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Doug Clark: Darkness descends over the Lilac City in pulp mystery magazine
Then I walk the few feet over to the table where Spokane’s man of mystery, Steve Oliver, sits sipping from his own hot, caffeinated beverage.
“I live basically in the past,” answers Oliver to my innocuous question about what’s new. “I have for a long time.”
No figure of speech as it turns out.
Oliver rattles off a list of his favorite TV shows, all reruns of golden moldies that I watched as a kid, like “The Alfred Hitchcock Hour,” “Mr. Lucky” and “Peter Gunn.”
Music?
No Taylor Swift for this guy.
Roaring Twenties hot jazz and 1930s swing. That’s what gets Oliver’s toes tapping.
Books?
Oliver still buries his nose in the gumshoe classics by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.
The good news is that Oliver is a diehard newspaper junkie. The bad news is that none of the newsprint he reads will pad my paycheck.
Oliver’s favorite rags are all deader than Bing Crosby, namely the Spokane Press and Seattle Star, circa early 1900s.
“Spokane was more fun back then,” Oliver says wistfully, adding, “That’s for sure.”
So why did he want to meet with me?
Though tethered to another era, Oliver is trying to sell people on an old-school idea: The Dark City, his quarterly pulp “crime and mystery magazine” that features original fiction from regional writers.
The Dark City’s maiden issue came out last October. It and the January issue can be bought for $3.95 a copy at Auntie’s Bookstore, 402 W. Main Ave. Amazon shows that it can be downloaded on Kindle for $2.99.
And you know what?
Oliver’s magazine is a lot of fun to read.
“Liz Hannigan lowered herself into the Adirondack chair with a sigh, lifted her glass and poured a healthy splash of Jack Daniels over a single ice cube,” reads the first line in “Good Instincts.”
The January edition’s opener, by Barbara Curtis, is about a woman who channels Agatha Christie in an attempt to solve an outbreak of neighborhood burglaries.
“Her generous pour did not go unnoticed by Gerald who sat in the matching chair. …”
“Gerald O’Toole was her cousin’s boy and most of the time they co-existed quite peacefully in a lovely Victorian house overlooking the Spokane River. Liz wondered how she could be a blood relative to someone with about as much animation as a baked potato.”
Dark City tales take me back to the hard-boiled mystery mags that I pawed through in a musty downtown used bookstore after Saturday guitar lessons in the mid-1960s.
Oliver is soliciting manuscripts from area writers. Just Google the phrase “Dark City Mystery Magazine submissions.”
Not just fame awaits those who make the magazine. Oliver also pays authors 25 bucks as an honorarium.
True, that’s a ways from a Powerball jackpot.
But this could be a way for some of you tweet-happy, Internet-addicted souls to find out what real writing is all about.
Oliver has the goods for what it takes to be an editor.
I first met him back in the late 1990s when he was closing Dark City Books, his small mystery bookstore at 111 S. Cedar St.
Before that Oliver authored a series of Spokane-based detective novels that were published by St. Martin’s Press of New York. His highly enjoyable books featured Scott Moody, a cab-driving knight-errant fresh out of a nuthouse.
Oliver based the character on some of his own travails.
He actually spent some time in a mental hospital in the 1970s and then drove a cab in Spokane after his release.
Why was he in a mental institution?
“I was crazy,” he deadpans.
Makes sense.
I hope Dark City catches on. I love the idea of crime stories that use this burg as a backdrop.
“Spokane is too interested in keeping the Kabuki mask on,” says the mystery man. “It’s an interesting place but it’s not all sunsets and roses.”
Doug Clark is a columnist for The Spokesman-Review. He can be reached at (509) 459-5432 or by email at dougc@spokesman.com.