"Because Murder is More Fun Away From Home"
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| Photo by your humbler blogkeeper/shooter, Peter Rozovsky |
"It was an old rooming house a few blocks behind the Ambassador Hotel. ... The light in the lower hall was dim, barely illuminating the lower steps; at the top of the stairs the darkness was cut only by a narrow knife of light coming from beneath the first door.
"Behind the door was one man, and a voice ... "© Peter Rozovsky 2015
Labels: miscellaneous, noir photos, photography
posted by Peter Rozovsky at 12:23 AM
This blog is a proud winner of the 2009 Spinetingler Award for special services to the industry and its blogkeeper a proud former guest on Wisconsin Public Radio's Here on Earth. In civilian life I'm a copy editor in Philadelphia. When not reading crime fiction, I like to read history. When doing neither, I like to travel. When doing none of the above, I like listening to music or playing it, the latter rarely and badly. Click here to find an independent bookstore near you.
17 Comments:
Ay-ay-ay! Too scary.
I am clueless -- in spite of your clues. Perhaps I don't have good enough memory for these kinds of challenges. (Ha! If you have been following my blog, you will understand how loaded the comment about my memory really is.) And the photo is too damned creepy!
Weeelll...Ross MacDonald? I really will be shocked if I'm right.
Peter,
Reminds me of a Chandler short story I read long ago.
Seana: Ha! It's not what you think.
I looked it up--the passage, I mean--so can't guess, but I will say I did think it was a woman. I was guessing Dorothy B. Hughes.
R.T., I provided no clues, so if you're clueless, I'm responsible in part.
The photo has nothing to do with the passage, by the way.
Philip, Ross MacDonald is a good guess for reasons related to the comment following yours.
Fred, it's not Chandler, but I chose the passage figuring someone would guess that it was. That's why the Ross MacDonald guess was good.
Seana: What made you think it was a woman? A resemblance to Dorothy B. Hughes' writing?
No, for some reason the combination of the style and the picture made me think of Dorothy B. Hughes' Ride the Pink Horse, and I knew you had led a panel which highlighted some women authors of that era. A process of association and deduction I guess.
Seana: You're a brilliant detective, and I'm a befuddled perp, because the picture was a subconscious clue, it a clue at all. I chose it simply because it was one of my noir shots that I don't think I had put up before.
I did indeed become acquainted with this author because of the panel you mentioned, though she was not one of the writers discussed on the panel. I thought about throwing in her pre-writing career as a clue, just to make things interesting.
Yes, I know her name but haven't read her or anything about her.
She was one of the names that came up in my discussions with panelists of what authors they would choose as their subject--and one of these days I will reveal her name here.
Interesting that both Fred and I should have noted a stylistic resemblance to Chandler. One of my questions on the panel concerned the extent to which mid-century female American crime writers were creating something new with their focus on domestic crime, or whether they and Chandler were drawing on something common in American life at the time. I chose Chandler because in The Big Sleep, the novel more than the movie, a family (the Sternwoods) is the locus of all the drama.
I should mention that I had great fun preparing for the panel. In addition to the authors who made it into the discussion, I quite enjoyed reading books by some of the authors that the panelists considered but wound up not choosing. I hope to have a similar experience with a similar panel at Bouchercon this year in Raleigh, N.C.
It was an excellent panel, Peter. I've already become acquainted with Dorothy Hitchens because of it, and I'll catch up with some of the others in time, I'm sure.
Milton Ozaki and the author I quote in this post were under consideration for the panel, but the panelists eventually chose to discuss other authors instead. Between those two and the authors who did make it, I think I read eight authors for the first time preparing for the panel. I had never had so much fun with panel preparations.
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