“[L]ike a weary, bedraggled gumshoe detective with worn-soled shoes and a rumpled raincoat I beat the streets for a good tale, which is in many ways all I ever expect to achieve, the Irishman’s desire to saddle up to the bar and tell an entertaining yarn.” – Cortright McMeel.

..... The day Cortright McMeel passed away I was presenting my first short story collection at a local bookstore in DC. Although I wrote it in Spanish, I can say that one of its biggest influences was the first issue of McMeel’s brainchild, Murdaland, and the wonderful writers it introduced me to, including Daniel Woodrell, Tom Franklin, David Goodis, and McMeel himself with one of my favorite short stories ever: “Nasty Jay.”
..... Unlike many others who have written heartfelt eulogies to McMeel, I never met him and we didn’t even exchange an email. By all accounts, many stemming from years ago, he was a generous writer with an unbridled passion for literature, someone who was not only willing to share his talent but also help others cultivate theirs. Still, I’d rather leave the personal appreciations to those who can write them from experience and focus instead on McMeel’s work.
..... I found that first issue of Murdaland by chance, as it so often happens with books that end up having a deep impact on you. It was high on a shelf behind the counter of a long-disappeared bookstore called “Mystery Loves Company” in the Fells Point neighborhood of Baltimore. ..... ..... Apparently, somebody had ordered a copy but never picked it up. Their loss, I guess. In reading it, I had a sensation many writers have described when discovering authors who share their own sensibilities, those aesthetic and literary preferences that until then you thought were exclusively yours and which all too often earned you looks of disapproval or bewilderment when mentioned out loud. “So there are people who actually write about this stuff?” I thought. It’s not that I didn’t already know that you could write noir fiction (or, as McMeel put it, “literature on the wrong side of the tracks”) that didn’t resort to formula and stale genre tropes. It’s just that I’d never read a publication that so consistently demonstrated it, story after story, page after page.
..... Amid Murdaland’s outstanding lineup, McMeel’s “Nasty Jay” struck a particular chord. It had the right balance of all the elements I thought made up a good short story: there was a silent conflict in Julie and Ben’s disintegrating marriage, a secret conflict in Jay’s obsession with Julie, and an overt conflict in Julie’s toxic relationship with her neighbors. More importantly, there was its fascinating protagonist, a deranged boxer who hallucinates with Wotan and, just like the Vikings who worshipped the Nordic god, he was a roaming despoiler let loose upon a world a thousand years too civilized for him. Something in that “berserker raids John Cheever’s suburbia” story was so compelling that I decided to track down more of McMeel’s work.
..... When I found out he was writing a novel about boxing and MMA, I thought very few authors this side of Thom Jones or Katie Kitamura could pull it off – and yet I was sure McMeel would be up to the task. I hope that novel eventually sees the light, not because it deals with a subject I happen to be passionate about, but because judging from his published fiction it should be a great read. I eventually wrote McMeel’s name on an ever-growing list of authors whose work I enjoy and who I wanted to contact. Too bad that in Cort’s case I never did.
..... Like one of his literary heroes, Leonard Gardner, McMeel’s output was small in volume but in time some of his stories might just become classics. At the very least, future readers will enjoy his ability to vividly depict different worlds, from the marginality of the smalltime boxing scene in “Fighter,” a story that holds its own against F.X. Toole’s best, to his Balzac-esque glimpse at the unhinged lives of energy traders and their foibles in his novel Short (2010). Or maybe they’ll enjoy the exploits of the Fraze and his pursuit of ice maiden Gnelia in “Istanbul,” as well as when he resurfaces in “Painters,” a tale of two slackers who bring to mind a world-weary version of Michael Chabon’s protagonists in The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, albeit better read and definitely tougher.
..... McMeel’s larger-than-life protagonists, typically a mix of intellectual and brute, can be found in his earliest published stories, such as the quintessential sports yarn “Fullback Glory,” a runner-up in the 1994 Playboy College Fiction Contest and the 1994 Mississippi Review Fiction Award. In describing the quiet desperation of the aspirational Buzz McBain, struggling on the football field to break his family’s cycle of mid-management karma, silently eating his breakfast while clenching his fist under the table, one can already appreciate the assured voice of a born writer.
..... A Boston native, McMeel attended Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in the early ‘90s and graduated with an MFA from the Creative Writing Program at Columbia University. He worked as an advertising copywriter and as an energy trader. From Murdaland in 2006 to Bare Knuckles Press, the e-book press he founded in 2011, he sought to provide an outlet for quality fiction. I think I speak for all the editors of PWG that Murdaland is a template for what we are striving to do and the type of voices we would like to publish and help promote.
..... Talking about his writing projects, McMeel once said: “What I worry about is getting down to the honest guts of my next novel like I did with Short. I’m proud of Short, but I know my best is yet to come. And there will be no giving up again, not ever. I’ve thrown away all my matches.”
I guess we’ll have to settle with the “matches” McMeel already fought. Whether they were thrown or not, they will live on in his readers.
..... And that’s the best a writer can wish for.

