Sunday, February 23, 2014

Interview with Chris Rhatigan, editor of All Due Respect - February 23, 2014


Please welcome Chris Rhatigan to The Qwillery. Chris is one of the editors of All Due Respect.


Design by Eric Beetner




TQ:  Welcome to The Qwillery. What is All Due Respect?

Chris:  All Due Respect is a quarterly crime fiction and non-fiction magazine. We tend toward noir/hardboiled, toward stories about criminals from the perspective of criminals. We always feature one author who we consider to be an important contributor to the genre. Our first featured author was Chris F. Holm.



TQ:  You are one of the editors of All Due Respect. Tell us a bit about yourself.

Chris:  I've run ADR for the last two years and edited the publication's anthology. I'm also manuscript editor for Full Dark City Press. I've written crime fiction for a number of years now as well. I mostly write short stories, though I also wrote a novella, The Kind of Friends Who Murder Each Other. When I'm not writing, I'm a history teacher at a boarding school in the Himalayan Mountains in northern India.



TQ:  What is the general process to put together an issue of All Due Respect?

Chris:  First, Associate Editor Mike Monson and I sort through all the submissions. This is a tremendous amount of work--most of which Mike does. Then we reject most of the stories and keep around about a dozen. We read them again and discuss what we think. Any story that we do eventually accept Mike and I have read at least twice. From there, we edit the stories and work with the authors on making each story sing. Depending on the story, edits range from a couple of proofreading issues to adding/removing scenes/characters/plot developments. I assemble all the stories into a document, and Mike and I read it again. Then we have Eric Beetner on cover design and JW Manus on formatting. Then we read it again before publishing the damn thing. (Any story we've published I've typically read five times.)

That doesn't even mention promotion, contracts, seeking reviews, assembling bios, keeping up the website, sending out work for awards, finding the money to publish it, and whatever the hell else pops up. Luckily I find publishing kick-ass crime stories really rewarding so it's all worth it.



TQ:  Which genres of stories are you looking for for All Due Respect?

Chris:  I sort of got into it earlier, but I'll expand on that. We're looking for: pulpy, lots of action, mostly about bad (but complex) people. Strong dialogue is always a plus. We like authors like Lawrence Block, Patricia Highsmith, Ken Bruen, Allan Guthrie, Megan Abbott, Eddie Higgins, and Jim Thompson. (We like plenty of authors beside that list, but that should give you a feel for what we do.) We also want to publish stories by writers with a strong voice.



TQ:  What is the process for choosing stores for each issue?

Chris:  I have a strong internal sense of what's a good story for ADR. Most the stories we receive are good, but not good for ADR. We don't tend to publish mysteries or police procedurals or PI stories. (Unless they're about, say, dirty cops or corrupt PIs.) From the small portion of subs that are both good and good for ADR, it comes down to what stories Mike and I like, what we're passionate about. If you can write compelling crime fiction outside of the standard fare (for example, we see plenty of stories about meth), even better.



TQ:  What can readers expect to find in the most recent issue of All Due Respect and when will the next issue be out?

Chris:  The next issue is out late February. Our featured author is thriller writer Owen Laukkanen, who has a hell of a story about deep sea fishing, an interview, and a non-fiction piece about how his story came to be. We also have a killer slate of other stories from Joseph Rubas, Scott Adlerberg, CS DeWildt, Eric Beetner, Liam Sweeny, and David Siddall.



TQ:  It says on the website that "we're reviewing every single freakin' book in legendary publisher Hard Case Crime's catalogue." Who is Hard Case Crime and how many books did they publish?

Chris:  I think they've published more than 90 books. Hard Case is THE place for modern crime fiction. They're very consistent. For the uninitiated, I would say The Max by Ken Bruen and Jason Starr is a good intro. They also just published a lost novel of James Cain's, The Cocktail Waitress. All their books have these wonderfully colorful and pulpy covers. They harken back to the days when 200-page paperbacks ruled the shelves, and we love them for it.



TQ:  Thank you for joining us at The Qwillery.

Chris:  Thank you, Sally!





