It’s said that no plan survives its first encounter with reality.  For Crimson Streets this has proven to be true.  We conceived Crimson Streets as “an over the top homage to the pulp detective and adventure magazines of the 1930s through 1950s.  Where the detectives are more hard boiled, the dames are leggier, the scientists are madder, and the horrors are more horrible.  Where square jawed heroes fight evil national socialists, hard boiled dicks are betrayed by femme fatales, and the night is filled with murder, street crime, sex, and violence.”

 

To bring all this together, our plan had been to create a meta-fictional framing device.  Crimson Streets would be published not in today’s world, but in a darker, grittier version of the 1930s or 40s. As part of this framing device, we imagined that it was 1939 in a crime filled city, where an unlucky editor named Joe “The Pole” Polaski hammered away at his typewriter putting finishing touches on stories late into the night.  The streets were to be filled with crime, the clubs with mobsters, the jungles with lost cities, and the sewers with monsters.  

That being said, Crimson Streets, the web site, quickly took on a life of its own, and “life” happens.  We are thrilled with the quality of stories that we have received, but the initial surge of submissions did not lend itself to support a complicated framing and back-story.  Additionally, by discarding the framing device it allows us to accept a wider breadth of stories.

We have also faced several familial challenges which have placed Crimson Streets into “station keeping” mode while we deal with these family matters.

In short, we plan to leave things as they are; this just officially acknowledges what we’re already doing.  The framing device, which never really materialized, is gone.

It is our hope that you’ll continue to enjoy stories from The Streets for some time to come.  

We offer our sincere thanks to our readers, writers, and illustrators without whom Crimson Streets would not be possible.  

See you on the Streets,

Janet Carden, Editor
Roger Carden, Publisher