Guest Post written by CS McLean
Crossing genres
Frequently, when I tell people about the plot of my novel, I get a curious reaction. A crime novel with zombies?. Seriously?
The truth is, I never set out to write a crime-horror crossover. To paraphrase Henry Hill from Goodfellas, all I ever wanted to be was a noir crime writer. So how did zombies come creeping into the plot?
My main inspiration comes from the classic hardboiled private eye novels – Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Mickey Spillane and so on. But, the moment that really kick-started my novel was when I read the Sin City series of graphic novels by Frank Miller. Here was a writer that wasn’t bound by the constraints of reality. He was doing whatever he damn well wanted to.
Those stories flipped a switch in my head. It seemed to me that writing graphic novels gave Frank Miller the freedom to bend the rules. He didn’t have to research into police procedures, or consider the true medical effect of a bullet in the gut. He just took the story wherever it suited.
It struck me that the only way I could do the same would be set my novel in a fictional city. Not too far from the world that we live in, but a few blocks down the street from reality. And, as I was thinking that, in came the zombies.
A few people have told me that they don’t read horror, and yet they liked my novel. I’m not surprised. It isn’t a story about zombies. Sure, the undead have a lumbering walk-on part, but they aren’t the main feature of the plot. It’s a noir crime novel, with all the concepts you would expect – corrupt cops, gangsters, kidnapping, murder, and guns. Lots of guns.
Some people think that you can’t be a crime writer if you sidestep outside the realms of pure reality. I don’t agree. I will always argue that my novel is a piece of detective pulp fiction. It just has a few more walking corpses than usual.
Title: They Shoot Corpses, Don’t They?
Author: CS McLean
Genre: Zombie Noir
Published: April 13th 2018
Buy Link: Amazon
Blurb
An original blend of crime fiction and horror – Zombie Noir.
Pat O’Hare is the only (living) private detective in Farrelton, a crime-ridden city still recovering from the ravages of an undead uprising. Pat is hired to find the missing granddaughter of a rich industrialist. But, what starts out as simple enough job turns into a fight for survival as he finds himself pulled into a deadly mystery where nobody can be trusted. Helped only by a trigger happy ex-cop and a washed up boxer with a pathological fear of trees, Pat has to use every trick in the book just to stay alive. Caught between corrupt police, gun-wielding hitmen and a ruthless crime lord, Pat soon learns that the zombies are not the most dangerous creatures in town.
Author Bio
Stuart McLean (aka CS McLean) is a writer currently living in St Albans. He studied Chemistry at the University of Hertfordshire – although, this was back in the days when the Premiership was still called Division One and Hatfield was still a Polytechnic.
He was shortlisted for the first Margery Allingham short story competition, and was twice shortlisted for the Bloody Scotland short story competition.
Stuart was a finalist in the 2016 Bloody Scotland Pitch Perfect competition, in which he pitched his brand of zombie noir to a largely bewildered group of panellists. He was also chosen as one of the 2018 Bloody Scotland Crime in the Spotlight authors, a platform to highlight new and emerging crime writers.
When not writing, Stuart likes to play various musical instruments, all very badly; guitar, ukulele, trumpet and harmonica. But, not at the same time.
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