Former Iron String Press Managing Editor To Release New Novel
By WRILEY NELSON
ONEONTA
Award-winning author and former Iron String Press Managing Editor Libby Cudmore will release her next novel on September 10, 2024. Datura Books has signed “Negative Girl,” a neo-noir thriller set in a dying city in upstate New York.
“I began developing this idea at the Barrelhouse Writer Camp in 2017, where I worked with the concept of an ex-punk private investigator as a character,” Cudmore said.
She started to write a sequel to her first novel, “The Big Rewind,” using characters similar to the leading pair in the new work as clients for her detectives, then realized they could stand alone. The first Martin Wade story was published in “Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine” in 2020.
According to a release, “Negative Girl” explores obsession and death in America’s forgotten spaces through the lens of a literary crime drama. It follows Martin, who lived hard in his youth but, unlike many of his friends, hit the recovery path and became a PI. He and his assistant, Valerie, are contacted by a young woman who needs help keeping her biological father away from her, but no one involved realizes that the father is Martin’s old bandmate, still using drugs and on a destructive path that will soon collide with Martin’s clean life.
“I’m so thrilled to be working with [Datura Acquiring Editor] Daniel Culver and everyone at Datura in bringing Martin and Valerie to a wider audience,” Cudmore said in the release. “From their first outing in ‘Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine,’ I knew this PI pair was destined for a larger case. ‘Negative Girl’ puts Martin and Valerie on the case of a drowned girl with ties to Martin’s past life as a hard-living rock star and forces both of them to confront the question: What happens when the past is buried for too long?”
“My stories are always based in upstate New York; it’s what I know,” Cudmore told “The Freeman’s Journal” and “Hometown Oneonta.” “I’ve lived in Oneonta since 2007. In fact, the American form of the PI genre started right here in Oneonta with S. S. Van Dine’s Philo Vance stories. My work draws in some ways on reporting I did for the newspaper, including crime reporting and work related to the opioid epidemic.”
The Wolfe Pack, a fan forum and organization dedicated to Rex Stout’s classic “Nero Wolfe” books and novellas, and to promoting detective fiction generally, announced on Saturday, December 2 that Cudmore won their 2023 Black Orchid Novella Award. This award, presented jointly with “Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine,” celebrates the novella format in crime fiction; Cudmore won with her novella “Alibi in Ice,” which will be published in the July 2024 issue of “Hitchcock.” Cudmore also received The Private Eye Writers of America’s 2023 Shamus Award for Best PI Short Story for her story “Charlie’s Magazine.”
Cudmore graduated from Cobleskill-Richmondville Central School in 2001 and attended Binghamton University and the University of Southern Maine. In addition to her prolific work in fiction, including a novel and recent publications in half a dozen prominent mystery fiction magazines, she works as a staff writer at Hartwick College. “The Big Rewind” (2016) is available from William Morrow and Company and from booksellers. “Negative Girl” will be released in September.