Bouchercon 2017, in which I'll answer questions rather than ask them

Sarah Weinman. Photo by Peter Rozovsky
for Detectives Beyond Borders

Sarah Weinman will step to the microphone to ask me some incisive questions on a panel at Bouchercon 2017 in Toronto this October. The panel is called "History of the Genre," it will be my first gig as a panelist rather than a moderator, and I'll share the stage with Martin Edwards, David A. Poulsen, Margaret Cannon, and Alex Gray.

Sarah is one of the savviest people in crime fiction, and so is Martin. Margaret is one of the more respected crime fiction critics out there, and Alex and David are two authors new to me, which is one of the pleasures of Bouchercon panels. I'm going to have some fun and learn something from this session, and I hope you'll be part of it.

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"History of the Genre: Covering decades of good mysteries and its subgenres" happens from 11:30 to 12:30 a.m. in the Sheraton E room at the Sheraton Centre  in Toronto. See you there.

© Peter Rozovsky 2017

Sunshine Noir, the CWA Dagger awards, and me

I feel a kinship with the shortlists (one word in British usage) for the Crime Writers Association Dagger awards, announced last week. Two of the six finalists for best short story — "The Assassination," by Leye Adenle; and "Snakeskin," by Ovidia Yu   — appeared in Sunshine Noir, a collection of short stories set in hot places. Here's what I wrote about Adenle's story in my introduction to the volume (I gave the introduction the title "Clime Fiction," and the indulgent editors, Annamaria Alfieri and Stan Trollip, in his role as part of the writing team of Michael Stanley, were kind enough to let it stand):

"Leye Adenle’s `The Assassination' is a taut tale of death and political corruption that harks back to honorable precedents in crime and espionage writing but is redolent of its setting, which I take to be the author’s country, Nigeria."

Here's what I wrote about Yu's:

"If you want gothic-tinged domestic mystery, you’ll find it in Sunshine Noir. (Family secrets flourish in steamy air. Try Ovidia Yu's `Snake Skin.')"

Three of the remaining shortlisted stories are from Motives for Murder, edited by Martin Edwards, including one by Edwards himself. I have no connection with Motives for Murder, but I will join Edwards on a panel at Bouchercon 2017 in Toronto. So when it comes to Daggers, I know almost everybody's shorts.

(Read about the nominees in all categories on the CWA website: https://thecwa.co.uk/the-daggers/)

© Peter Rozovsky 2017

What was the high point of sound engineering in American movies? plus two questions for readers

James Grady, author of Six Days of the Condor, the
novel on which Three Days of the Condor is based.
Photo by Peter Rozovsky for Detectives Beyond
Borders

Were the late 1960s into the mid-1970s a high point of sound engineering in American crime movies? Bullitt (1967) is noted for its car chase, but, I wrote when I saw the movie for the first time that:

"I don't remember ever having seen a movie so self-conscious about its sound editing. Footsteps clatter loudly and significantly. Characters gesticulate and argue behind glass, seen but unheard. Pumps pump menacingly. Characters breathe loudly, and if you know Jacques Tati, you know where the movie makers got their idea for the hospital lobby scene with its busy ambient sound and utter absence of dialogue."

Last weekend I saw Three Days of the Condor (1975) at the Film Forum, and it used the teletype machine in the CIA front-organization office the way Bullitt used machines (EKGs) in an intensive care unit. Reviewing a DVD rerelease of Bullitt in 2005, the American Cinematographer website wrote of the famous car chase that "the music drops out and the whole scene is `scored' with a cacophony of revving engines and screeching tires."

I like that better than I like thudding music at one extreme and the triteness of echoing footsteps at the other, but I don't know much of the history of sound in movies. So, two questions: What are the high points of sound in American movies, and What are your favorite uses of sound (and why)?

© Peter Rozovsky 2017

Good noir at a good bar, Part II: The Photographs

Angel Luis Colón

A few more photos from the Noir at the Bar I wrote about yesterday, all by Peter Rozovsky for Detectives Beyond Borders:

Suzanne Solomon

Nik Korpon, Angel Luis Colón, Nick Kolakowski,
Brian Panowich

Dj Alkimist, Nancy ThiLan Hart-Aymar

Suzanne Solomon (left), Ed Aymar
(right), Todd_Robinson and Rory
Costello (in mirror)

Joe Clifford

© Peter Rozovsky 2017

Good noir at a good bar, Part I

I've complained, most recently in a discussion on Jay Stringer's Facebook wall, that "too many writers (of noir and neo-noir) think sticking their characters in a trailer park and having them crack wise while spitting out teeth near the meth lab is enough." I recently attended a Noir at the Bar at New York's Shade Bar that presented several exceptions. Here's what made some of those readings stand out.

