Bouchercon 2016, Part I: Crime with alligators

The Garden District, New Orleans.
Photos by Peter Rozovsky for
Detectives Beyond Borders

Bouchercon 2016 was like no other in my experience, with more music, more color, more humidity, more good food, more courtesy, more good fellowship, more nobility of character, more drama, more hospitality, and more alligators than any I'd attended before.   That's New Orleans and the bayou country, I guess.

My Thursday morning panel went as well as any I'd moderated. The panelists — Eric Beetner, Martin Edwards, Rick Ollerman, and Gary Phillips — were articulate, knowledgeable, and entertaining talking about their favorite crime writers of the past. Those crime writers included some I had previously read and enjoyed, including Charles Williams, Peter Rabe, and Michael Gilbert, and others new to me.

The latter included William Peter McGovern and the remarkable Clarence Cooper Jr. Ten minutes into the panel, Walter Mosley walked in and took a seat in the crowd. He even offered a trenchant and entertaining interjection during the session's question period. I have no photographic evidence of Mosley's presence, but you might be able to hear him on CDs and MP3 files of the session,  available from VW Tapes Conference Recordings.

Christa Faust

The fun had begun the previous night, with the best Noir at the Bar I have attended since I invented Noir at the Bar eight years ago. The Voodoo Lounge on North Rampart Street was a perfect venue: crowded, amiably seedy, with a low, steady buzz of talk punctuating breaks between the superb readings.

The highlights for me? Martyn Waites and Christa Faust, who write violence and grotesquery, which anyone can do, but who do so with sympathy and heart, which few even try.  John Rector's deadpan story, whose television food-show host character appears to cook something you'll never eat, was not just gross-out funny, but also superbly controlled. Johnny Shaw gave a hilarious reading-performance of a story featuring Chingón: The World’s Deadliest Mexican.

Chris Acker and the Growing Boys. French
Quarter, New Orleans

Sunday evening, two of us wandered the French Quarter, stopping in at bars or lingering in the street wherever the music sounded interesting. We heard funk and blues that brought home how important New Orleans was to the formation of rock and roll. We heard pure and clear country music from a sidewalk quartet whose audience included an 89-year-old woman who sang along to everything.

Jay Stringer, Noir at the Bar's
apparently headless host

But she couldn't top the blind man who walked into the first place we had stopped and danced up a storm using his impassive seeing-eye dog as a maypole. At one point in the evening a young man backing out of a doorway carrying an amplifier accidentally bumped my friend and said to her in a voice filled with concern: "Excuse me, sweetheart." That would not have happened in Philadelphia or Boston or Montreal or anywhere else I've ever been.

Music in the French Quarter,
New Orleans

Along the way we became separated from Ali Karim and Mike Stotter, much to Ali's consternation. But his anger had a benevolent cause: He had gone out of his way to help a fellow convention attendee who had got into trouble, and he was worried that the same had happened to us.  Ali is a good human being as well as a hilarious boon companion.

New Orleans food you know about already. Suffice it to say that the spices will wake you up and that the best meal I had was the andouille-crusted fish at the Palace Café. Cajun music? Sone of the rhythms are tricky, but a lot of the songs are based on a simple I-IV-V chord progression that even I can play.

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

Bright Women Wear Dark Hats, and other Noircon images

A good noir convention should always wind up at a vast and labyrinthine book shop. Philadelphia filled the bill with Noircon 2014 and Port Richmond Books. Photos by your humble blogkeeper, Peter Rozovsky, except where physically impossible.

Christa Faust

Anita Thompson, Suzanne Solomon

Andrew Nette, Ed Pettit

Jed Ayres and I re-enact an ancient
Noir at the Bar ritual

Scott Adlerberg

William Lashner

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Noircon, Day I

Christa Faust, Frank De Blase

So I'm sitting in the hotel bar Thursday night with Christa Faust, Frank De Blase, and the ex-LAPD detective who says his father killed Elizabeth Short, and I'm thinking, "This Noircon thing is kind of fun."

