Bouchercon 2014 in a few more words and pictures

Gary Phillips brought up the mysterious Roosevelt Mallory during the  "Beyond Hammett, Chandler, and Spillane: Lesser Known Writers of the Pulp and Paperback Eras" panel I moderated at Bouchercon 2014 in Long Beach.  I now have Double Trouble, third of Mallory's four Radcliff novels, on order.


I've already mentioned my discovery of Dolores Hitchens, Charlotte Armstrong, Roy Huggins, and Ennis Willie in the course of my preparation for the panel, thanks to panelists Sarah Weinman, Sara J. Henry, and Max Allan Collins.

This was an especially rich Bouchercon for new discoveries, and I'm grateful to the panelists who helped me make them. (I intend no slight to the fifth panelist, Charles Kelly. I'd already started reading his author, Dan J. Marlowe, two years before the convention.) And here are a few more photos from Bouchercon 2014, all photos by your formerly humble blog keeper, with the exception of the Double Trouble cover.

At left is Ingrid Willis, who did such a fine job as chair of this year's Bouchercon. The noirish fellow at right is Stacey Cochran, who is doing the same job for Bouchercon 2015 in Raleigh, N.C. I've already registered. Have you?

Finally, two pics of my Bouchercon peeps and one from after the con. At left, Ali Karim points to the visual welcome from the Hyatt Regency Long Beach. At right/below, Mike Stotter contemplates the world through the prism of David Morrell's Macavity Award for Murder As a Fine Art. Below left, a mammoth reflected in the Lake Pit at the Page Museum/La Brea Tar Pits. The mammoth is a reproduction based on fossil evidence. The oily slick is real.  (Read all my Bouchercon posts from before, during, and after the convention.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Bouchercon, Days 1 and 2

A few highlights of Bouchercon's first two full days:

Sara Blaedel

John McFetridge

Both panels I moderated Friday went supremely well. Many thanks to panelists Gerard Brennan, Paul Charles, Stuart Neville, Max Allan Collins, Sara J. Henry, Charles Kelly, Gary Phillips, Saeah Weinman.

Two women at the bar mistook me for Jon "Crimespree/organizer of Bouchercons/center of the crime fiction universe" Jordan, though one conceded she was drunk at the time.

Mark Billingham

Kwei Quartey

Ali Karim, Stav Sheewx

Mike Stotter, Bob Truluck

© Peter Rozovsky 2014  

My Bouchercon panels: Charles Kelly and Dan J. Marlowe

Chapter 14 of Charles Kelly's Dan J. Marlowe biography reminded me that I attained my majority in a degenerate age:

"On March 23, 1976 ... Marlowe told a friend in a letter, `Gold Medal has just cancelled flat my Operation series.' Fawcett Gold Medal editor Joseph Elder had informed Marlowe, `Basically this kind of story is not working at all in today’s market. The mystery/ suspense novel as a paperback category is failing left and right, and very few of the category heroes are surviving.'” 

I was in my mid-teens then, which meant that by the time I was ready to start exploring crime fiction in a serious way, even reprints of those old paperback originals were going out of print, and the originals were often available only under plastic wrap, complete with brittle pages and high prices. (I have no figures to back me up, but I suspect that one benefit of electronic publishing is increased availability of books that had appeared as paperback originals. Gold Medal's decision to drop Marlowe, by the way, happened during CBS' takeover of Fawcett, which ran Gold Medal. No doubt CBS would have told worried readers that it was refocusing its crime offerings to better serve our customers. Always to better serve our customers.)

Kelly's book is called Gunshots in Another Room: The Forgotten Life of Dan J. Marlowe, and it's refreshingly free of lurid details, considering that Marlowe was a professional gambler, an amnesiac, a rambler, and a spanking fetishist who also befriended and collaborated with a bank robber who had made the EBI's Ten Most Wanted list. That Marlowe was also a Rotarian, a small-town Republican councilman, a hardworking businessman, a thoroughgoing professional, and a man who met setbacks with industry and equanimity are salutary reminders that real life is often more interesting and less sensational than the publicity machine (with our enthusiastic complicity) would have us believe.

Above all, Kelly knows that the writing is the thing, and he lards his book with excerpts from and summaries and discussions of Marlowe's work. And quite a body of work it is. The protagonist of the great The Name of the Game Is Death is scarier than Richard Stark's Parker, what Parker might have been had Stark chosen to get inside his (Parker's) head.

If you like Parker (I wrote in a previous Marlowe post), you might like Marlowe. If you like Stephen King's "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption," you might like Marlowe. If you like revenge stories and you want to see how a master wrote them, you might like Marlowe. If you like man-on-the-run stories, you might like Marlowe. If you like your sex scenes with a bit of an edge, you might like Marlowe. (Read a sample of Kelly on Marlowe from Allan Guthrie's Noir Originals.)

