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The Making of Tart Noir, the anthology
by Stella Duffy

From the introduction to the Tart City website:

"Tart. It's a potent four-letter word. Sweet, sour, sharp, sexy, bad, with a touch of cheesecake.... These are neofeminist women, half Philip Marlowe, half femme-fatale, who make their own rules, who think it's entirely possible to save the world while wearing a drop-dead dress and stiletto heels. Our heroines are Modesty Blaise and Emma Peel, our morals are questionable and our attitude always needs adjustment..."

And now it's not just a website -- now, there's an anthology, too. We asked coeditor Stella Duffy to fill us in on how Tart Noir came to be.

When Lauren Henderson and I first met, we had been told by far too many mutual friends that we were bound to get on -- we are both fairly loud (to put it politely), we both write strong pushy smart-mouthed heroines, and we are both quite good at performing our own work and that of others -- basically, we're very adept at showing off.

Now, to me, this set off alarm bells immediately. How could we possibly get on? Didn't our mutual friends know that one bright and shiny, young(ish) woman at a book event is more than enough? Couldn't people tell neither of us were going to want (whisper it, I know girls aren't supposed to feel this way) competition? But hey, what happened? We were wearing the same color nail varnish. Astonishing but true. Immediate chick-bonding, girlie-binding, tart-bonding. We got on well. We both like the odd cocktail (or 12). And, along with the other women of the Tart ethos, we have an idea of the kind of characters we want to read and to write -- not always the smart-mouthed sassy ones, sometimes downright dour and plain hard. But always interesting. Multidimensional. Smart girls who do dumb things sometimes because that's the way the world is. Clever women who are mean. Beautiful girls who know to use it to their advantage. Ugly women who really don't care. Women who may well adore men, but don't need them to save the day. Girls who are women who know that Tart is a fine word, a juicy word, a really big four-letter word.

Five years ago the Tart Noir anthology would have been a difficult enterprise, if not impossible. This book was conceived, edited, copyedited, discussed, debated -- and is now being promoted -- almost entirely by email. (Okay, so it was actually conceived in a drunken conversation in a girls' loo at a book launch in East London, but the follow-up was all email!) I live in London. My coeditor Lauren Henderson lives in New York. But when we started work on it she was living in Italy and I was working in San Diego.

The 20 authors in this anthology are scattered across the United States and Britain. Of those 20, there are seven I have never physically met. But thanks to this being a tart project and the loveliness of girlie emails, I know about many of these women's partners, homes, pastimes, hobbies, and taste in music. In fact, I possibly know too much, even for a fairly nosy chick like me. But I love the way email confidences slip out and into the ether, the way a request for a writer to take another look at the turn of a sentence might prompt a recalled story about some God-awful editor they had to kill in fiction to save themselves slaughtering in person. I'm not sure these confidences would be given in the flesh or on the telephone -- there's something so personal/impersonal about email that frees up even the hard-bitten journalist part of many a crime writer. There's something very lovely about getting to know entire strangers purely through the medium of a shared concept -- and then turning that concept into a tangible reality. It is highly unlikely we'll ever be able to get the 20 women of this collection in one room together. (It's probably safer that way!) But it would be a fine party.

And now we have Tart Noir -- the never-never party you can leave on a bookshelf. Creating this anthology took way more work than either Lauren or I expected -- partly due to the administration involved in getting in all those stories from all those places, partly because when you're doing something as a pair, you do want the other's approval before signing off on anything. Lauren and I pretty much consulted on every step we took, and with incredible good fortune we agreed on almost everything, too. We made it easy for each other, we each took on jobs when the other was too busy, divided certain tasks according to our own specialties, and pretty much just got on with it. From London and New York, Italy and California.

We liked getting on with it, we like the book. And we like the Tarts. Very much. Lucky really, given how it might have turned out if I'd worn the pale pink nail varnish instead.

Tart Noir

Search for all Stella Duffy's books on BookSense.com

Further Reading:

• Nicola Griffith
• S.J. Rozan
• Dana Stabenow
• Nevada Barr
• Tart City

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