Earlier, I'd attended a panel that offered Flannery O'Connor's biographer, Jean W. Cash; and Patricia Highsmith's biographer, Joan Schenkar; in a conversation moderated by Jim Thompson's biographer, Robert Polito.  Were Highsmith and O'Connor radically different in temperament? Were they so far apart that they began to approach each other from the opposite direction? If you begin to suspect that NoirCon is not like other crime fiction conventions, you just may be right.

Later, after a fine, light convention-provided lunch, events included a kind of reading slam called "Three Minutes of Terror," in which twenty or so writers read from their work for no more than three minutes each, with the threat of ringing buzzers, flashing lights, and a chain-saw attack for anyone who exceeded the time limit. Among the well-received selections was a modified-for-oral-presentation version of this story, by your humble blogkeeper, the first time I had ever read fiction in public.

And now, before I head to track down more of my peeps, collapse in happy exhaustion, or both, here are a few good things people have said at the con, context to come later:

"The dog lived. I knew that was a bad sign."

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"Half man, half sponge."

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"He was so wicked, he had to go live in Switzerland."

© Peter Rozovsky 2014 

Pulp in Italy: An interview with author/editor/publisher Matteo Strukul, Part I

Matteo Strukul's Edizioni BD publishes Italian translations of comics, graphic novels, fiction, and non-fiction by authors including Dennis Lehane, Alan Moore, Joe R. Lansdale, Moebius, Michael Chabon, Warren Ellis, Stan Lee, Kazuo Koike, and Jacques Tardi. The Revolver imprint, of which he is line editor, brings hard-hitting authors such as Allan Guthrie, Ray Banks, Russel D. McLean, and Victor Gischler to Italian readers, with more to come from the likes of Charlie Huston and Christa Faust. He lives in Padua (Padova) in northern Italy's Veneto region and, when not publishing and editing, he writes. His first novel, La Ballata Di Mila, was shortlisted for Italy's Scerbanenco Prize. In the first of a two-part interview with Detectives Beyond Borders, Matteo Strukul talks about pulp fiction, Italian hard-boiled authors, comics, and his own discovery as an author by Massimo Carlotto. And, proving himself true kin to Detectives Beyond Borders, he has kind words about some of this blog's favorite Irish crime writers.

(Read Part II of the Detectives Beyond Borders interview with Matto Strukul.)

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Detectives Beyond Borders: Talk about the Revolver imprint, about the authors you chose, and why you chose them.

Matteo Strukul: First of all, Peter, thank you for the opportunity that you have given to me. It's great to answer your fantastic questions. I’m honored. Now, about Revolver… Revolver is an imprint focused on pulp crime fiction. We love to collect fast-paced novels. Every story has to be a real roller-coaster, a furious, well-plotted patchwork of wit and wise guys, ultra-violence and thrills, and unpredictable, lunatic characters. For these reasons we chose authors like Victor Gischler, Allan Guthrie, Tim Willocks, Christa Faust, Ray Banks. Personally, I love all these authors who are completely crazy and original but all of them have an intriguing, fascinating, irreverent approach to the genre. We want to have authors who have courage enough to break rules and to have faith in their stories and characters, doesn’t matter how crazy and strongly cruel those stories are. 

DBB: Your online biography says you were discovered by Massimo Carlotto. How did this discovery happen?

MS: Well, I was at the international Book Fair in Turin (Il salone del libro) in 2010 and, of course, Massimo Carlotto was also there. I remember that I went to the E/O publisher’s stand and said to him that I have a novel for him. Well, it was incredible when he said that he want to read it, because, man, I was and am a real fanatic of his work. At that time I was press officer with an independent and well-reputed publisher: Meridiano Zero.  I organized press campaigns for authors like David Peace, James Lee Burke, Derek Raymond. So, of course this fact doesn’t mean that I was an author but means, without any doubt, that I had a strong background. For this reason, I mean, he was curious.  I wrote for “Il Mattino di Padova,” my hometown newspaper, so he knew who I was, because Massimo is from Padova, too. So I was very lucky, in fact. Anyway, after some months, Colomba Rossi, who was responsible, together with Massimo, for a new imprint at Edizioni E/O, called Sabot/Age, sent to me an e-mail. I remember she said that my manuscript was fantastic and the character of Mila was amazing. She said also that Massimo Carlotto was really impressed and so, after that, they told me that they want to have me on board as author for the new imprint. It was amazing! 

