PAKET UMROH BULAN FEBRUARI MARET APRIL MEI 2018

    saco-indonesia.com,

    Mana janjimu padaku
    Yang dulu kau ucapakan untukku
    Semua tak nyata

    Khilaf atau memang lupa
    Atau memang kau sengaja
    Mendua terhadap diriku

    Mungkin kau pikir ku akan menangis
    Atau kecewa dan terluka karenamu
    Sayang bapakku dokter cinta
    Sakit hati putus cinta bagiku hal biasa

    Jadi jangan kau mengira ku terluka
    Putus nyambung dalam cinta bagiku hal biasa

    Mungkin kau pikir ku akan menangis
    Atau kecewa dan terluka karenamu aaa
    Sayang bapakku dokter cinta
    Sakit hati putus cinta bagiku hal biasa

    Sayang bapakku dokter cinta
    Sakit hati putus cinta bagiku hal biasa
    Jadi jangan kau mengira ku terluka
    Putus nyambung dalam cinta bagiku hal biasa
    Karena bapaknya dokter cinta ooo
    Hal biasa karena bapaknya oh dokter cinta

    Editor : Dian Sukmawati

saco-indonesia.com, Winda Viska telah merasakan perbedaan honor atas tawaran manggung di malam tahun baru. Senyuman muncul saat melihat nominal honor yang telah ditransfe olehr pihak penyelenggara di buku rekeningnya. Tak ingin membuat iri orang lain, Winda pun juga enggan membeberkan berapa kali lipat honor yang diperolehnya.

"tidak usah dipamerin ah, nanti dibilang sombong lagi. Kalau dibilang 100 kali lipat nanti banyak yang iri. Yang jelas berapa yang didapat, mau 100 kali lipat pun diaminin saja," kata Winda saat ditemui di Hotel Grand Melia Jakarta Selatan.

Hampir setiap malam tahun baru ia juga mengaku menerima tawaran manggung. Bukan lantaran honor yang telah menggiurkan tapi Winda lebih melihat dari keseruan acara yang telah diselenggarakan.

"Tiap tahun baru selalu ambil, kalau tidak memungkinkan sih nggak diambil. Tapi tidak tahu kenapa keadaan aku selalu memungkinkan buat ambil. Bukan mikir karena honornya juga, tapi yang penting acaranya seru," jelasnya.

Editor : Dian Sukmawati

saco-indonesia.com, Seorang juru parkir, Septian Papa alias Tomi, telah tewas dikeroyok preman di sekitar Jembatan Rel Kereta Gunung Antang, Jatinegara, Jakarta Timur, Jumat (7/2) dinihari. Pemuda yang berusia sekitar 26 tahun itu tewas akibat luka bacok di sekujur tubuhnya.

Utar, seorang saksi mata telah mengaku sempat melihat korban dilempar dari atas jembatan di atas Jalan Matraman Raya. Pemantauan Pos Kota jarak jembatan ke jalan raya tersebut kurang lebih telah mencapai 5 m.

“Kejadiannya sekitar jam 2:00. Sebelum korban dilempar, saya juga telah mendengar teriakan sejumlah orang yang telah mengeroyok korban. Katanya, ‘buang aja, buang’,” ujarnya, di sekitar lokasi kejadian, Jumat (7/2) dini hari.

Belum cukup sampai di sana saja , urainya, korban juga sempat dilempari batu ketika tersungkur di pojok jalan bawah jembatan. Warga sekitar lokasi kemudian baru berani untuk menghampiri korban setelah tak ada lagi serangan dari para pelaku.

“Pas kami hampiri, ternyata korban juga banyak mendapat luka bacokan, mulai dari kepala, mata sebelah kanan hilang, leher sebelah kanan dan tangan kiri juga sobek, serta semua jari kaki kanannya hilang seperti habis dipotongi. Oleh warga korban langsung dibawa ke Rumah Sakit Cipto Mangunkusumo (RSCM),” paparnya.

Utar juga mengaku tak tahu persis kenapa pemuda tersebut telah dikeroyok sejumlah preman. Ia hanya mengetahui bahwa korban sehari-harinya bekerja sebagai juru parkir di sekitar warung di bawah jembatan itu.

