In the late 1990s, a couple of Los Angeles writers, frustrated trying to find a publisher, decided to self-publish a clever mystery styled after the Dell pulp crime novels of the 1940s.
Since the 1998 publication of their retro pulp crime novel By the Balls, Tom Fassbender and Jim Pascoe, aka Uglytown, have released 10 collections of trade paperback crime fiction (seven novels, an anthology and two kids' mysteries) from a variety of notable writers. Pascoe told PW the two started Uglytown "on a lark. We wanted to publish our own writing but publishers kept asking, 'What have you done?' So we wrote and published By the Balls to get a reputation." Uglytown has established a reputation as an imaginative small press specializing in handsomely designed, quirky, hardboiled crime novels with a strong sense of location.
Late this summer, the house published its first hardcover title, Burn by Sean Doolittle, a murder mystery set in L.A. And this month Uglytown will publish its second hardcover, Dark as Night by Mark T. Conrad, a thriller that brings together the world of five-star restaurants and the Philadelphia mob.
By the Balls, with illustrations by popular graphic novel artist Paul Pope, was a success by self-publishing standards, selling 3,500 copies and setting the two men up in the publishing business. In 2000 Uglytown published Five Shots and a Funeral, a sequel to By the Balls, that sold 3,000 copes. They followed that with a crime anthology Deadly Dozen, published in collaboration with the L.A. chapter of Sisters in Crime, which they credit with making them serious about being publishers. By 2001 Uglytown was publishing four books a year and was distributing its books through Words Distribution, which is a part of Book People.
Other Uglytown titles include Sean Doolittle's first book Dirt, which was selected as one of Book Sense's 100 books of the year, and Curt Colbert's Sayonaraville, a mystery set in 1940s Seattle during the period of WWII Japanese-American internment. The house has also published One Last Hit, the third book in Nathan Walpow's Joe Portugal mystery series. Its two children's mystery novels, The Curse of Royal Ruby and The Secret of Dead Man's Mine by Rodney Johnson, sold 4,000 and 3,000 copies respectively. They feature Rinnah Two Feathers, a 14-year-old Lakota Sioux Indian girl who solves mysteries on the Lakota reservation.
