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November 5, 2021

Roy Marx: Socialist Portland Detective by Lark Jameson

My former author client Lark Jameson has just published a new collection of fiction and I want to promote it here. It’s a fantastic crime and kink thriller set in the Rose City that also employs savage and funny social commentary. She truly has an original take on the genre. It’s published by Pacific Coast Smut and available on Amazon in print and e-book formats.

Description below:

Roy Marx is a socialist Portland detective with a ferocious mutt named Trotsky. Together, comrade, dog and their strange brew of a crew, fight crime, injustice and inhumanity wrought by the evil and destructive forces of capitalism.

In three Left wing, lusty and action-packed novellas, Roy and Trotsky kick some serious ass in the defense of working class heroes such as burger flippers, strippers and teachers.

Utilizing his highly specialized knowledge of all things commie and eccentric detection methods, Marx is unlike any private dick you’ve ever met. And don’t even think of messing with his dog, lest you want parts of your reproductive system chomped to smithereens.

Readers of the crime world unite, and meet the new sleuth, not the same as the old sleuth.

In the Case of the Burger Town Murders, Marx investigates the savage killing of a union-forming employee of a progressive fast food joint who was kinking it up after hours with horny burger flippers.

In the Case of Stripper Collective, Marx looks into the murder of two dancers by a deranged Bible thumper in what later becomes the world’s first socialist strip club.

In the Case of the Teacherless School, Marx digs into the shooting of a high school teacher by a foxy, sex-starved android created by a fiendish corporation hell-bent on replacing all teachers with robots.

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The Old Crow

Book Club

$11.99 + $3 Shipping

In December of 2020, author Matt Love moved to Portland to care for his elderly father.

Returning to the Rose City jolted Love after 23 years residing on the Oregon Coast. In the Sellwood neighborhood where he lived, Love met a homeless man named Mark. They formed a friendship over literature and the unforeseen magical discoveries in street libraries. They created The Old Crow Book Club, and yes, sometimes that involved drinking Old Crow on a sidewalk.

The club also included several other Sellwood homeless men and women cut from John Steinbeck's Cannery Row cloth.

In due course, Love learned the members' stories of homelessness and how they survived. He wondered what happened to his beloved state of Oregon and attempted to help Mark get off the streets only to run up against the seemingly futile policies to address the crisis.

Along the way, he had the best conversations about books in his life and wrote The Old Crow Book Club, where he recounts his interactions with the homeless people in his neighborhood and offers some suggestions how to alleviate what he considers the greatest man-made American humanitarian disaster of his adult life.

The Old Crow Book Club is available for purchase here and select independent bookstores in Oregon.

Choice Cuts

of Oregon Fiction

$22.99 + $3 Shipping

Choice Cuts of Oregon Fiction by Matt Love contains 20 stories, all set in Oregon. The cast of characters includes a depressed Santa Claus, Steve Prefontaine, Jack Ramsay's fast break offense, socialist squirrels, a clearcut, a dead deer, a junior high football team, a high school tennis player, a dissipated teacher, a man who evolves into a beaver, a homeless vet, a jilted preacher, a double date to a prom, rural degenerates, a wily caterer, and much more.

The publication of the collection culminates a quarter century of the author's writing about Oregon and rambling around the state.

Choice Cuts is available for purchase here, through Amazon, or select independent bookstores in Oregon.

The Savage

of State Street

Nestucca Spit Press is proud to present The Savage of State Street: The Thieving and Literary Lives of Smoky Epley. He is the greatest unheralded writer in Oregon history and also one of its more mediocre, colorful and persistent thieves.

$19.99 + $3 Shipping

In 1973, Oregon State University Press published Men in Exile: An Anthology of Creative Writing by Inmates of the Oregon State Penitentiary. Twenty-two of Smoky Epley's pieces appeared in the book.

Smoky spent most of his adult life in state and federal prisons for robbery. In 2008, during one of his brief stints of freedom, Smoky became friends with Matt Love, an Oregon author and publisher. They met after Love discovered Men in Exile and wrote a newspaper column about the landmark book. Smoky read the column and reached out.

He returned to prison in 2009 after forging a check. Upon his release in 2011, Love encouraged Smoky to write a memoir. He completed half of Auto before dying in February of 2013.