From 1996 thru 2010 I devoted much of my life to interviewing the perpetrators of, witnesses to and targets of violence. I have written four thematic books based on this work: The Fighting Edge; The Logic of Steel; The Logic of Force; and When You’re Food.
The book market has slowed and it takes a long time to get this stuff to the public in hardcopy form. Paladin is currently considering their option on When You’re Food. Since I believe this is important information and would like to disseminate it in a more timely fashion, I have scrapped the plans for a second series of violence books: Harm City; In Her Faint Shadow; and Crooked Timber. There is also the fact that The Fighting Edge is now out of print and portions need to be rewritten and updated.
This online magazine has been conceived as a means to present all of this material. I live in, study and write about what H. L. Mencken once described as “the ruins of a once great medieval city”. A friend from New York, upon coming to Baltimore for a visit in 2001, described it as a “frightening brownstone ghetto.” I have always just called it “a dump”. However, a far more immersed literary mind has put its own stamp on Baltimore.
In 2000 I boarded the #15 Bus at Overlea Station. I took my seat and noticed the spore of a graffiti artist who had recently worked his magic-marker wonder on behalf of the Kaos Krew on the back of the seat in front of me. His darkly inspired line read “Welcome to Harm City.”
It is now late 2011, and according to the ancient and long-extinct Mayan astronomers we have only 13 months to live. The young man who has become—in the deeper shadows of my pillaged mind—my very own H. L. Mencken [Many dead White men just moaned. Really, I heard them groaning over on my bookshelf.] and his vaunted “krew” have likely gone the way of the condor. His inspiration, his pride for his feared urban habitat, remains to lend a context for my inquiry into the dark side of humanity.
Readers have often asked me how I accessed so many interviews with criminals and victims. I rarely was able to score law enforcement interviews. One of the keys to my success was the ridiculous business card reproduced for posterity below. It really disarmed people and got them interested in speaking with me. I think the key was that the card did not say True Tales of: Victims, Violent Alcoholics, PSTD Head Cases, Criminals &nzc; Rent-a-cops. I once gave this card instead of my last $18 to a gunman who decided that $18 dollars was a small price to pay for the acquisition of his very own biographer. I have immortalized this man as Tavon Price in the Sunset Novels.
