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

Bouchercon 2016, Part III: One panel and another mess of pictures

Eric Beetner and his sister Gretchen don't take no
mess. Photos by Peter Rozovsky 

My only complaint about the panels on lesser-known writers of the pulp and paperback-original eras that I've moderated at the last three Bouchercons is that time inevitably runs out well before I run out of questions and the panelists out of answers.  This year's panelists helped out by anticipating some of those questions and incorporating the answers into their replies to questions I did ask. Eric Beetner, for example, offered some interesting comparisons of the writing style and literary chops of the two writers he discussed, William P. McGivern and Charles Williams.

Rick Ollerman

Alexandra Sokoloff

I chided several of the panelists for stealing my questions, but I was grateful to be up there on stage with such interested panelists. Thanks, Eric, Martin Edwards, Rick Ollerman, and Gary Phillips. You can buy CDs and MP3 files of the panel and all other Bouchercon sessions at at VW Tapes Conference Recording, http://vwtapes.com/bouchercon2016.aspx, purveyors of fine Bouchercon recordings for a number of years now.

Steve Cavanaugh shot by Ayo Onatade
shot by me, Noir at the Bar, Voodoo
Lounge.

Danny Gardner

Craig Faustus Buck

Johnny Shaw

Harlan Coben

Sarah M. Chen

Josh Stallings

Christa Faust

© Peter Rozovsky 2016 

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

The long Thursday morning: My last Bouchercon 2016 book arrives

The book I'll need to complete preparation for the panel I'll moderate at Bouchercon 2016 next week arrived today. 

The novel is The Long Saturday Night by Charles Williams, the panel is called "From Hank to Hendrix: Beyond Chandler and Hammett: Lesser Known Writers of the Pulp and Paperback Original Eras," and, for the third straight year, preparation for the "Beyond Chandler and Hammett" panel has expanded my idea of what crime fiction is.

This year's version includes four of today's sharpest, savviest crime writers talking about their favorite crime writers of the past: Eric Beetner on William P. McGivern and Charles Williams, Martin Edwards on Michael Gilbert, Rick Ollerman on Peter Rabe and Jada Davis, and Gary Phillips on Clarence Cooper Jr., with a word or two on Gil Brewer.

===========================

"From Hank to Hendrix: Beyond Chandler and Hammett: Lesser Known Writers of the Pulp and Paperback Original Eras" happens Thursday, Sept. 15. at 9 a.m.,  at the Marriott, 555 Canal St., New Orleans. The room is LaGalleries 1. See you there.

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

My Bouchercon 2016 panel: Charles Williams: Out of luck because he wrote too well?

Why is Charles Williams not better known? Could it be that his writing was too good?

Anthony Boucher wrote that Williams'

"striking suspense technique ... may remind you of [Cornell] Woolrich; the basic story, with its bitter blend of sex and criminality, may recall James M. Cain. But Mr. Williams is individually himself in his sharp but unmannered prose style and in his refusal to indulge in sentimental compromises."

"Sharp but unmannered." Williams' novels don't abound in quotable lines (there are no bad lines, either, at least in the eleven of Williams' twenty-two novels that I've read), but he knew that a writer's job is to write good books, not good sentences. His novels lack the political pandering that found its way into books by, say, Mickey Spillane and Stephen Marlowe, and he didn't write from hell, the way Jim Thompson or David Goodis or Harry Whittington (sometimes) did. His protagonists are more or less regular guys, physically strong, good at working with their hands, but they don't hit you over the head with what regular guys or what brutes they are, either. Williams' books are full of good jokes without ever patting themselves on the back for their wit, and they show no signs of the haste that sometimes appears in even the best books from other terrific Gold Medal authors.

Williams wrote suspense with an edge hard enough to make himself a star at Gold Medal books, and he wrote fluently, cleanly, and well enough to have written for the slick magazines. It's hard to imagine any of the other Gold Medal authors, with the possible exception of John D. MacDonald, writing books as good, as convincing, and as far from their authors' normal hard-boiled style as Williams' The Diamond Bikini and Uncle Sagamore and His Girls.

The Wikipedia entry on Williams is notable for who talks about Williams and what they say. And Bill Crider is right that "there’s no such thing as a bad Charles Williams novel."

=====================

Eric Beetner will offer some remarks about Charles Williams n as part of a panel I'll moderate at Bouchercon 2016 in New Orleans in September. The panel is called "From Hank to Hendrix: Beyond Chandler and Hammett: Lesser Known Writers of the Pulp and Paperback Original Eras," and it happens at 9 a.m., Thursday, Sept. 15, at the Marriott, 555 Canal St., New Orleans. The room is LaGalleries 1. See you.  

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

Michael Gilbert, Charles Williams, and writing what you know (My Bouchercon 2016 panel)

The estimable Laura Lippman once said that the old advice to write what you know had served her poorly in one of her own embryonic, excessively autobiographical early efforts. "Write what you know," Lippman said, is "well-intentioned, but it's poorly put. [Better to] write what you want to know about."

But knowledge, wielded with discretion and with the aim of telling a good story always in mind, can serve crime writers well. Michael Gilbert was both a lawyer (a solicitor, to be precise), and a prolific and much-honored crime writer. Gilbert's novel Smallbone Deceased (1950), about a dead body that turns up in a solicitors' office, not only wrings a convincing mystery out of the minutiae of conveyancing, but it also includes some delightful jabs at the foibles of law as practised in a Lincoln's Inn solicitors' firm. And that makes of the novel a social comedy in addition to a mystery.

