Goodreads asked Jack Wells:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Jack Wells It was actually in response to an open call for submissions for a pulp collection in Utah. The request was for any dark/pulpy/subversive works that maybe had been sitting around, but that might not fit with most publications. By the time I received the request, there were three weeks left for open submissions.

When I think of pulp stories, I immediately visualize gritty hardboiled detective stories; populated with tough guys, buxom femme fatales, big cars, and long shadows.

So I wanted to tell that kind of story, but not in the standard or expected way. And definitely not in the expected time period. So I tried to think of a decade where the pulp concept wasn't very well represented. Just to make things difficult. And nothing is the anti-thesis to those types of stories than the vibrant 80's. And yet I still wanted that old-timey feel, and that's where the initial concept of the world being black-and-white came from. To take the loudest decade (visually) and strip it down.

From there, it was just a question of how to populate it with interesting characters. Characters who skirted the edge of the expected tropes without being completely beholden to them.

Initially, Monochrome Noire was only going to be a short story. And that's how it was submitted to the local publication. But then the concept kept growing and evolving. It went from a short story to a novella. And then from a novella into the beast it has grown into.

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