Sementara, saksi lain yang tidak disebutkan namanya juga mengatakan, selain Tomi, ada satu korban lain yang juga menderita luka cukup serius. Korban itu, menurutnya adalah kakak Tomi, bernama Yupit Taimbonan alias Yores.

“Sekarang Yores lagi dirawat di Rumah Sakit Kramatjati (RS Polri),” ujarnya.

Ia telah menduga peristiwa pengeroyokan tersebut terjadi akibat dendam antara Yores dengan beberapa pemuda yang biasa berkeliaran di sekitar Jembatan Rel Gunung Antang. “Karena belum lama ini Yores sempat berkelahi dengan beberapa orang di sana. Kemudian Tomi mungkin tadi mencoba bikin perhitungan atau gimana, tapi ia malah dikeroyok hingga tewas,” ungkapnya.

Kasus ini telah ditangani Polsek Jatinegara. Hingga berita ini diturunkan, polisi juga masih harus melakukan penyelidikan mulai dari mendatangi lokasi kejadian dan mencari saksi yang dapat memberikan keterangan.

Editor : Dian Sukmawati

JAKARTA, Saco-Indonesia.com — Kabar melonjaknya harga jengkol disambut positif Ketua DPR RI, Marzuki Alie. Ia mengaku malah bersyukur harga jengkol naik di sejumlah wilayah Indonesia.

"Kalau harga jengkol naik, saya bersyukur. Artinya ada penghargaan atas produk lokal Indonesia yang sebagian warganya suka makan jengkol," kata Marzuki saat dihubungi, Rabu (5/6/2013).

Seperti diberitakan sebelumnya, harga jengkol di sejumlah wilayah terutama Jawa naik dari biasanya sekitar Rp 10.000 per kilogram menjadi Rp 50.000 per kilogram.

Menurut Marzuki Alie, kenaikan harga jengkol tidak akan terlalu mengganggu stabilitas ekonomi. Sebab, jengkol beda dengan komoditas lain seperti beras yang merupakan bahan pokok.

"Tidak makan jengkol tidak mengakibatkan rakyat menjadi lapar, tetapi justru rakyat atau petani khususnya yang menghasilkan jengkol dapat menikmati hasil kebunnya karena harga yang bagus," kata Marzuki.

Ketika ditanya kalau harga jengkol mahal bukankah akan merugikan konsumen yang menggemarinya, Marzuki menjawab, "Makan jengkol tidak banyak, enggak sampai 1 ons, bisa mabuk jengkol kalau banyak-banyak dimakan."

JAKARTA, Saco-Indonesia.com — Wakil Ketua Fraksi Partai Keadilan Sejahtera Ecky Awal Mucharram membenarkan pertemuan antara pemerintah dan pimpinan Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat pada Senin (3/6/2013) pagi ini membahas tentang rencana kenaikan harga bahan bakar minyak (BBM). Ecky menuturkan bahwa pertemuan dilakukan atas permintaan pemerintah.

"Itu permintaan pemerintah untuk lobi pimpinan. Ini rapat konsultasi tentang APBN-P 2013, ada sesuatu yang harus disinkronkan mungkin," ucap Ecky di Kompleks Parlemen, Senin (3/6/2013).

Ecky mengaku hingga saat ini memang masih banyak fraksi yang menolak rencana kenaikan harga BBM. Salah satunya adalah PKS.

"PKS melihat dinamika politik yang ada sehingga PKS menolak kenaikan BBM," imbuh anggota Komisi XI dari Fraksi PKS itu.

Ecky mengungkapkan, PKS menolak lantaran masih ada hal-hal yang perlu diperbaiki sebelum harga BBM dinaikkan. Ia mencontohkan seperti kebijakan energi alternatif yang perlu diperbaiki.

Seperti diberitakan, para pejabat di sektor keuangan RI mendadak datang ke DPR RI untuk bertemu pimpinan, Senin pagi. Pertemuan diduga membahas tentang rencana memasukkan dana kompensasi dalam rancangan Anggaran Pendapatan dan Belanja Negara Perubahan (RAPBN-P).

