Noir

At left, Lazarus Is Dead by Richard Beard: another of the World Noir books I acquired a couple weeks back.

The production quality of this publisher is quite nice. I like the feel of the books.

Beard is the director of the National Academy of Writing in London, so I look forward to reading the text. He's a dead blog from this summer if you search for him.

I like the title. Lazarus was the fellow raised from the dead by Christ (if you can't remember your Sunday school, I understand.)

Lazarus is also the movement made by some brain dead folks as they expire. If you shoot them in the head, they fall down. Sometimes, after lying motionless for three or four minutes, they'll raise their arms and fold them on their chests.

No, I'm not making it up and it will give you nightmares for twenty years after you've seen it. You shoot somebody and then they start moving their arms, it's pretty scary.  It's super scary when they do it after lying on the ground a while. It has to be a small wound - it can't be a "blow their head off and then they bleed out" wound.

Now, we're crime writers here so we can talk about such things. It is enough reason to go up in calibre if you are doing violence. A .223 is not the round of choice to produce a wound sufficient to prevent this little trick of the dead.

Maybe you can use that in your writing. It'd scare Sam Spade.

I'm off to write. That'd scare Sam a little too.