Friend of the Devil:

Crime Fiction Inspired by the Songs of the Grateful Dead

edited by Josh Pachter

This is my seventh "inspired by" anthology, following volumes inspired by the songs of Joni Mitchell, Jimmy Buffett, Billy Joel, the Marx Brothers, Paul Simon, and the Beatles.

For this one, I returned to writing the title story myself and invited a bunch of authors (including several from the Bay Area) to contribute the rest of the stories. I had some challenges, this time around: several of the people who originally agreed to write Dead-inspired stories ultimately withdrew from the project due to health issues, so I had to replace them on relatively short notice.

It all worked out, though, and I was once again able to shepherd a couple of people who hadn't previously published any prose-form crime fiction into print: Linda Landrigan (who has for many years been the editor of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine) and David Avallone (who writes for comic books and graphic novels and is the son of my old friend, the legendary Michael Avallone). Plus this time around I got my Flemish friend Dominique Biebau to provide a take on the song "What's Become of the Baby" from the Aoxomoxoa album, and I translated it into English for the book.

For my own story, "Friend of the Devil," I imagined a young man driving a truckload of illicit cigarettes from his home in Chino up to the Bay Area, which gave me the opportunity to use the lovely word "buttlegging."

On September 6, 2024, Kristopher Zgorski did a cover reveal at BOLO Books.

In late September and October 2024, Art Taylor ran essays by contributors on four consecutive Tuesdays at his "First Two Pages" blog: Avram Lavinsky (September 24), Linda Landrigan (October 1), David Avallone (October 8), and Faye Snowden (October 15).

On January 30, 2025, I found out that David Avallone's "The Golden Road (To Unlimited Devotion)" had been selected for inclusion in Otto Penzler's The Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2024, on January 31 that Friend of the Devil was one of the six finalists for the Short Mystery Fiction Society's first-ever Best Anthology Derringer Award, and on May 7 that it was a finalist for Bouchercon's Best Anthology Anthony (the fourth of my "inspired by" anthologies to get an Anthony nod).

Friend of the Devil was originally published in October 2024 by Down and Out Books. A year later, in October 2025, Down and Out 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 books. As of this moment (October 29, 2025), it might be possible to find a copy of Friend of the Devil, 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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