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Charles Kelly will discuss Dan J. Marlowe as part of a panel I'll moderate at Bouchercon 2014. The panel is called "Beyond Hammett, Chandler, and Spillane: Lesser Known Writers of the Pulp and Paperback Eras," and it happens at 3 p.m, Friday, Nov. 14. See you there.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Sara J. Henry joins Team Detectives Beyond Borders for Bouchercon 2014 panel

Sara J. Henry has joined the "Beyond Hammett, Chandler, and Spillane: Lesser Known Writers of the Pulp and Paperback Eras" panel that I'll moderate at Bouchercon 2014 in Long Beach, Calif.

Sara is the author of the novels Learning to Swim and A Cold and Lonely Place, the latter of which will be up for the best-novel Anthony Award at Bouchercon. For my panel, she'll discuss Lester Dent, the prolific principal author of Doc Savage, with a few remarks about Charlotte Armstrong, whose A Dram of Poison won the best-novel Edgar Award in 1957.

I met Sara at Bouchercon 2008 in Baltimore, where she made her first big crime-fiction splash when everyone but me mistook her for Sarah Weinman. That's why I'm especially tickled that Sarah Weinman will also be on the panel. (Get a sneak peak at Sara and Sarah here, and see what all the confusion was about.)

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Beyond Hammett, Chandler, and Spillane: Lesser Known Writers of the Pulp and Paperback Eras happens at 3 p.m., Friday, Nov. 14, at the Hyatt Regency, Long Beach. Not everyone on the panel is named Sara or Sarah, spent formative years in Ontario, or is haunted by a crime-fiction doppelganger. Max Allan Collins, Charles Kelly, and Gary Phillips will also take part. 

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

My Bouchercon panels: More on the great Dan J. Marlowe

(Photo by your humble blogkeeper; has
nothing to do with Dan J. Marlowe)

Earlier this year I called Dan J. Marlowe's first novel, Doorway to Death, "loaded with sex and adverbs," and for a while there I thought Marlowe, who published the book in 1959, was simply using hard-boiled syntax that came naturally to him from crime writing of the 1930s and '40s.  Then I started coming across examples like these:

"He sighed, stretched lengthily..."

"He stripped the bed, walked stiffleggedly to the bathroom.."

"Inside the panelled doors he rushed softfootedly past the drowsing drinkers..."

"Manuel’s dark eyes lingered fascinatedly..."

“`Come in, come in!' Lieutenant Dameron barked irritatedly..."

"Resignedly he dried his face and took down the electric razor."

and I began to suspect that Marlowe was having fun, bidding a fond farewell to the adverb-laden hard-boiled prose of his younger days, deliberately taking it over the top. A sentence from the great Name of the Game Is Death confirmed the impression:

"I backed out tanglefootedly under Mrs. Newman’s bright-eyed inspection."

to which I smiled not just amazedly, but also appreciatingly.  In any case, by the time Strongarm appeared in 1963, the extravagant-adverb count was way down, from Doorway to Death's 73 words ending in -dly to 43.

But Marlowe was more than just adverbs and odd word choices (“'You’re in trouble, Jerry!' she accused her husband.")  If you like Richard Stark's Parker, you might like Marlowe. If you like Stephen King's "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption," you might like Marlowe. If you like revenge stories and you want to see how a master wrote them, you might like Marlowe. If you like man-on-the-run stories, you might like Marlowe. If you  like your sex scenes with a bit of an edge, you might like Marlowe. A blog post by Ed Gorman sums up nicely Marlowe's ability to evoke so many of the great hard-boiled crime writers.

*

Charles Kelly's Gunshots in Another Room bears the subtitle "The Forgotten Life of Dan J. Marlowe," so I'll pick it up with the expectation of learning why that strange and interesting life has been forgotten. In the meantime, Kelly tells a short version of Marlowe's story over at Allan Guthrie's Noir Originals.
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Charles Kelly will discuss Dan J. Marlowe as part of a panel I'll moderate at Bouchercon 2014. The panel is called "Beyond Hammett, Chandler, and Spillane: Lesser Known Writers of the Pulp and Paperback Eras," and it happens at 3 p.m, Friday, Nov. 14. See you there. 

© Peter Rozovsky 2013, 2014

My Bouchercon 2014 panels: The magnificent, mysterious Dan J. Marlowe

I read older books as artifacts, particularly those from periods that have labels slapped on their foreheads such as the 1950s and early 1960s. You probably do the same, and we can't help it, especially in a genre as saturated with archetypes and prototypes as hard-boiled crime fiction.