Beberapa di antara yang hadir yakni Menteri Koordinator Perekonomian Hatta Rajasa, Menteri Keuangan Chatib Basri, Kepala Bappenas Armida Alisjahbana, Wakil Menteri Keuangan Mahendra Siregar, dan Kepala Badan Kebijakan Fiskal Kemenkeu Bambang Brodjonegoro.

Pemerintah berencana menaikkan harga BBM pada awal Juni 2013. Namun, rencana itu akhirnya ditunda hingga minggu ketiga bulan Juni 2013. Pemerintah dan DPR hingga kini masih menggodok rencana memasukkan dana bantuan langsung sementara masyarakat (BLSM) ke dalam kerangka APBN-P yang nilainya sekitar Rp 11,6 triliun.

Ms. Meadows was the older sister of Audrey Meadows, who played Alice Kramden on “The Honeymooners.”

Ms. Turner and her twin sister founded the Love Kitchen in 1986 in a church basement in Knoxville, Tenn., and it continues to provide clothing and meals.

BEIJING (AP) — The head of Taiwan's Nationalists reaffirmed the party's support for eventual unification with the mainland when he met Monday with Chinese President Xi Jinping as part of continuing rapprochement between the former bitter enemies.

Nationalist Party Chairman Eric Chu, a likely presidential candidate next year, also affirmed Taiwan's desire to join the proposed Chinese-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank during the meeting in Beijing. China claims Taiwan as its own territory and doesn't want the island to join using a name that might imply it is an independent country.

Chu's comments during his meeting with Xi were carried live on Hong Kong-based broadcaster Phoenix Television.

The Nationalists were driven to Taiwan by Mao Zedong's Communists during the Chinese civil war in 1949, leading to decades of hostility between the sides. Chu, who took over as party leader in January, is the third Nationalist chairman to visit the mainland and the first since 2009.

Relations between the communist-ruled mainland and the self-governing democratic island of Taiwan began to warm in the 1990s, partly out of their common opposition to Taiwan's formal independence from China, a position advocated by the island's Democratic Progressive Party.

Despite increasingly close economic ties, the prospect of political unification has grown increasingly unpopular on Taiwan, especially with younger voters. Opposition to the Nationalists' pro-China policies was seen as a driver behind heavy local electoral defeats for the party last year that led to Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou resigning as party chairman.

With 12 tournament victories in his career, Mr. Peete was the most successful black professional golfer before Tiger Woods.

Ms. von Furstenberg made her debut in the movies and on the Broadway stage in the early 1950s as a teenager and later reinvented herself as a television actress, writer and philanthropist.

Mr. Napoleon was a self-taught musician whose career began in earnest with the orchestra led by Chico Marx of the Marx Brothers.

Hired in 1968, a year before their first season, Mr. Fanning spent 25 years with the team, managing them to their only playoff appearance in Canada.

At the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Suzman’s signature accomplishment was the central role he played in creating a global network of surveys on aging.

Todd Heisler/The New York Times

Children playing last week in Sandtown-Winchester, the Baltimore neighborhood where Freddie Gray was raised. One young resident called it “a tough community.”

Hard but Hopeful Home to ‘Lot of Freddies’

The neighborhood where Freddie Gray came of age has survived harrowing rates of unemployment, poor health, violent crime and incarceration.

A former member of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Mr. Smedvig helped found the wide-ranging Empire Brass quintet.

Mr. Pfaff was an international affairs columnist and author who found Washington’s intervention in world affairs often misguided.

Ms. Plisetskaya, renowned for her fluidity of movement, expressive acting and willful personality, danced on the Bolshoi stage well into her 60s, but her life was shadowed by Stalinism.

THE WRITERS ASHLEY AND JAQUAVIS COLEMAN know the value of a good curtain-raiser. The couple have co-authored dozens of novels, and they like to start them with a bang: a headlong action sequence, a blast of violence or sex that rocks readers back on their heels. But the Colemans concede they would be hard-pressed to dream up anything more gripping than their own real-life opening scene.

