Lanny Larcinese

I have been writing fiction for twelve years following a long career in various iterations of business. I was an English major undergraduate as well as attend the Detroit College of Law. I have published two crime novels, a memoir. and am currently shopping two additional crime novels. My writing voice is an unusual combination of highly articulate. combined with “street,” reflecting my background as a committed urban person, open-mindeness regarding class. love of the richness of (E language, and education.

I would describe my work as noir-ish, in that I don’t adhere to all of its tropes. I prefer more to get to the inside of the inside of the bad guy as well as the victims. The following, prepared for an article, describes my crime-writing values and reveals much about me and my writing.

I grew up in part working at a family-run restaurant in a working-class area of Detroit. I delivered food to after-hours drinking and drug dens, called in local parlance, “blind pigs.” As a high school kid, I routinely cruised late night, hard-scrabble streets—not unlike Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver—my windshield a lens to life without boundaries, unshackled from the incrimination of daylight. In addition to the general decrepitude, I witnessed muggings, knifings, robberies, prostitution, police brutality, and strange nocturnal juju. Also, our place was a few blocks from the Seventh Police Precinct, so detectives, uniforms, motorcycle cops, and the special unit Clean-Up Squad (think Mulholland Falls), were back-room regulars, relating life from the dregs with aplomb while embossing my brain with a world view unimaginable by my school pals. They found my stories incredulous. Not surprising, theirs were lives of lawns, gardens, and cul-de-sac neighborhoods in which the only felonies were hydrangeas instead of lilacs, or worse, crabgrass.

My entire life has been a mixture of environments and stimuli and of hard times and grace. It’s the mixture I put into all my fictional characters.