DBB: Italy has produced some excellent, dark crime writers, such as Leonardo Sciascia and Giorgio Scerbanenco. Besides Massimo Carlotto and Carlo Lucarelli (with the De Luca novels), who are the best modern-day Italian noir, pulp, and hard-boiled writers? And what does the Anglo-American tradition give Italian readers that they will not find in Italian crime writing? Who are your favorite writers, artists, and filmmakers from that tradition?

MS: Modern-day Italian noir, pulp, and hard-boiled writers are Giancarlo De Cataldo, author of Romanzo Criminale and many other novels. A bigger-than-life and epic criminal saga, a cruel, merciless, bloody and magnificent tale about Banda della Magliana: a gang of thugs and mobsters that during the end of the seventies created a criminal empire in Rome and Italy. The novel tells the story of the relationship between criminals and corrupted politicians in Italy at that time, with gangs fighting for the control of drug traffic, prostitution and gambling in the different quarters of Rome. Another wonderful Italian novelist that I love is Maurizio De Giovanni, author of the Commissario Ricciardi series set in Naples in the early ‘30s, a fantastic police-procedural series.

DBB: Your own first novel, La Ballata Di Mila, reminds me of Quentin Tarantino’s movie Kill Bill, which was based on a comic book. You also publish a novel by Victor Gischler, whose work sometimes reads like a comic book without the pictures. How do comics influence the fiction you write and publish?

MS: Comic books are a big inspiration for my work. More than this, recently I have written Red Dread, an arc, drawn by international artist Alessandro Vitti (Marvel), with Mila as the main character. The arc was awarded the “Premio Leone di Narnia 2012” as best comic-book arc of the year. But anyway, I love authors like Garth Ennis, Warren Ellis, Alan Moore, Victor Gischler, as I said they are a big influence, in particular I think that Mila has a big debt to Ennis' The Punisher. When you read comics, sequences and cruel feelings like violence, anger, hatred, are literally graphic. I love to study the rhythm, the action, the storytelling. Comic-books and movies are a big inspiration for my work. For instance, Punisher stories like “Mother Russia” or “Barracuda,” by Garth Ennis, or “Welcome to the Bayou,” by Victor Gischler, are stylish visions of hell. You could taste (thanks to the amazing work of guys like artists Goran Parlov or Leandro Hernandez) reasons and motivations, souls and blood, and at the end of the story what you really think is that authors like Garth and Victor are able to go right to the point. No mercy on you, as reader, no fuckin’ cheesy lines.

DBB: A number of the authors published by Revolver write slam-bang, action-packed novels: Allan Guthrie, Ray Banks, Victor Gischler, and Christa Faust, for example. But you also publish Brian McGilloway, a quieter and more reflective writer than some of your other authors. How does McGilloway fit in with the publishing philosophy of Revolver?

MS: You know sometimes, we have to breathe. As you said, we love to publish action-packed novels, but at the same time we would like to offer different kind of crime fiction, different tunes and tastes, and Irish noir, for instance, is a wonderful new creature that, as publisher, we would like to show to the Italian readers. I hope to publish as soon as I can guys like Adrian McKinty or Stuart Neville but sometimes you cannot publish everything you want.

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Practise your Italian at Revolver's Web site and at Matteo Strukul's own site. Read about Italy's best current crime writers, crime in northeastern Italy, and a new Italian literary movement and crime fiction festival, coming soon in Part II of Detectives Beyond Borders' interview with Matteo Strukul.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Bouchercon Day 3: Panelist takes a fall

Saturday was the seventh panel I'd moderated at a Bouchercon, the most fun I've had while dressed in respectable clothes, and it almost never happened.