In the summer of 2001, JaQuavis Coleman was a 16-year-old foster child in Flint, Mich., the former auto-manufacturing mecca that had devolved, in the wake of General Motors’ plant closures, into one of the country’s most dangerous cities, with a decimated economy and a violent crime rate more than three times the national average. When JaQuavis was 8, social services had removed him from his mother’s home. He spent years bouncing between foster families. At 16, JaQuavis was also a businessman: a crack dealer with a network of street-corner peddlers in his employ.

One day that summer, JaQuavis met a fellow dealer in a parking lot on Flint’s west side. He was there to make a bulk sale of a quarter-brick, or “nine-piece” — a nine-ounce parcel of cocaine, with a street value of about $11,000. In the middle of the transaction, JaQuavis heard the telltale chirp of a walkie-talkie. His customer, he now realized, was an undercover policeman. JaQuavis jumped into his car and spun out onto the road, with two unmarked police cars in pursuit. He didn’t want to get into a high-speed chase, so he whipped his car into a church parking lot and made a run for it, darting into an alleyway behind a row of small houses, where he tossed the quarter-brick into some bushes. When JaQuavis reached the small residential street on the other side of the houses, he was greeted by the police, who handcuffed him and went to search behind the houses where, they told him, they were certain he had ditched the drugs. JaQuavis had been dealing since he was 12, had amassed more than $100,000 and had never been arrested. Now, he thought: It’s over.

But when the police looked in the bushes, they couldn’t find any cocaine. They interrogated JaQuavis, who denied having ever possessed or sold drugs. They combed the backyard alley some more. After an hour of fruitless efforts, the police were forced to unlock the handcuffs and release their suspect.

JaQuavis was baffled by the turn of events until the next day, when he received a phone call. The previous afternoon, a 15-year-old girl had been sitting in her home on the west side of Flint when she heard sirens. She looked out of the window of her bedroom, and watched a young man throw a package in the bushes behind her house. She recognized him. He was a high school classmate — a handsome, charismatic boy whom she had admired from afar. The girl crept outside and grabbed the bundle, which she hid in her basement. “I have something that belongs to you,” Ashley Snell told JaQuavis Coleman when she reached him by phone. “You wanna come over here and pick it up?”

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In the Colemans’ first novel, “Dirty Money” (2005), they told a version of this story. The outline was the same: the drug deal gone bad, the dope chucked in the bushes, the fateful phone call. To the extent that the authors took poetic license, it was to tone down the meet-cute improbability of the true-life events. In “Dirty Money,” the girl, Anari, and the crack dealer, Maurice, circle each other warily for a year or so before coupling up. But the facts of Ashley and JaQuavis’s romance outstripped pulp fiction. They fell in love more or less at first sight, moved into their own apartment while still in high school and were married in 2008. “We were together from the day we met,” Ashley says. “I don’t think we’ve spent more than a week apart in total over the past 14 years.”

That partnership turned out to be creative and entrepreneurial as well as romantic. Over the past decade, the Colemans have published nearly 50 books, sometimes as solo writers, sometimes under pseudonyms, but usually as collaborators with a byline that has become a trusted brand: “Ashley & JaQuavis.” They are marquee stars of urban fiction, or street lit, a genre whose inner-city settings and lurid mix of crime, sex and sensationalism have earned it comparisons to gangsta rap. The emergence of street lit is one of the big stories in recent American publishing, a juggernaut that has generated huge sales by catering to a readership — young, black and, for the most part, female — that historically has been ill-served by the book business. But the genre is also widely maligned. Street lit is subject to a kind of triple snobbery: scorned by literati who look down on genre fiction generally, ignored by a white publishing establishment that remains largely indifferent to black books and disparaged by African-American intellectuals for poor writing, coarse values and trafficking in racial stereotypes.

But if a certain kind of cultural prestige is shut off to the Colemans, they have reaped other rewards. They’ve built a large and loyal fan base, which gobbles up the new Ashley & JaQuavis titles that arrive every few months. Many of those books are sold at street-corner stands and other off-the-grid venues in African-American neighborhoods, a literary gray market that doesn’t register a blip on best-seller tallies. Yet the Colemans’ most popular series now regularly crack the trade fiction best-seller lists of The New York Times and Publishers Weekly. For years, the pair had no literary agent; they sold hundreds of thousands of books without banking a penny in royalties. Still, they have earned millions of dollars, almost exclusively from cash-for-manuscript deals negotiated directly with independent publishing houses. In short, though little known outside of the world of urban fiction, the Colemans are one of America’s most successful literary couples, a distinction they’ve achieved, they insist, because of their work’s gritty authenticity and their devotion to a primal literary virtue: the power of the ripping yarn.

