This week my co-editor, Libby Cudmore, and I worked with Down & Out Books to shift plans for the cover for our forthcoming anthology Lawyers, Guns, and Money: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Music of Warren Zevon, forthcoming June 13 from Down & Out Books.
Here’s the official statement we prepared with the publisher: “The last two weeks before a book’s release hardly seem the ideal time to radically change that book’s cover, but with the number of mass shootings in the news recently, we and several of our contributors have had mixed feelings about the original cover image for Lawyers, Guns, and Money. Clearly, these stories are crime fiction—violence regularly an integral part of the genre and gun violence specifically central to several plotlines within these very pages—but images often speak louder than words, louder and less clearly, and having a semi-automatic weapon as the key image associated with this anthology felt uncomfortable… but fortunately was not unavoidable. We’re grateful that our cover artist, Zach McCain, had designed two cover treatments for the book and that Down & Out has been able to make a swift change so close to our publication date. Thanks to them, to our contributors, and to our readers for understanding and support here.”