The Anthology

All Due Respect: The Anthology
Christ Rhatigan, editor
Full Dark City Press, January 29, 2013
eBook, 264 pages
Trade Paperback (February 19, 2013)

Cover by Eric Beetner
In 2010 the online crime fiction journal All Due Respect blasted its way across the internet leaving a trail of blood and mayhem. Written by some of the best up and coming authors on the crime fiction scene, the stories inside this volume will leave you breathless. A few of them may even make you sick to your stomach and then double check all your doors and windows before you go to sleep. These pages are filled with thugs, grifters, dope dealers, and killers who make no apologies about who they are or what they do. All Due Respect is about crime, not the solving of crime, not the bemoaning of crime, just the bad things that bad people do. So pull up a chair, grab a drink, and keep an eye on that guy in the corner as you read All Due Respect.

Highlighting lowlifes in hardboiled homilies - these stories stick it in and break it off. Tender as a brick, subtle as a Molotov Cocktail. - Jedidiah Ayres author of Fierce Bitches.

ALL DUE RESPECT is the sort of anthology you dole out to yourself piecemeal. You read "Even Sven" and then shake your head, looking off into the distance, trying to make sure you start breathing again. You read Matt Funk and Patti Abbott the way you eat a good meal in that restaurant you go to for your anniversary. You savor the characters, the plot undertones. When a Joe Clifford character says that something "tastes like a cat's ass," you nod that, yeah, that character probably has that experience. Full of great stories from David Cranmer, Thomas Brown, Fiona Johnson, Ryan Sayles and more, ALL DUE RESPECT is a book you'll read a story at a time, maybe one a night, like that after-dinner drink you can't put down.
- Steve Weddle, editor, NEEDLE: A Magazine of Noir

ALL DUE RESPECT, the first collection from the legendary website of the same name, founded by Alec Cizak and run by Chris Rhatigan, is full of bars and beatings, guns and grifters, not necessarily the kind of crime to cozy up with by the fire, unless it's one of those burning cars on the side of the road.

Stand-outs include the opener "Day Tripper," where Clifford's tight descriptions had me believing every word out of his day laborer's mouth as he tried to stay sober at a dead-end job full of temptations.

Mike Toomey's dialogue-heavy "Even Sven" flew by, like a story talking your ear off in the passenger's seat of your car. Erin
Cole has some fun with slow-mo, doing Tobias Wolfe "Bullet In The Head"-like tricks with the gunshots in "7 Seconds."

Nigel Bird's "Hoodwinked" has a great staccato style that reads like a brutal telegraph.

Garnett Elliot's "Disability, Inc." might be my favorite, his style always reminding me of Richard Bachman, but twice as mean, (which makes him, what, three times meaner than King?)

Christopher Grant gives us a little chocolate kiss with "Deviation Jones: A Trilogy,"
Sayles follows an addict through her day in "Formula and Meth," showing us that the ladies can live down there in the gutters with the boys and suffer the same comeuppance,

C.J. Edward's "Peeper" is doing worse than peeping, to animal and human alike.

And, holy crap, Richard Godwin with his special brand of perverse, with talking parrots and threats of talking orifices that reach almost Naked Lunch levels of hilarity.

Matt Funk gives us just one perfect scene in "His Girl," reminding us never to take your eyes off the girl,

and David Cranmer closes the show, reinforcing what I already believed - the only time anyone can tolerate magicians is in crime fiction, where they never fake those tricks. All of these were good fast reads. Highly recommended. - David James Keaton, author of FISH BITES COP! Stories To Bash Authorities

You can also pick up each issue of All Due Respect at Amazon (Issue 1), Barnes and Noble (Issue 1) and Books-A-Million (Issue 1).


Issue 2 is coming in late February!

Cover art by Eric Beetner
Coming in late February: Issue 2, featuring author Owen Laukkanen. If you don't know him yet, check out The Professionals or Criminal Enterprise. They're everything you could ask for in a dark thriller. He also has a book coming soon titled Kill Fee.

Our stellar lineup includes some very nasty stories from Scott Adlerberg, Joseph Rubas, Eric Beetner, C.S. DeWildt, Liam Sweeny, and David Siddall.


Visit All Due Respect at the website. If you'd like to submit to All Due Respect you can find their submission guidelines at the website here.


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