“When you read our books, you’re gonna realize: ‘Ashley & JaQuavis are storytellers,’ ” says Ashley. “Our tales will get your heart pounding.”

THE COLEMANS’ HOME BASE — the cottage from which they operate their cottage industry — is a spacious four-bedroom house in a genteel suburb about 35 miles north of downtown Detroit. The house is plush, but when I visited this past winter, it was sparsely appointed. The couple had just recently moved in, and had only had time to fully furnish the bedroom of their 4-year-old son, Quaye.

In conversation, Ashley and JaQuavis exude both modesty and bravado: gratitude for their good fortune and bootstrappers’ pride in having made their own luck. They talk a lot about their time in the trenches, the years they spent as a drug dealer and “ride-or-die girl” tandem. In Flint they learned to “grind hard.” Writing, they say, is merely a more elevated kind of grind.

“Instead of hitting the block like we used to, we hit the laptops,” says Ashley. “I know what every word is worth. So while I’m writing, I’m like: ‘Okay, there’s a hundred dollars. There’s a thousand dollars. There’s five thousand dollars.’ ”

They maintain a rigorous regimen. They each try to write 5,000 words per day, five days a week. The writers stagger their shifts: JaQuavis goes to bed at 7 p.m. and wakes up early, around 3 or 4 in the morning, to work while his wife and child sleep. Ashley writes during the day, often in libraries or at Starbucks.

They divide the labor in other ways. Chapters are divvied up more or less equally, with tasks assigned according to individual strengths. (JaQuavis typically handles character development. Ashley loves writing murder scenes.) The results are stitched together, with no editorial interference from one author in the other’s text. The real work, they contend, is the brainstorming. The Colemans spend weeks mapping out their plot-driven books — long conversations that turn into elaborate diagrams on dry-erase boards. “JaQuavis and I are so close, it makes the process real easy,” says Ashley. “Sometimes when I’m thinking of something, a plot point, he’ll say it out loud, and I’m like: ‘Wait — did I say that?’ ”

Their collaboration developed by accident, and on the fly. Both were bookish teenagers. Ashley read lots of Judy Blume and John Grisham; JaQuavis liked Shakespeare, Richard Wright and “Atlas Shrugged.” (Their first official date was at a Borders bookstore, where Ashley bought “The Coldest Winter Ever,” the Sister Souljah novel often credited with kick-starting the contemporary street-lit movement.) In 2003, Ashley, then 17, was forced to terminate an ectopic pregnancy. She was bedridden for three weeks, and to provide distraction and boost her spirits, JaQuavis challenged his girlfriend to a writing contest. “She just wasn’t talking. She was laying in bed. I said, ‘You know what? I bet you I could write a better book than you.’ My wife is real competitive. So I said, ‘Yo, all right, $500 bet.’ And I saw her eyes spark, like, ‘What?! You can’t write no better book than me!’ So I wrote about three chapters. She wrote about three chapters. Two days later, we switched.”

The result, hammered out in a few days, would become “Dirty Money.” Two years later, when Ashley and JaQuavis were students at Ferris State University in Western Michigan, they sold the manuscript to Urban Books, a street-lit imprint founded by the best-selling author Carl Weber. At the time, JaQuavis was still making his living selling drugs. When Ashley got the phone call informing her that their book had been bought, she assumed they’d hit it big, and flushed more than $10,000 worth of cocaine down the toilet. Their advance was a mere $4,000.