Partial bibliography:

Short stories:
“Fullback Glory,” The Mississippi Review #1-2, Volume 23, 1995. Also available at: http://newworldwriting.net/backissues/1995/04-mcmee.html
“Istanbul,” Plots with Guns #29, May/June 2004. Available at: http://wayback.archive.org/web/20040621165537/http://www.plotswithguns.com/Istanbul.htm
“Fighter,” Plots with Guns #31, September/October 2004. Available at: http://wayback.archive.org/web/20041016082452/http://www.plotswithguns.com/Fighter.htm
“Mahler’s Ninth,” The Gettysburg Review, Spring 2005.
“Bus Driver,” The Chicago Quarterly Review, Volume 9, Summer/Fall 2006.
“Nasty Jay,” Murdaland, Number 1, 2006.  Available at: http://www.murdalandmagazine.com/backissues/issue1/issue1/issue1_nastyjay_1.html
“Painters.” The New Guard Literary Review, Volume 2, 2011. Reprinted by Bare Knuckles Press, 2012. Available here.
“Kiev, Ukraine,” Noir at the Bar Volume 2, 2012.

Novels:
Short. Thomas Dunne Books / St. Martin’s Press, 2010.
Blue Bloodbath (co-written with Tristan Davies as Katrina Von Kessel). Bare Knuckles Press, 2011.

Unpublished/unfinished novels:
The Rugby Player. M.F.A. thesis, Columbia University, 1996.
Cagefighter.
Unfinished Doc Holliday short novel. 

Non-fiction:
“Lonigan Redux. The Return of James T. Farrell.” The Weekly Standard, Vol. 9, No. 29, 2004. Available at:  http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Protected/Articles/000/000/003/910abtjt.asp
“Our Man in Kabul. A nineteenth-century American meets Afghanistan.” The Weekly Standard, Vol. 9, No. 45, 2004. Available at: http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Protected/Articles/000/000/004/425giqkm.asp
“When Businessmen Attack. A Pair of Simenon Hard Novels.” Mulholland Books website, 2010. Available at: http://www.mulhollandbooks.com/2010/10/20/when-businessmen-attack-a-pair-of-simenon-hard-novels/
“B. Traven: The Writer Who Wasn’t There, or A Case for His Works.” Mulholland Books website, 2010. Available at: http://www.mulhollandbooks.com/2010/12/02/b-traven-the-writer-who-wasn%E2%80%99t-there-or-a-case-for-his-works/

Selected interviews:
“Sin Peeks. Two Columbia Creative Writing MFAs Unleash Noir From The Maddening Crowds.” Baltimore City Paper, 2007. Available at: http://www2.citypaper.com/eat/story.asp?id=13124
"Interview with Cortright McMeel, Author of Short." Les Edgerton on Writing blog, 2011. Available at: http://lesedgertononwriting.blogspot.com/2011/02/interview-with-cortright-mcmeel-author.html
“An Interview with Cortright McMeel.”  New West.net, 2011. Available at: http://newwest.net/topic/article/an_interview_with_cortright_mcmeel/C39/L39/ 
“Noir Nation: A Conversation between Cort McMeel and Dennis Tafoya.” Mulholland Books website, 2011. Available at: http://www.mulhollandbooks.com/2011/11/10/noir-nation-a-conversation-between-cort-mcmeel-and-dennis-trafoya/