The Great Filling Station Holdup:

Crime Fiction Inspired by the Songs of Jimmy Buffett

edited by Josh Pachter

Given the fun I had editing The Beat of Black Wings: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Songs of Joni Mitchell, I decided to do some more "inspired by" collections. Down & Out Books had bid on the Joni Mitchell one, so I asked publisher Eric Campbell if he'd be interested in a Jimmy Buffett version and -- at least in part, I think, because D&O is located in Florida -- he jumped on the idea.

I didn't want this one to be as big a volume, so I approached a smaller number of possible contributors and wound up with a total of sixteen stories, inspired by songs from sixteen of Jimmy's studio albums. I focused on Florida authors -- Micki Browning, Don Bruns, Jeffery Hess, Leigh Lundin, Alison McMahan (who wound up moving to New Hampshire before the book came out), Rick Ollerman, Neil Plakcy, and Elaine Viets -- but also included some folks I hadn't worked with before (Bruce Robert Coffin, Isabella Maldonado, Laura Oles, Robert J. Randisi, Lissa Marie Redmond) and a couple of my "go to" writers (Michael Bracken and John Floyd).

As with my contribution to the Joni book, I took the cover song for myself. "The Great Filling Station Holdup" is a third case for Texas PI Helmut Erhard, who first appeared in "The Yellow Rose of Texas" and then in "The Stopwatch of Death." Following through on something I did in those two earlier stories, this one also includes a truly massive Easter egg, which -- as of this writing, in any case -- no one has yet spotted....

Once again, Kristopher Zgorski did a cover reveal at his popular website, BOLO Books, and the trade paperback came out on February 22, 2021.

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Four and a half years later, in October 2025, Down and Out Books went out of business with no advance warning, orphaning literally hundreds of novels and anthologies and leaving their authors and editors -- as well as the authors and editors of novels and anthologies scheduled for publication but as yet unpublished -- scrambling to find alternate homes for their work. As of this moment (October 29, 2025), it might be possible to find a copy of The Great Filling Station Holdup, new or used, somewhere online, but it might not be. When and if I'm able to find a publisher to rerelease it, I'll update this page with a link to show where it's available.

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