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Those advances would soon increase, eventually reaching five and six figures. The Colemans built their career, JaQuavis says, in a manner that made sense to him as a veteran dope peddler: by flooding the street with product. From the start, they were prolific, churning out books at a rate of four or five a year. Their novels made their way into stores; the now-defunct chain Waldenbooks, which had stores in urban areas typically bypassed by booksellers, was a major engine of the street-lit market. But Ashley and JaQuavis took advantage of distribution channels established by pioneering urban fiction authors such as Teri Woods and Vickie Stringer, and a network of street-corner tables, magazine stands, corner shops and bodegas. Like rappers who establish their bona fides with gray-market mixtapes, street-lit authors use this system to circumnavigate industry gatekeepers, bringing their work straight to the genre’s core readership. But urban fiction has other aficionados, in less likely places. “Our books are so popular in the prison system,” JaQuavis says. “We’re banned in certain penitentiaries. Inmates fight over the books — there are incidents, you know? I have loved ones in jail, and they’re like: ‘Yo, your books can’t come in here. It’s against the rules.’ ”

The appeal of the Colemans’ work is not hard to fathom. The books are formulaic and taut; they deliver the expected goods efficiently and exuberantly. The titles telegraph the contents: “Diary of a Street Diva,” “Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang,” “Murderville.” The novels serve up a stream of explicit sex and violence in a slangy, tangy, profane voice. In Ashley & JaQuavis’s books people don’t get killed: they get “popped,” “laid out,” get their “cap twisted back.” The smut is constant, with emphasis on the earthy, sticky, olfactory particulars. Romance novel clichés — shuddering orgasms, heroic carnal feats, superlative sexual skill sets — are rendered in the Colemans’ punchy patois.

Subtlety, in other words, isn’t Ashley & JaQuavis’s forte. But their books do have a grainy specificity. In “The Cartel” (2008), the first novel in the Colemans’ best-selling saga of a Miami drug syndicate, they catch the sights and smells of a crack workshop in a housing project: the nostril-stinging scent of cocaine and baking soda bubbling on stovetops; the teams of women, stripped naked except for hospital masks so they can’t pilfer the merchandise, “cutting up the cooked coke on the round wood table.” The subject matter is dark, but the Colemans’ tone is not quite noir. Even in the grimmest scenes, the mood is high-spirited, with the writers palpably relishing the lewd and gory details: the bodies writhing in boudoirs and crumpling under volleys of bullets, the geysers of blood and other bodily fluids.

The luridness of street lit has made it a flashpoint, inciting controversy reminiscent of the hip-hop culture wars of the 1980s and ’90s. But the street-lit debate touches deeper historical roots, reviving decades-old arguments in black literary circles about the mandate to uplift the race and present wholesome images of African-Americans. In 1928, W. E. B. Du Bois slammed the “licentiousness” of “Home to Harlem,” Claude McKay’s rollicking novel of Harlem nightlife. McKay’s book, Du Bois wrote, “for the most part nauseates me, and after the dirtier parts of its filth I feel distinctly like taking a bath.” Similar sentiments have greeted 21st-century street lit. In a 2006 New York Times Op-Ed essay, the journalist and author Nick Chiles decried “the sexualization and degradation of black fiction.” African-American bookstores, Chiles complained, are “overrun with novels that . . . appeal exclusively to our most prurient natures — as if these nasty books were pairing off back in the stockrooms like little paperback rabbits and churning out even more graphic offspring that make Ralph Ellison books cringe into a dusty corner.”

Copulating paperbacks aside, it’s clear that the street-lit debate is about more than literature, touching on questions of paternalism versus populism, and on middle-class anxieties about the black underclass. “It’s part and parcel of black elites’ efforts to define not only a literary tradition, but a racial politics,” said Kinohi Nishikawa, an assistant professor of English and African-American Studies at Princeton University. “There has always been a sense that because African-Americans’ opportunities to represent themselves are so limited in the first place, any hint of criminality or salaciousness would necessarily be a knock on the entire racial politics. One of the pressing debates about African-American literature today is: If we can’t include writers like Ashley & JaQuavis, to what extent is the foundation of our thinking about black literature faulty? Is it just a literature for elites? Or can it be inclusive, bringing urban fiction under the purview of our umbrella term ‘African-American literature’?”