That's why I like Dan. J. Marlowe so much. He was no path breaker, like Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler. The novels of his that I've read are recognizably products of their time (the late 1950s and early 1960s) unlike, say, Hammett's The Glass Key, parts of which could have been written yesterday rather than in 1931. But Marlowe wrote and told stories and worked the conventions so well that even when he writes a happy ending to a hard-boiled story, it seems fresh.

I've just read Marlowe's Strongarm after previously having read The Name of the Game is Death, One Endless Hour, Vengeance Man, and Four for the Money. Marlowe could write tough, and he could write funny, and by all rights, he ought to be at least as celebrated as Donald Westlake. I'll leave you with a selection from Strongarm before letting you know where you might begin exploring the mystery of why he was not:

“`You’ll dance to a different tune now, buster,' Foley announced with vicious satisfaction. `This is even better than we’d —' his voice died away. He had expected me to run. His popping eyes didn’t believe it when I went after him. `No! No! No!' he screamed, wrapping his arms around his head. I wrenched them away. He started to dive out of the chair, and I smashed him right in the mouth. I hit him twice more. I felt bone go. I didn’t know whether it was his or mine. I don’t think he felt the third one. I looked at him slumped in the chair with blood streaming down his shirt front. It was only a down payment on what I owed him, but for now it would have to do.”

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Charles Kelly's Gunshots in Another Room bears the subtitle "The Forgotten Life of Dan J. Marlowe," so I'll pick it up with the expectation of learning why that strange and interesting life has been forgotten. In the meantime, Kelly tells a short version of Marlowe's story over at Allan Guthrie's Noir Originals.
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Charles Kelly will discuss Dan J. Marlowe as part of a panel I'll moderate at Bouchercon 2014. The panel is called Beyond Hammett, Chandler, and Spillane: Lesser Known Writers of the Pulp and Paperback Eras, and it happens at 3 p.m, Friday, Nov. 14. See you there. 

© Peter Rozovsky 2013, 2014

My Bouchercon 2014 panels

I'll moderate two panels at Bouchercon 2014 in Long Beach, and I am excited about both.

On Friday, Nov. 14, at 11:30 a.m., it's

Belfast Noir: Stories of Mayhem and Murder from Northern Ireland, with Gerard Brennan,  Paul Charles, Adrian McKinty, and Stuart Neville.

Then I'm back at 3 p.m. for

Beyond Hammett, Chandler, and Spillane: Lesser Known Writers of the Pulp and Paperback Eras,  Max Allan Collins, Sara J. Henry, Charles Kelly, Gary Phillips, and Sarah Weinman. Each will discuss one of his or her favorite authors, a list that includes Dan J. Marlowe, Joseph Nazel, Dolores Hitchens, and to be announced.

So, one panel with some of my favorite writers from the planet's most dynamic crime fiction scene, and another with some of crime fiction's sharpest minds shining their intellectual searchlights into out-of-the-way corners of the crime fiction world. This is going to be fun

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Hard-boiled at the beach

I'm bursting with enthusiasm for my adopted country, for its misfits, its losers, its hard cases, and its beaches.

I've continued my project, announced here, of reading classic American hard-boiled and noir, and I'll likely continue to do so over the next few days at an undisclosed location on the Atlantic coast. And that means blogging may be light here at Detectives Beyond Borders until next week, lest I get sun screen and beach sand all over my keyboard. In the meantime, a few notes:

1) I like Jim Thompson's The Getaway better than Edward Anderson's Thieves Like Us. Each is saturated with sympathy for its characters, each occasionally lapses into speechifying, but Thompson, perhaps more in this novel than in his others, has considerable fun on the way to his hellish destination.

2) Why isn't Dan J. Marlowe better known? He did his best writing in the know-it-all, smirk-at-everything, over-the-top 1960s, yet his heist novels avoid both nostalgia and jokiness. And The Vengeance Man combines Ross Thomas' eye for political shenanigans with Jim Thompson's fatalism.

Happily, readers will soon be able to learn more about Marlowe and his interesting life (He was a professional gambler, a Rotarian, a Republican city councilman, and a friend of a notorious bank robber.) Gunshots in Another Room: The Forgotten Life of Dan J. Marlowe is scheduled for publication this fall. In the meantime, here's an appreciation of Marlowe from the biography's author, Charles Kelly.

3) Why is Paul Cain's Fast One not included in the Library of America's American Noir of the 1930s and 40s collection? It's the best, toughest, hardest-hitting American crime novel whose author is not named Chandler or Hammett. I'll be sure to ask the LofA volume's editor, Robert Polito, the reason for the omission when we meet in good fellowship at Noircon 2012 in November.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012