The panel, called "Murder Is Everywhere," was on the docket for 10:15 a.m., and the previous panel ran over. When the moderator thanked the guests and dismissed the audience, one of his panelists plunged off the back of the stage and required brief medical attention. "Oh, great," I thought. "More delays." Happily a small bandage and a few stitches were all the falling panelist needed, and he was later able to joke about the mishap.

Once the stage was cleared of the wounded, Yrsa Sigurðardóttir, Jeffrey Siger, Stanley Trollip (one half of the duo that writes as Michael Stanley), Tim Hallinan, Lisa Brackmann (filling in for Cara Black), and I took over for fifty-five minutes of illuminating and entertaining verbal high jinks that went over the allotted time by no more than a minute or two.

Bearer of appalling
animal parts

I knew the panelists well, and some of them had expressed a desire to do things a little differently, so I tried to avoid questions I'd asked in the past. One got the panel members debating whose country, Iceland, Greece, South Africa, Thailand, Mexico, or China, was worst off. Yrsa's mention of the surprising Icelandic food she had brought to this year's Bouchercon (pickled sheep's testicles) probably contributed to the fun.

Your jovial moderator, photo
courtesy of Annamaria Alfieri

Later, a launch party for Stuart Neville's Ratlines included much beer and much good chat with a group that included Ed Lin, an author new to me who has a book on the way from Soho Crime set in Taiwan.  I am an impatient reader, ready to set aside a book that does not grab me from the first word. This will not be a problem with Ratlines.

Earlier, lunch with Jennifer Jordan, Christa Faust, and Sean Chercover included thought-provoking discussion of what Dr. Faust called "sexualization of the other in porn."

Finally, thanks to the gang who organized Thursday's Snubnose Press edition of Noir at the Bar. Food-service delays forced me to miss most of the event, but I did arrive for the last two readers and the traditional closing salutation of "Fuck Peter Rozovsky!"

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Bouchercon Day 2: The juxtaposition

After a one-year absence, DBB is 
pleased to present the return of the 
annual Christa Faust picture

Today's favorite moment at Bouchercon 2012 in Cleveland, other than the photo at right, came during the "Cop vs. Constable" panel, which offered crime writers from the U.K., Australia, Denmark, and the U.S. talking about how laws, social attitudes, and police practices differ between countries and how this affects their writing.

Michael Robotham, acting as participating moderator, asked Michael Connelly: "Can you explain to the rest of the world the O.J. Simpson verdict?" A discussion of law, celebrity, and money ensued.

Not ten minutes before that question, I'd been riding in an elevator with Marcia Clark, a prosecutor in the Simpson trial, who, whether because of the trial's outcome or otherwise, has turned to writing mystery novels. I heard no gnashing of teeth or rending of garments at Robotham's query so I presume Clark was not in the room at the time. But I wonder how she'd have reacted to the discussion or what she'd have said if she'd have taken part.

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One day til my "Murder Is Everywhere" panel Saturday (with one substitution due to a family emergency).  View the complete Bouchercon schedule.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Christa Faust NSFW* update

Double-D Double Cross is the book Raymond Chandler would have written had his protagonist been a high-libido lesbian who kept a sex toy rather than a bottle of whiskey handy in the office.

Actually, the opening chapters of this raunchy slice of hardboiled, over-the-lop lesbian erotica by DBB friend Christa Faust deserve the Chandler invocation more than some books do. Faust cops a line from Farewell, My Lovely but, more than that, the book is filled with touches of the sympathy that characterized Chandler and bits of righteous anger, too.

And parts of those opening chapters are just plain funny:

"She was the type who got all juicy over the idea of slumming with a rough and tumble blue-collar butch like me, but couldn’t stop lecturing me about how I was internalizing oppression because I cut my hair like Tony Curtis."

And, when P.I. "Butch" Fatale keeps her clothes on, this is one righteous, thrilling ride, including the best nude skateboarding scene you're likely to read in a crime novel this year.

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* Not Safe for Work.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Christa Faust, new books, and the remembrance of things past

I've always thought authors must feel weird, at least early in their careers, promoting books that they may have written two or three years earlier.

