by Nancy Cole Silverman
As president of Sisters in Crime LA, I wanted to take the opportunity to share with Kings River Life a little of what went on behind the scenes with the production of Angel City Beat, SinC LA’s newest anthology. One of my biggest honors is to help authors find a home for their work, and sometimes, that home has been our anthology. Every other year, our local chapter puts together a collection of short stories and encourages our members to submit their work for consideration. But before we announce the theme, we offer our members a short story writers’ class, and this last year, we were thrilled to have Barb Goffman, who was also our anthology’s editor, as our online instructor for our class.
It’s a fun way to kick off the year and an opportunity for our board of directors to select our short story committee, headed by Lynn Varon, to ensure a hands-off approach while allowing the committee to choose a theme and shepherd the project from concept to publication without the board’s interference. The theme for Angel City Beat was the beat of the city, a reporter’s beat, a cop’s beat, the beat of a musical score, or a story’s beat. Whatever the beat, if it was an LA mystery, SinC LA members were invited to submit their stories for consideration.
Our judges were selected from members who volunteered. At one of our in-person meetings, we made a big deal of presenting them with survival baskets put together by Peggy Rothschild, to help maintain their energy as they read through the blind submissions. Fourteen finalists were announced at the end of March, and then all the behind-the-scenes work started to take place. Publishers were queried, Level Best Books accepted our pitch for publication, the cover was designed by Scott Montgomery, our PR and marketing guru, and Naomi Hirahara agreed to write our introduction.
I’m proud of the authors whose works appear on the pages of Angel City Beat. They have created memorable protagonists across the City of Angels with a vast array of locations and occupations, and with Naomi’s permission, I’ve included parts of her introduction here:
The fifteen selected short stories in Angel City Beat have certainly answered SinC LA’s call. There are protagonists with a law-enforcement background, but not your typical men and women in blue. Norman Klein’s police detective in “Crime Doesn’t Play” is from out-of-town, but is called to aid the Beverly Hills Police Department in an investigation of stolen artifacts because of his bookish sensibilities. In Sybil Johnson’s “Fatal Return,” a volunteer must rely on her former experience as a police detective in solving a crime in a library. Amy Kluck in “The Missing Mariachi” explores Boyle Heights and beyond in the case of the kidnapping of a female trumpet player. The beats of music are also covered in Anne-Marie Campbell’s “Settling the Score,” in which the competition to determine the next director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic becomes deadly.
Hollywood is well represented in “Underbelly,” Jacquie Wilver’s tale of warring screenwriters, as well as in Daryl Wood Gerber’s writers’-room mystery “Murder Unjustified,” which also happens to be the name of the television show the characters are working on.
While print journalism has had its challenges in the twenty-first century, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times is featured in both Nancy Cole Silverman’s 1998-set “Byline for Murder” and Kate Mooney’s “Getting Warmer.” Each protagonist has a slightly different newspaper beat, yet for both, the full truth doesn’t make it to their respective investigative stories.
More unusual beats are covered in some of the stories. Ken Funsten, CFA’s “A Dead Line” follows a high school student’s summer gig cold-calling retirees about senior-living packages. Funsten, CFA, also has a second story in the anthology, “What’s Really Unforgettable,” which features a Connecticut-based fund manager who returns to LA to identify a potential client who has been hospitalized. And in Meredith Taylor’s “Death Beat,” observations of a hospice nurse reveal unexpected events in some patients’ final days.
In many of the stories, Southern California’s academic institutions, most notably USC and UCLA, but also Caltech, are mentioned. Academia is the star in Paula Bernstein’s “A Thesis on Murder,” which uses Santa Monica Beach and Westwood as settings.
Los Angeles’s reputation as a culinary mecca is not forgotten in Gail Alexander’s celebration of Italian cuisine in “The Feast of the Seven Fishes.” The region’s constant thirst for water has spurred Jenny Carless to create a dystopian world in “Everything’s Relative,” where people literally fight for this vital rationed resource. And finally, Melinda Loomis’s “Unbeatable” perhaps nails the most LA character of all—a pet psychic who is hired to communicate with a racehorse at the Santa Anita racetrack.
The stories in Angel City Beat are entertaining and imaginative. Their unique sleuths and situations even have potential for becoming the solid foundation for a novel-length work. Sisters in Crime Los Angeles has again fulfilled its mission to encourage members to further develop the craft of writing mysteries. My hope is that publication in this anthology will encourage writers to reach their creative goals and continue to set stories in our wild and wonderful world of greater Los Angeles.
As the president of SinC LA, it’s my honor to represent this group of very talented writers.
SinCLA has an in-person launch for Angel City Beat at Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena on Monday, February 24 at 7 p.m.
You can click here to purchase this book from Amazon.
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