Some readers have asked if any of my Harm City stories are ‘made-up’ or ‘illustrative composites of multiple events’. They are not.

I do write Harm City Noir. This is fiction that is strictly urban, without sci-fi, horror or fantasy elements, and is often based in Baltimore, featuring characters drawn from my Harm City project. We want no confusion on this count.

Harm City Noir sale content [Menthol Rampage, Shoebox] will be put up for sale on the Harm City page. Some of the characters in these selections, such as Shoey and Aussie, are based directly on a single person I have interviewed. This is someone’s story reworked as a novelette to disguise their identity, with me taking some liberties with filling in narrative gaps. I won’t put their life out there for free. It was the only life they had. In such cases the ad will run with a ‘based on a true story’ notice. Purely fictional tales, such as Menthol Rampage, will have no such notice.

Free content, such as Poet & Ray Ray, will run on the fiction page. The free content characters are composites of people I have interviewed, and the stories are entirely fictional.

Please keep in mind, in the case of your children, or your squeamish better half, that these stories will tend to feature graphic violence and criminal activity. These stories are not about catching the criminal, but about seeing crime from the criminal perspective.