The book is new and exciting to readers, but the author has long since moved on to new projects. Do you remember what you were working on two years ago? Do authors find it difficult or odd to talk with enthusiasm about something that may be old to them? (Authors' comments welcome.)

I got a taste of this temporal dislocation when I read Christa Faust's Choke Hold this week. A couple of years ago, Faust made a blog post or Tweet that she was off to do research on the effects of traumatic brain injuries. Hank, a major supporting character in Choke Hold, very likely suffers from such injuries, and Faust does a hell of a job showing their effect rather than telling us about them. I'd bet a week's worth of bagels and whitefish salad that Hank is the product of that long-ago research trip.

This has also made me think about social media. The biggest effect of social media on our lives is the blizzard of speculation about the effect of social media on our lives, but in a small way, Faust long-ago blog post/Tweet makes me feel that I've had a glimpse into the gestation and genesis of a book.

P.S.  The book packs an emotional punch, and that's no cheap joke about its characters' involvement in Mixed Martial Arts.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Reading fun from Faust to the Federalist

My reading has been both eclectic and promiscuous in recent weeks. Here are some highlights:

• 
  Fiction from outside one's own country comes with a burden of greater expectations. We expect such fiction to contain clues to the essence of the country where it originates, and I sometimes wonder if this is unfair to authors who may just want to show the reader a good time. I don't know yet what Mike Nicol's thriller Black Heart says about South Africa, but it sets a fine mood of tension, suspense and paranoia.
  
  
• 
  Christa Faust's Hoodtown is as much alternate-universe fantasy as it is crime. In this case, the universe is a neighborhood populated entirely by luchadors and luchadoras (masked Mexican wrestlers) and their descendants. Sure, fetish sex is part of the mix, but this is mainly a story of outcasts, a protagonist with a dark past, thwarted love, and this bit of musing on the decadence of today's youth: "It was easier back then. Not like now when you got joints all through Hoodtown with Hood girls in máscaras that might as well not exist, string bikinis for the head that cover barely more than a Halloween domino. You couldn't pay me enough to leave the house like that."
  
  
• 
  Frederick Nebel's writing has not dated as well as that of his fellow Black Mask authors Dashiell Hammett, Paul Cain, or Raymond Chandler. Period slang and dated locutions weigh more heavily on his work than on theirs. But Nebel was at least as good as the big three at creating an atmosphere of  menace and uncertainty, and his writing at times has as hard an edge as Cain's. He deserves to be better known and more widely published.
  
  
• But the hardest-edged writer I've read this week, the one with the bleakest (or most clear-eyed) view of humanity, may be Alexander Hamilton. Here are some selections from Federalist Paper #6:

"(M)en are ambitious, vindictive, and rapacious.  ...

"Have republics in practice been less addicted to war than monarchies? Are not the former administered by men as well as the latter? Are there not aversions, predilections, rivalships, and desires of unjust acquisitions, that affect nations as well as kings? Are not popular assemblies frequently subject to the impulses of rage, resentment, jealousy, avarice, and of other irregular and violent propensities? Is it not well known that their determinations are often governed by a few individuals in whom they place confidence, and are, of course, liable to be tinctured by the passions and views of those individuals? Has commerce hitherto done anything more than change the objects of war? Is not the love of wealth as domineering and enterprising a passion as that of power or glory? Have there not been as many wars founded upon commercial motives since that has become the prevailing system of nations, as were before occasioned by the cupidity of territory or dominion? Has not the spirit of commerce, in many instances, administered new incentives to the appetite, both for the one and for the other?

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Will `indy' e-books kill translated fiction?

The estimable Christa Faust wonders what the rise of electronic and independent publishing will mean for translated fiction:

“If `indy' eBooks are the wave of the future, will translation and foreign editions become a thing of the past? Will each country (or each group of people who share a common language) become like a literary island, reading only their own books?”

Christa's apprehensions appear to me plausible, at least in the short term. The exacting labor of translation seems ill-suited to the supposedly liberating amateurism of electronic self- and independent publishing.

Will translators want to bring their skills to bear on a publishing model whose financial return is uncertain at best? If not, what will happen to the market for translated writing?

