It’s hard enough finding a good job, but keeping a bad job is no day at the cinema either. When there’s money missing and you’ve got a target on your back, it just might come down to fisticuffs with your boss. See what happens when the narrator of “Unemployed & On Probation” refuses to inform on his fellow employees.
Watch me read an excerpt from my short story "Nothing Doing" which was published in the June 2020 issue of Mystery Weekly Magazine. Hard to believe it's already been a year since this story came out. This is a great issue of the magazine with a lot of different types of mystery stories.
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.
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.”
In Carl Robinette's debut short story “The Hard Type,” originally published by Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, we meet Hank Garnier. A 14-year old boy in the badlands of rural California during the wild 1960s. Will Hank show us the path of righteousness when his manhood is tested violently, or will he succumb to his own viciousness?
Technology is changing at breakneck speed and it's changing the world around us, or at least it is for some people. For the nameless narrator of this flash fiction story, “8 Big Time Bummers About Buying A New Phone,” mobile technology is for suckers and smartphones are dumb anyway. See what happens when he hits a few speed bumps at his local phone store. In this fourth installment of the Baby Idiots series, our hero will defend the honor of a damsel in destress, even if she’s not a damsel or in distress.
Carl Robinette 