Defenders of street lit note that the genre has a pedigree: a tradition of black pulp fiction that stretches from Chester Himes, the midcentury author of hardboiled Harlem detective stories, to the 1960s and ’70s “ghetto fiction” of Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines, to the current wave of urban fiction authors. Others argue for street lit as a social good, noting that it attracts a large audience that might otherwise never read at all. Scholars like Nishikawa link street lit to recent studies showing increased reading among African-Americans. A 2014 Pew Research Center report found that a greater percentage of black Americans are book readers than whites or Latinos.

For their part, the Colemans place their work in the broader black literary tradition. “You have Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, James Baldwin — all of these traditional black writers, who wrote about the struggles of racism, injustice, inequality,” says Ashley. “We’re writing about the struggle as it happens now. It’s just a different struggle. I’m telling my story. I’m telling the struggle of a black girl from Flint, Michigan, who grew up on welfare.”

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Perhaps there is a high-minded case to be made for street lit. But the virtues of Ashley & JaQuavis’s work are more basic. Their novels do lack literary polish. The writing is not graceful; there are passages of clunky exposition and sex scenes that induce guffaws and eye rolls. But the pleasure quotient is high. The books flaunt a garish brand of feminism, with women characters cast not just as vixens, but also as gangsters — cold-blooded killers, “murder mamas.” The stories are exceptionally well-plotted. “The Cartel” opens by introducing its hero, the crime boss Carter Diamond; on page 9, a gunshot spatters Diamond’s brain across the interior of a police cruiser. The book then flashes back seven years and begins to hurtle forward again — a bullet train, whizzing readers through shifting alliances, romantic entanglements and betrayals, kidnappings, shootouts with Haitian and Dominican gangsters, and a cliffhanger closing scene that leaves the novel’s heroine tied to a chair in a basement, gruesomely tortured to the edge of death. Ashley & JaQuavis’s books are not Ralph Ellison, certainly, but they build up quite a head of steam. They move.

The Colemans are moving themselves these days. They recently signed a deal with St. Martin’s Press, which will bring out the next installment in the “Cartel” series as well as new solo series by both writers. The St. Martin’s deal is both lucrative and legitimizing — a validation of Ashley and JaQuavis’s work by one of publishing’s most venerable houses. The Colemans’ ambitions have grown, as well. A recent trilogy, “Murderville,” tackles human trafficking and the blood-diamond industry in West Africa, with storylines that sweep from Sierra Leone to Mexico to Los Angeles. Increasingly, Ashley & JaQuavis are leaning on research — traveling to far-flung settings and hitting the books in the libraries — and spending less time mining their own rough-and-tumble past.

But Flint remains a source of inspiration. One evening not long ago, JaQuavis led me on a tour of his hometown: a popular roadside bar; the parking lot where he met the undercover cop for the ill-fated drug deal; Ashley’s old house, the site of his almost-arrest. He took me to a ramshackle vehicle repair shop on Flint’s west side, where he worked as a kid, washing cars. He showed me a bathroom at the rear of the garage, where, at age 12, he sneaked away to inspect the first “boulder” of crack that he ever sold. A spray-painted sign on the garage wall, which JaQuavis remembered from his time at the car wash, offered words of warning:

WHAT EVERY YOUNG MAN SHOULD KNOW
ABOUT USING A GUN:
MURDER . . . 30 Years
ARMED ROBBERY . . . 15 Years
ASSAULT . . . 15 Years
RAPE . . . 20 Years
POSSESSION . . . 5 Years
JACKING . . . 20 YEARS

“We still love Flint, Michigan,” JaQuavis says. “It’s so seedy, so treacherous. But there’s some heart in this city. This is where it all started, selling books out the box. In the days when we would get those little $40,000 advances, they’d send us a couple boxes of books for free. We would hit the streets to sell our books, right out of the car trunk. It was a hustle. It still is.”

One old neighborhood asset that the Colemans have not shaken off is swagger. “My wife is the best female writer in the game,” JaQuavis told me. “I believe I’m the best male writer in the game. I’m sleeping next to the best writer in the world. And she’s doing the same.”

A 2-minute-42-second demo recording captured in one take turned out to be a one-hit wonder for Mr. Ely, who was 19 when he sang the garage-band classic.