The Gimmick: Novelettes, stories, and sketches

by Vern Smith

"Vern Smith is a phantasmatic presence hovering over hard luck debacles and muted urban theater, colloquy consisting of full-bodied gestures captured in the word, messy lives tangled at the root, twisting misshapen into bloom. He haunts the North American literary canon with a salt-of-the-earth journalist's ear for the unspoken and unspeakable. There is an uncanny violence to these selections, as if there before the fact, now willed into expression in lean, muscular, lockstep cadences that model with sobering, unsentimental reverence and radical, stethoscopic clarity the raging interiority of the North American animal/everyman/mammal. With preternatural stylistic range, Vern Smith renders the ineffable with documentary devotion. It is poetic realism with exacting, brutal command of the minimal. Nothing less than ink, pulp, and blood amalgamated with sinew and synapses." - Manuel Marrero, author of Not Yet

139 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 1, 2020

About the author

Vern Smith’s novel Scratching the Flint was named Best Indie Novel of 2023 by Crime Fiction Lover. He is also author of the novels Under the Table and The Green Ghetto. Winner of the Chinaski Award as editor of the Jacked crime fiction anthology, Smith is a former newspaper reporter, magazine editor, radio host, and political staffer. His novelette, The Gimmick—a finalist for Canada’s highest crime-writing honor, the Arthur Ellis Award—is the title track to his second collection of fiction.

Reviews

[Joey · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Gimmick is full of oddball crime fiction and urban grit. It's highly recommended.