Rose City Vice

The City of Roses, as natives of Portland, Oregon like to call it, has a long and honorable history of crime and corruption, starting as far back as the post-Civil War frontier days, leading into the mobster-infused decades of the twentieth century when prohibition, prostitution, gambling, and hard drugs besieged the town. The so-called Great Portland Vice Scandal of 1956-57 spilled into national politics, with hearings before the Senate Rackets Committee. When the '70s rolled around, members of the police narcotics squad were caught red-handed perpetrating nefarious deeds. This Northwest city, known best today for its punk rock and hipster comedies like Portlandia, was once overrun with corruption and foul play. Rose City Vice reveals a city where the cops are putting drugs back on the street, maybe even committing murder. The city council is high on coke, and the mayor is carrying on a clandestine sexual relationship with 13-year- old schoolgirl while under surveillance by the vice squad. It's 1970's Portland and blackmail is in the air.

Dark Rose reveals the fascinating and sordid details of an important period in the history of what by the end of the century had become a great American city.

A Lambda Literary Award Finalist Winner of The Ferro-Grumley Award for Gay Fiction Award-winning short stories from the author of The Danish Girl and Pasadena “Passion for us all will remain a troublesome thing.” The Rose City combines a collection of unforgettable characters with Ebershoff’s trademark emotional insight and intelligent prose in seven stories about young men and boys as they discover and rediscover themselves in a world that never really works out as planned. Often tragic but lacking in despair, The Rose City delves into the tribulations of youth, identity, sexuality – and longing for something just out of reach. Written with compassion and truth, these stories present characters who live at the margins of the world at the moment they take their first steps toward acceptance and love.

From a Portland Tribune columnist comes Portland Confidential, the story of Big Jim Elkins, a conman and criminal who arrived in Portland in 1937 and helped unleash prostitution, bootlegging, gambling, and drug running.

Tucked away in the northwestern frontier, Portland offered all the best vices: opium dreams, gambling, cheap prostitutes, and drunken brawling. In its early days, Portland was a "combination rough-and-ready logging camp and gritty, hard-punching deep-water port town," and as a young city (established in the late 1840s) it developed an international reputation for lawlessness and violence. In the early 1900s, the British and French governments filed formal complaints about Portland to the US state department, and Congressional testimony from the time cites Portland as the worst place in the world for crimping. Today, tours of the alleged Shanghai Tunnels offer Portland visitors a taste of that seedy past.

Portland, Oregon, in the 1970s. Portland is often called the Rose City, but the denizens that inhabit its underbelly rarely smell so sweet. Dirty cops, dirty robbers. These shady characters and their illicit connections reveal the boiling corruption in Phil Stanford's true crime stories. Only the names have been changed to protect the guilty. Welcome to the City of Roses. Dark Horse is currently publishing archive editions of the 1950's most vile crime comics, Crime Does Not Pay, and is now creating new crime stories under that title. This is the first of them.

When vice and scandal are all fun and games. Portland, Oregon began as a town of itinerant young men who had no shortage of diversions at the end of the workday. This city grew up with lots of revelry and little regulation. After the last tree fell in logging season and after the workday ended on the docks, those young men broke out the cards. Saloon culture quickly took hold in Portland, offering alcohol, sex, gambling, and other diversions. This book traces the storied and scandalous history of Portland, from the underground and elite saloons and gambling rings to the vice, scandal, and fun they brought. Readers will meet the impresarios, gangsters, and racketeers who colored Portland’s history.

In a city full of police controversies, hippie artist punk houses, and overzealous liberals, Portland, Oregon, is a place where even its fiction blurs with its bizarre realities. Brand-new stories by: Gigi Little, Justin Hocking, Christopher Bolton, Jess Walter, Monica Drake, Jamie S. Rich (illustrated by Joelle Jones), Dan DeWeese, Zoe Trope, Luciana Lopez, Karen Karbo, Bill Cameron, Ariel Gore, Floyd Skloot, Megan Kruse, Kimberly Warner-Cohen, and Jonathan Selwood. Editor Kevin Sampsell is a bookstore employee and writer. He is the author of a short story collection, Creamy Bullets (Chiasmus Press), and the upcoming memoir The Suitcase (HarperPerennial, summer 2009). He is also the editor of The Insomniac Reader (Manic D Press) and the publisher of the micropress Future Tense Books.