Crime does look profitable, these days! Never have we had such a torrential or varied response from would-be Litro contributors.

Valerie O’Riordan’s short ‘The Explosion of Josiah Bounderby’ will knock you for six, while Kevin Brown’s ‘Odds Are’ depicts the sorry triumph of modern fear. Iphgenia Baal’s smart squib is anchored in forensic contemporary observation, in contrast with Larry Lefkowitz’s brave venture into Holmesian rigour, bringing you the story for which Conan Doyle’s readers were famously ‘not yet prepared’.

We are also proud to continue our ‘Gabriel Josipovici mini-series’: if you enjoyed December’s ‘The Two Lönnrots’, skip straight to his latest short, ‘Love Across the Borders’. This and Phil Bennett’s superb ‘Mikel’, an evocation of an autistic child’s experience of civil conflict in Chile, keep faith with Litro’s aim to bring the whole world to you in short stories.

Lastly, we have poetry from two writers who know their crime backwards: one from Paul Lyalls and four from the late great Charles Bukowski. No-one ever said the Post pays…

Sophie Lewis
Editor

PS – Subscribe to Litro; it’s a steal.