Danny Gardner. Photos by Peter
Rozovsky for Detectives Beyond
Borders, except where notes.

Danny Gardner is also a stand-up comedian and an actor, so he reads well. Beyond that, his story, from an upcoming anthology inspired by Johnny Cash's songs ("Black people love Johnny Cash," he said, citing Cash's employment of black musicians and his refusal to play venues were black people were not admitted), hit on social themes, striking hard without coming on preachy. His story, he said, is about gun violence, its consequences, and who causes it. (Hint: It's not young black males.) When he did address a social problem directly, it seemed more an exciting Brechtian provocation than middle-class slumming, guilt mongering, or do-gooding.

Brian M. Panowich

Brian Panowich, unrecognizable at first because I'd never seen him without his cowboy hat, read with expression and emotion and offered the terrific sight gag of yanking out one of his teeth. The villain of his story was unexpected, as were the MacGuffin and, especially, the story's ending. Like Gardner's story, Panowich's offered unflinching explicit violence. Unlike too much new noir, neo-noir, and recent hard-boiled, both took that violence seriously, again without preaching or anything approaching torture porn.

Eric Beetner

Eric Beetner, who runs Noir at the Bar in Los Angeles, threw a gracious hat tip my way for creating Noir at the Bar here in Philadelphia in 2008. He also read a story that embraced the misty glamour of 1940s Los Angeles in every word without, however, tumbling into schmaltz. That's no easy feat, and it shows the man has chops.

Ed Aymar

Ed Aymar, who organizes Noir at the Bar in Washington, D.C., read a story that centered on looting and packed a contemporary punch even as it harked back in a highly satisfying way to noir's roots in melodrama. And these four writers are four reasons I feel better about new noir and neo-noir than I did last week.

(Jen Conley and Scott Adlerberg organized the New York event, and Gardner, Panowich, Beetner, and Aymar were just four of a large group of readers. I'll write about some of them soon, In the meantime, here's a photo of all the readers plus Jen and Scott, courtesy of Mark Krajnak.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2017

Le Trou, Donald Westlake, and everything: Atmosphere in noir and elsewhere

"`Don't you see? There's a plan there, but you have to convert it to the real world, to the people you've got and the places you'll be, and all the rest of it. You'd be the auteur."

-- May to Dortmunder in Jimmy the Kid, by Donald Westlake

Photos by Peter Rozovsky for Detectives Beyond Borders.

That photo at right is the closest thing to a noir photo I shot in New York Saturday, and that's only because it's black and white and has some dark shadows. OK, maybe the lack of natural light and the photo's underground setting have something to do with it. Oh, and the walkway in question runs under Times Square, but you might not know that unless I told you or unless you knew New York fairly well. But the point is that noir isn't just a literary form or a fatalistic view of life; it's also atmosphere.

It's Jeanne Moreau wandering through the streets of Paris in the rain looking for her lover in Elevator to the Gallows. It's Alain Delon smoking a cigarette in just about anything; Le Samourai will do for a start. Atmosphere of a different kind was at work in Le Trou, one of two movies that brought me to New York and the Film Forum.

Le Trou ("The Hole") is a 1960 French prison-break drama directed by Jacques Becker, and I suspect that many Americans will find that it doesn't feel like a prison movie. The five (!) prisoners crammed into a small cell at Paris' La Santé Prison don't fight or rape each other. Instead, they share the contents of packages they receive from the outside, and they cooperate on an escape plan.  The atmosphere, that is, is one of teamwork rather than confrontation. And Becker fills the movie with the five men digging and reconnoitering and planning without, however, gimmicky attention boosters and false drama and wrong turns and screeching music to tell viewers how they ought to feel. (J. Hoberman's New York Times article touches on some of these questions, with a hat tip to Suzanne Solomon for putting the article in my way.)
 
I included the Westlake snippet above because the coincidence of coming to a discussion of auteur theory just when I was preparing a post about a French movie from 1960 was too good to pass up. But Le Trou may remind viewers of Westlake's comic Dortmunder novels and the Parker heist dramas he wrote as Richard Stark. Parker is a planner and Dortmunder is a planner, and so are Roland and Manu, two of the cellmates who plan the escape in Le Trou. The other three are something like the Kelps and Murches and Grofields and Deverses who fill out the teams that execute Parker's and Dortmunder's plans.

I had some quibbles with Le Trou's ending; see the movie, and we'll talk about it.

© Peter Rozovsky 2017

My sixth cover photo!

My latest book-cover photo is now available, complete with a novel by Philadelphia's own Tony Knighton. Available on Amazon and elsewhere.

Knighton's Three Hours Past Midnight joins a worthy group of crime novels and story collections whose covers have featured my photography.

That group includes:


© Peter Rozovsky 2017