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

The Hendrick's and Tonic Crime-Convention Cost-of-Living Index ©

(#Noircon2010: David White [left] and Howard Rodman discuss Fantômas)Christa Faust (left), here with Butch on her lap and Vicki Hendricks to the right, provided one of those hotel-bar, a-ha! moments that make crime-fiction conventions such a treat for the mind even as they wreak havoc on the body.

She had bought Darwyn Cooke's graphic-novel version of Richard Stark's The Hunter, an adaptation I'd found slightly disappointing for its fidelity to Stark's novel. I reasoned that a comics adaptation ought to add something that words alone could not accomplish. Christa argued for strict obedience to the source; I defended infidelity.

But then she said look at the hands, at the panels in which hands fill the frame and their attitude tells the story. Stark's novel tells us about Parker's hands, but I don't think it focuses on hands nearly as much as Cooke does. So thanks, Christa, for opening my eyes to the power of hands.

***

So, what is the Hendrick's and Tonic Crime-Convention Cost-of-Living Index (HAT-3C-LI ©)?

A Hendrick's gin and tonic cost $14.24 with tax at Bouchercon 2010's convention hotel in San Francisco; at Noircon's hotel in Philadelphia the cost was $9.90.

Using the San Francisco cost as a baseline and assigning it a score of 100, Philadelphia's Hendrick's score is 69.5, nothing to laugh at in these hard times.

What's your city's Hendrick's score? (Trust me: You'll enjoy the research.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Hard Case Crime is coming back

Hard Case Crime will be back next year after it suspended publication when its publisher, Dorchester, decided to move to e-books only.

The new publisher, Titan Publishing, plans to retain the paperback format and to publish e-books across multiple platforms. Hardback titles are also possible, Hard Case headman Charles Ardai says.

Christa Faust's Choke Hold and Max Allan Collins' Quarry's Ex will be the resurrected imprint's first new titles next fall along with "two never-before-published novels by MWA Grand Masters (names to be announced shortly)." Titan also plans to acquire existing stock of Hard Case's backlist and resume shipping the books to bookstores immediately, Ardai says.

Hard Case has strayed into international crime occasionally, with its three Ken Bruen-Jason Starr collaborations and David Dodge's tales of high foreign adventure. Even when it stays home in America, Hard Case does fine work.

Here are some of my previous posts about Hard Case Crime titles (scroll down). And here's to the rebirth of this exciting imprint.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Bouchercon, Day 1 and Tokyo Year Zero

It's easier to report on a Bouchercon panel when one has passed the hour in the audience rather than on stage moderating. That's a phenomenon full of psychological interest, but we can talk about it in another post.

In any case, Thursday's "Stamp of Death" panel with Michael Sears and Stanley Trollip, who write together as Michael Stanley; Yrsa Sigurðardóttir; and Christopher G. Moore talking about their books, their countries, and their cultures, and your humble blog keeper moderating, proved an convivial hour for the participants and, I hope, an entertaining and informative one for the audience. Details later.

As always at conventions, some of the most illuminating remarks are uttered at the bar. The day's favorite for me came from a Japanese crime-fiction reviewer named Naomi Hoida, who said that the British crime novelist David Peace had done a fine job in his Tokyo Year Zero. The book traces an investigation that takes place amid the hellish chaos of postwar Japan, and Naomi said she was surprised a foreigner could write so sensitively and accurately about the period.

Over the course of the day, met and hob-nobbed with John Lawton, whose attire included a Mailer-Breslin campaign button; Robert Ward, and Otto Penzler.

Now, to bed to rest up for moderating "Flags of Terror" on Friday, with authors James R. Benn, Cara Black, Lisa Brackmann, Henry Chang, Jassy Mackenzie and Stuart Neville.

And, with a heads-up to Sean Patrick Reardon, this year's Christa Faust picture (above right).

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

There's a money shot in Donna Moore's book

There are also a Big O, a two-way split and probably lots more I haven't noticed or have not got to yet.

