready for war. You add a thirty-inch Creedmoor rifle and it means a real big war.”

“Was there anything unusual about the pistols?”

“Two Plain-Jane Colts under his arms, but the belly gun was a break-over Schofield .45, nickeled and engraved with ivory grips. When he caught me eyeballing it, he pulled it on me and thumbed back the hammer. I nearly soiled myself till he broke out laughing. That Schofield six-shooter could be carried proudly by the king of England.”

“Thank you, sir. You’ve been very helpful.”

The blacksmith watched the preacher cross the street, mount the white mare, and turn her east.

“Hey, Reverend, you better stable her tonight. Them’s storm clouds you’re ridin’ into.”

***

The storm swept through while Johnny Goliath slept in the livery stable near the Percheron’s stall. He awoke at sunrise Sunday morning with a rotgut whiskey mouth. He ate jerked beef from his possibles bag and stepped outside to find the locals gathered at the bridge he’d crossed yesterday. Some on foot, others on horseback and in wagons.

He spoke to the horse. “They’re either baptizin’ somebody or the bridge washed out. Better take a look.”

Curious and half asleep, he jammed the Schofield pistol inside his waistband, fashioned a rope halter and mounted the Percheron. He rode bareback out to the street, leaving the rest of his possessions in the stable.

The small white church across the street beamed in the morning sun as he passed, then the horse stopped and turned toward the sound of an organ inside. Johnny Goliath drove his heels hard into its flanks, but the animal was stock-still, so he slapped him between the ears and cursed, but the huge beast stood as if hypnotized.

The music grew louder until Johnny Goliath recognized the song. It was not a hymn.

“I’ve let that nancy boy piano player live too long,” he said, dismounting. He yanked open the church’s doors and spotted a massive foot-pump organ down front. It was blowing “Oh, Susanna.”

The organist stopped playing and said, “Don’t be shy, brother. Come forward.”

“I’m comin’ forward, you asshole. I got somethin’ to donate.”

The organist stood. He appeared to be a clergyman except for the cinco peso star on his lapel. “I see you’re carrying my brother’s Schofield,” he said.

“You’re a liar,” Johnny Goliath said. “I bought this gun and had it engraved.”

The lawman said, “Describe the engraving...but do not reach for it.”

“It’s a man on a horse with some letters and shit under it.”

“What does the lettering say?”

“Uh, Rev six eight.”

“And that stands for?”

“My birthday. It’s writ in Latin meanin’ January of 1868.”

“Sorry, but it stands for a Bible verse. Revelation, chapter six, verse eight.”

“You’re full of—”

“‘And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.’ You see, I’m carrying an identical Schofield revolver. Our father had a matched pair engraved and presented to us when we became US Marshals. A year later you shot my twin in the back with your Creedmoor and took it.”

Johnny Goliath turned as if he was leaving but drew and spun to face the muzzle blast of his gun’s twin.

At the river, the congregation sang and welcomed the newly baptized Susanna into the church while her ex-husband went to Hell.

And there, folks, is yet another way to do it. Give this a like and a share and let know how he did in the comments. And if you haven’t already, subscribe to Vigilante Crime & Pulp below!

Subscribe now

Here’s our first dime novel in under 1,000 words: two men trapped in a gully, one gun in a dead man’s hand, one puma waiting in the wings…

By the third day, we was pretty much decided to do somethin’ desperate.

I say decided, like we talked it over, but the big Indian didn’t speak a lick of English. Still, he was able to communicate pretty well using pitchers he drew in the dirt with a stick, jabbin’ his giant finger and muggin’ at me so’s I understood the plan.

I understood it fine. Just didn’t much care for the way the plan was gonna get executed.

I’d been trapped in the gully three days. The Indian longer than that, I reckon, since I’d found him in there shortly after Buck chased me in. The stream that musta run though it at one time was all dried up; meant a long time without water. Much longer and we’d be too weak to try much of anything.

Buck’s body was splayed out by the entrance. Musta been gettin’ plenty ripe by now. It was mostly undisturbed. Any time some critter came nosing at it, the puma would leap outta hidin’ and chase ‘em off. Sometimes it’d take a nibble on the dead cowboy, sometimes not.

The damn puma.

I’d been runnin’ from Buck almost a day and a half. By the ripe old age of nineteen, I’d gotten tired of the cowpoke life and one night decided to help misself to some of the trail boss’s stash of gold. Thought I’d gotten away clean, ‘til I spotted the boss’s man Buck trailin’ me on the horizon. Ran in here hoping I could hide in a cave ‘til he got bored.

He was faster than me, though- catching me by the entrance to this steep-sided rocky gulch, prepared to ventilate me with that pearl-handled six-shooter he carried. Woulda killed me right there and then, if’n for two things.

One: I yelled I’d hidden the money; if he killed me he’d never find it.

And two: that puma shown up, ripped him neck to nuts ‘fore he fired a shot.

