Paranoia Blues:

Crime Fiction Inspired by the Songs of Paul Simon

edited by Josh Pachter

This is my fifth "inspired by" anthology, following volumes inspired by the songs of Joni Mitchell, Jimmy Buffett, Billy Joel, and the Marx Brothers.

For this one, I originally planned to limit the contents to one story per Simon and Garfunkel studio album and one story per Paul Simon solo studio album, for a total of nineteen stories. As my deadline approached, however, one of the stories I commissioned turned to be unusable, and I reached out to two different authors, hoping one of them might be willing and able to come up with a worthy substitute on very short notice. As it happened, they both did, and -- rather than taking one and rejecting the other -- I decided what the hell, it's my book, so I can make whatever rules I feel like making, and so there are two stories representing the Bridge Over Troubled Waters album and a total of twenty stories in the book.

As before, I wrote the title story myself, and my "Paranoia Blues" is set in Cleveland, where I lived from 1991 to 2006. Robert "Junior" Lockwood was a real person as described in the story, and I did indeed spend most of my Wednesday evenings listening to him at Fat Fish Blue and talking with him during his breaks. That's a picture I took of him over at the left.

Kristopher Zgorski did a cover reveal at BOLO Books, and the trade paperback and e-book came out in October 2022.

In May of 2023, Paranoia Blues was named one of the five finalists in the "Best Anthology" category for the Anthony Awards, which are given out every fall at the Bouchercon crime-fiction conference, and Ed Aymar's "Still Crazy After All These Years" was named a finalist in the Best Short Story category. (Neither the book nor Ed's story wound up winning — but as they say, it's an honor just to be nominated....)

You can order the book from Down and Out Books, and it's also available on Amazon and the other clicks-and-mortar megavendors.

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