Moore's book is Old Dogs, and Money Shot, The Big O and Two-Way Split are novels by her fellow crime writers Christa Faust, Declan Burke and Allan Guthrie, respectively.

Moore's salutes to her friends are unobtrusive and will bring a smile to those who have read the novels (I recommend all three). And now your question: What other writers pay similar tribute to the titles of their own favorite books?

P.S. I'll enlarge this list of Moore's tributes as I discover more of them.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

In Bruges wins the Edgar Award for best screenplay, and a word about Declan Hughes

Blue Heaven by C.J. Box has just won the Edgar Award for best novel, but I felt a certain attachment to one of the other short-listed books: The Price of Blood by Declan Hughes (titled The Dying Breed in the UK). The man is Irish, for one thing, right up Detectives Beyond Borders' alley.

Also, I wrote nice things about the book in the Philadelphia Inquirer, beginning my review thus: "A fist to the jaw carries with it an intimacy that a bullet to the gut just can't match." And Hughes' niece's husband played on my softball team. And someone snapped a photo of Hughes and me at Bouchercon 2008 in Baltimore.

(From left, J. Kingston Pierce, your humble blogkeeper, Declan Hughes. Photo by Ali Karim, courtesy of The Rap Sheet)

Hughes was not the only writer from beyond these shores up for the Mystery Writers of America's top award Thursday night. Also in the running were Karin Alvtegen for Missing and Morag Joss for The Night Following.

Christa Faust's Money Shot was up for best paperback original. She's American, but she wrote a book very much worth reading, and she was responsible for my favorite crime-fiction-related phrase of the year. Click this link to see and hear me using the phrase. (The Edgar for best paperback original went to China Lake by Meg Gardiner.)

Martin McDonagh won the Edgar for best screenplay for In Bruges, a beyond-borders nomination that I forgot to mention earlier.

Congratulations to the winners, and a hat tip to Sarah Weinman for providing up-to-the-minute news as the official Edgars chronicler. (See a list of all Edgar nominees here.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

How do you say "pulp" in German?

Fruitful intercultural exchange is happening at Christa Faust's Deadlier Than the Male and the German crime-fiction blog Internationale Krimis. It started when Faust travelled to Germany to promote Hardcore Angel, the German translation of her novel Money Shot, and found a surprising attitude to the kind of crime fiction she loves :

"(I)n Germany hardboiled pulp (vintage or modern) is basically considered lowbrow trash on the level of supermarket romance. I had several interviewers ask me about how it feels not to be taken seriously, and I honestly didn’t get what they meant at first. ... (T)he Germans have this idea that crime fiction ought to be much more literary and `serious.' Apparently this means no explicit sex or violence, just lots of depressed, angst-ridden (male, of course) detectives brooding and contemplating the meaning of life."

Bernd Kochanowski of Internationale Krimis replied with a nuanced picture of fragmented German crime-fiction traditions that encompass both "pulpy" and "high end" and make sweeping references to "the Germans" problematic. One difficulty, he wrote, is that some German critics fought hard to get crime writing taken seriously and are unprepared to accept pulp and hard-boiled crime fiction. He also takes up the discussion, in German, on his own blog.

Follow the exchange for an incisive view of crime fiction's audience in one major country, for Faust's take on her own work, and for a tale of literary culture shock.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

NoirCon 2008: Eat to the beat

Two of the people whom it was my pleasure to meet at NoirCon, Christa Faust and Ed Pettit, posted similar remarks about the event's raucous awards banquet.

Here's Faust's account, in part:

"There were uniformed police in black rubber gloves lined up to frisk everyone entering that half of the restaurant (which incidentally was where the only bathrooms were located.) The food was lousy, mostly bland, uninspired Chinese junk that even their hottest hot sauce couldn’t save, but the parade of chubby Cambodian hotties in micro minis and platform heels more than made up for it.

"The high-decibel Cambodian warbling continued all through the meal and the actual award ceremony. Nothing but a thin, folding wall separated us from the festivities. ... Meanwhile Bruen is just hanging his head in the background and dying a long slow death. It was hilarious, excruciating and surreal. I’ve been to way too many boring, endless rubber chicken dinners at conventions in the past, but whatever else you may say about this event, it was anything but boring."