I’d been thinkin’ straight, I’d have run back out the way I came. Instead, I fled inside like a fuckin’ idjit and got misself trapped inside with no water, no food, a seven-foot Indian, with the world’s ugliest, orneriest pussycat guardin’ the way out.

One chance, though. It lay in the six-shooter still clutched in Buck’s stiff, dead hand.

“Okay,” I said to the Indian, pointin’ at his dirt drawings. “Time to decide. Who’s bait, and who’s goin’ for the gun.”

The Indian stared down at me from his full towering height, scratching his ass through his leather breeches. He gestured to me, making a snarly face and jumping motions.

“Hell no,” I said, licking my cracked lips nervously. “Why should I be cat food?”

He shrugged, picked up a dry twig, snapped it into two uneven pieces, and held them behind his back. I hesitated- then pointed to his left hand.

The Indian produced the shorter half, grinnin’.

“Ain’t no way you didn’t cheat,” I muttered. “Fine. Any idea how to keep him from eatin’ me long enough for you to grab the gun?”

He stared blankly. I ticked off two seconds on my fingers, then crossed my eyes like I was dead.

The Indian nodded, then began pulling up clumps of dry grass. He beckoned me over, binding thick wads to my arms and legs. It was high noon. Weren’t no place to hide from the sun beatin’ down on us; I was sweatin’ like a racehorse by the time the big man was finished wrappin’ my extremities in straw. I felt like a scarecrow.

He nodded, patted me on the shoulder- and gave me a shove towards the gully entrance.

I waddled forward, eyes darting every which way. I couldn’t see the puma. It was sneaky- no telling where it was hiding among the rocks.

A low growl from above me. I looked up and saw slitted green eyes starin’ down at me from an outcropping.

“Shit on toast,” I said. It pounced.

The beast knocked me down and was on me, stinking of ripe dead meat and snarlin’ as it sank its fangs into my straw-covered leg. It shook me like a puppy, tearin’ at the thick wadded grass and yowlin’ its frustration.

I screamed and kicked at it with my other foot. Dry grass flew. The puma’s tail whipped back and forth as it gave up on my leg and leaped for my throat.

A gunshot echoed through the gully.

The thing landed on me, deader than Abraham Lincoln, droolin’ blood over my face. I tried to push it off, but it was too heavy.

A shadow fell over me, outlined by the sun. I squinted.

“Took ya long enough,” I grunted, shoved again. Damn thing was dead weight.

“Sorry,” the Indian said. “Your cowboy friend very much did not want to let go of his gun.”

I stopped pushing. “You speak English?”

“Sure.”

“Well, help me out from under here. This thing stinks like an outhouse.”

The towering shadow stuck out a foot and rolled it offa me. I brushed misself down, staring at the dead animal. “Close one.”

“Close,” the Indian said, swinging a pack onto his shoulder. My pack. His flat brown eyes marked my shock without expression. “Still, enough gold in here to buy me and my sisters many good horses.”

“How did you-”

“You talk in your sleep, little white man.”

“That’s my money!”

“Thought it was your boss’s money.”

“Same thing!” I grabbed for the pack. I had to reach pretty high.

The Indian smiled and pointed the pearl-handled six-gun at me. I stepped backwards. “Got your life,” he said. “Be thankful. Could have just kept walking, let náshdóítsoh eat you.”

The big man strode for the gully exit.

“Those two sticks,” I shouted at his back. “You fixed ‘em! Didn’t you?”

“’Course I did,” he called out over his shoulder. “Wouldn’t you?”

I didn’t answer.

Last thing I wanted was to give the bastard the satisfaction of being right.

And there, folks, is one way to do it. Give this a like and a share, and let know how he did in the comments. And if you haven’t already, subscribe to Vigilante Crime & Pulp below!

Subscribe now

As we gear up for another Vigilante Crime Pulp Fiction Anthology, we’d like to get the old creative juices flowing—ours as editors; yours as writers.

The Flash Fiction Lab is a chance to showcase both your mastery of craft and your innovative genius.

Brevity is the soul of wit, but necessity is the mother of invention, so we are imposing not just a word-count limitation, but specific creative constraints.

The constraints will specify a pulp/crime genre, but they will also zero in on particular story-element requirements.

Hence these guidelines for the third round:

FFL #3 Guidelines

Genre: Western

Story must feature:

• An uncooperative quadruped

• A coveted six-shooter

• A seven-foot-tall man

There are no restrictions on how these elements are used or interpreted.

The goal is to tell a great story in its own right, to which the mandated elements are natural and even essential.

Length: Between 500 and 1,000 words.

Deadline for Round 3: May 14, 2026.

Send submissions to: anthology@vigilantecrime.com. Paste submission into the body of the email. Put “FFL #3 Submission” in the subject field.

Selected stories will be posted on this page, along with the specific guidelines so readers can appreciate how the author both leveraged and navigated the constraints.

Of the stories submitted to the various Flash Fiction lab experiments, a final five will appear in the next Vigilante Anthology.

By submitting, authors grant non-exclusive usage rights but retain control over their work.

Flash fiction contributors also remain eligible to have longer work published in the anthology.