When police detectives show up at his door, the narrator of “Vertical Blind” realizes a fight he heard the previous night coming from a nearby alley was the sound of a woman screaming for her life, not the usual everyday drunks he is used to. He comes to find out what he heard had been a woman being murdered.
Carl Robinette explores alienation in his latest flash fiction story, “The Night Crew,” which was recently published by Every Day Fiction. In this story the protagonist is attempting to rise out of his own deepening alienation from the world.
The strangeness of 2020 is finally in the past and we are now living through the strangeness of 2021. See what Carl Robinette has been up to in 2020 and get some hints for what he has in store for 2021.
Watch Carl Robinette read his short story "Bystander Boondoggle" which was recently published in Mystery Weekly Magazine's November 2020 issue. This story has all the classic suspense tropes, except the protagonist has no interest in solving anything. He's just a bystander waiting for things to get better.
The bystander is an often overlooked archetype in crime fiction. The exact opposite is true in Carl Robinette’s short story, “Bystander Boondoggle,” which was recently published in Mystery Weekly Magazine. Read and Excerpt from “Bystander Boondoggle”
Daisy Belle is armed with nothing but brass knuckles and a misled sense of justice as she gets to the bottom of nothing. Hold on to your drink and watch Daisy bust open the criminal underbelly of her Southern California beach town as she leaves a trail of empty bottles in her wake.
Carl Robinette explores revenge as a literary concept in his latest work of flash fiction, “Luck & Retribution,” a story published by Mystery Tribune about a hit man who finds the man he’s been hired to kill already circling the drain. It seems Mother Nature has first dibs on revenge in this story.
In “The Hard Rise,” by Carl Robinette, originally published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Hank Garnier is already a small-town hero and the rural press in Los Pinos County is not ready to let go of the past. But when so many of his fellow soldiers were cast out as “baby killers” the last thing Hank Garnier wants is to be called is “war hero.”
It's time to say goodbye to 2019, but before we do, it's always good to reflect on the path we've taken over the last 12 months. Check out what Carl has been up to the past year with fiction, news articles and videos, and keep an eye out for more in 2020.
Carl recently reported on an indigenous people's celebration in Los Angeles for the Los Feliz ledger. Though much of native American history has been erased or mistreated, the article hopes to give local residents a sense of connection to the indigenous history of the land on which they live and help foster a sense of one community.