Here's part of Pettit's:

"There was even tight security ... with police searching each and every partygoer before they were allowed to enter their party. The music was so loud that the presenters could barely be heard giving their congratulatory speeches to the honorees, Bruen and McMillan. But when it came time for Bruen to give his thanks, he showed how loud an Irishman can be. The whole event was surreal. And we loved every minute of it. Who wants to be at another boring awards ceremony?"

And here's a clip from a different concert at the same restaurant that gives an accurate impression of what it was like trying to listen to the NoirCon speeches.


Me, I liked the quiet conversation. Since there was no way I'd hear much of what was happening on the NoirCon stage, I surrendered myself to pleasant chat with my convivial tablemates.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

The seamy side of noir: Money Shot and The Ice Harvest

The crime-fiction borders I have crossed most recently took me into the dim and smoky half-world of strip clubs and porn talent agencies – appropriate, since I picked up the books right after a convention dedicated to noir.

Christa Faust's Money Shot has everything a noir story ought to: fast pace, stripped-down prose, killing, confrontation with some of the darkest crimes humans can commit, and an ending that hits like a punch in the stomach. But it also has an ambivalent, mature attitude to cathartic violence, and a refreshingly nuanced view of the milieu its protagonist inhabits.

The milieu is the pornography trade, and the protagonist is Angel Dare, once a porn actress, now owner of an agency that supplies talent to strip clubs and porn-movie producers. Faust's view of the subject is neither moralistic nor hedonistic. There is a hierarchy: some clubs are stinking and sleazy; others are harsh, viciously competitive, but a good source of income for dancers who can fight their way to the top. As narrator, Angel Dare meets women and men scarred by drugs and cosmetic surgery, but she also recalls good times and good, generous people.

Some aspects of the novel might catch the eye of an adventurous gender theorist. Angel is forced into a disguise as a man to avoid killers who want a briefcase full of money that has disappeared from her office, and it is during this phase that she turns detective. But when the time comes to kick ass, she sheds the male garb and becomes a woman again.

Faust dedicates the book to the multimega-million-selling crime author Richard S. Prather, who died shortly before its publication. Prather's Shell Scott may be inimitable, but Faust has a good ear for his goofily reflective over-the-top wisecracks in lines like "Now that I could see where I was, I still had no idea where I was" and this:

"I slowly pulled open the Civic's passenger-side door and put my bare feet on the grimy concrete, high on beautiful, full-color action movie fantasies of dishing out .44-caliber justice. That's when I realized I was naked."

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I've just started The Ice Harvest by Scott Phillips, but I'll mention it here because its opening scenes take place largely in a string of strip clubs in Wichita, Kansas, on Christmas Eve 1979. The clubs are nearly empty, most who are there would rather be somewhere else, and a kind of resigned humor marks the proceedings:

"Shouldn't you turn down the heat a little, Dennis?"

"Sure. I bet the nude members of our staff would greatly appreciate that."

"I see your point."

The novel became a 2005 movie that featured John Cusack and Billy Bob Thornton in the leads, Harold Ramis as director and Richard Russo and Robert Benton as screenwriters. It's very much worth watching even though Phillips says he hated the ending.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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Hard Case Crime in German

Hard Case Crime gets around. Less than a minute after making the post immediately below, I found this interview with publisher/editor Lisa Kuppler on the German crime-fiction site Krimi-Couch. It appears under the headline "Ein neuer Umgang mit den Konventionen des Hardboileds – im Retro-Kleid," which means something like "A new encounter with hard-boiled conventions – in retro dress."

If my rough reading is accurate, it appears that Kuppler bought the rights to the entire Hard Case line and will issue selected books in German, retaining the original covers but translating the titles – except in cases like Christa Faust's, should her Hard Case book make it into German. Its title, Money Shot, is untranslatable, according to Kuppler.

(See Hard Case's German Web site for more information or just to satisfy your curiosity about this encouraging example of crime fiction crossing borders.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2008