Back in America, that great writer of paperback originals (and some hardbacks, too, I think) Charles Williams devoted a considerable chunk of his output to crime novels set in the world of sailing and featuring lone-wolf, man-on-the-run sailor protagonists. His titles in this category include Scorpion Reef, Aground, Dead Calm, And the Deep Blue Sea. and The Sailcloth Shroud.

A boat with two or three people aboard (or three at first, then two) makes a great setting for a locked-room mystery. If the ship sails between and outside various nations' territorial waters, one has built-in ingredients of international intrigue. The tension between the different demands of life on ship and life ashore adds another element not present in mysteries set solely on dry land. And the minutiae of shipboard life, like the minutiae of the law in Michael Gilbert's novels, become both a plot element and an exciting new setting for the reader.

Williams served ten years in the Merchant Marine and later worked at a shipyard. Is the picture his novels offer not just of shipboard life, but of life aboard several distinct types of ships authentic? Who knows; authenticity is not fiction's job. But the books sure are convincing. Now, your turn: What are your favorite crime stories in when the author's mastery of given subject makes the book what it is?

=================

Martin Edwards will discuss Michael Gilbert and Eric Beetner will say a few words about Charles Williams on a panel I'll moderate at Bouchercon 2016 in New Orleans next month. The panel is called "From Hank to Hendrix: Beyond Chandler and Hammett: Lesser Known Writers of the Pulp and Paperback Original Eras," and it happens at 9 a.m., Thursday, Sept. 15, at the Marriott, 555 Canal St., New Orleans. The room is LaGalleries 1. See you. The Fantastic Fiction Web site includes bibliographies for both Michael Gilbert and Charles Williams.

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

My Bouchercon 2016 panel: Odds Against Tomorrow

The New York Times was right: William P. McGivern's 1957 men-on-the-run novel Odds Against Tomorrow is "a powerfully exciting action-melodrama." Let's look at the last part of that description.

Melodrama fell out of favor in the middle of last century, perhaps after French movie critics came up with a fancier name for the mid-century American movies that were called melodramas when they first appeared. The French called them films noirs and unleashed a wave of cultural cachet that swept up everything in its path.

So, what's melodramatic about Odds Against Tomorrow?: Two men, one white, one black, thrown together when a bank heist goes wrong and forced to overcome mutual hatred and suspicion and yadda, yadda, yadda (McGivern's novel was the basis of the 1959 movie starring Harry Belafonte and Robert Ryan and produced by Belafonte.)  What saves the novel from being a brave, dated relic? Astonishing characterization like this:

"He wasn't worried about failure, because he didn't have the imagination to picture disaster in vivid and personal terms."

The taut professionalism of McGivern's work. The repetition of certain words that work through, with, under, and around the narrative, reinforcing it and building suspense: Confused. Confusion. Unconscious (impressions).  Co-protagonist Earl Slater's invocation of his military background. Johnny Ingram's cool. Some delicious plotting, much of it involving the interpersonal dynamics between Slater and Ingram.  The canny decision to add a brief coda so the novel does not end on the somewhat schmaltzy note that brings the main action to a close.  McGivern knew what he was doing.

(Poster by Jon Jordan)

(McGivern also wrote the novels on which the movies Rogue Cop and Fritz Lang's classic The Big Heat were based.)

=========

Eric Beetner will discuss William McGivern as part of a panel I'll moderate at Bouchercon 2016 in New Orleans in September. The panel is called "From Hank to Hendrix: Beyond Chandler and Hammett: Lesser Known Writers of the Pulp and Paperback Original Eras," and it happens at 9 a.m., Thursday, Sept. 15, at the Marriott, 555 Canal St., New Orleans. The room is LaGalleries 1. See you.

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

My Bouchercon 2016 panel: Rogue cops, fool's gold, and more!!!

I have the singular honor of being the first name on the panel schedule for Bouchercon 2016. That's because I'm moderating a session at 9 a.m., Thursday, Sept. 15, and it's a good one.

The panel is From Hank to Hendrix: Beyond Chandler and Hammett: Lesser Known Writers of the Pulp and Paperback Original Eras. This is the third year I'll moderate this panel, in which authors, critics, and editors discuss their favorite lesser-known crime writers of the past. The sessions always expand my appreciation of crime's fiction's range, and this year is no exception.

The panelists for 2016 are: Patti Abbott, Eric Beetner, Martin Edwards, Rick Ollerman, and Gary Phillips, and they already have me reading authors new to me. So come see us in LaGalleries 1, in the Marriott, 555 Canal St., New Orleans, 9 a.m. on Thursday, Sept. 15.

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

Noir at the Bar: The History

Over at LitReactor, Keith Rawson presents an oral history of Noir at the Bar-- interviews with me and with some of the people who took the N@B idea and ran with it: Jed Ayres in St. Louis, Todd Robinson and Glenn Gray in New York, Eric Beetner in Los Angeles. Duane Swierczynski, the reader at the first Noir at the Bar ever, right here in Philadelphia, weighs in with a highly entertaining excerpt from the piece he read at the first L.A. N@B.

The photo above, from October 2008, which I sent Keith for inclusion with his article, captures a seminal moment in Noir at the Bar history.  Scott Phillips (lower left, miming the theft of a bicycle) had dropped in to the fourth Noir at the Bar to hear John McFetridge (top left) and Declan Burke (center) read. (That's me behind the perp.)  Scott liked the idea, took it back to St. Louis, where he organized a Noir at the Bar with Jedidiah Ayres, and the rest is history, Noir at the Bar spreading across North America like a slow-moving, persistent, incurable virus.

It's nice to see how much the event has meant to writers all over North America, and the Noirs at the Bar Keith writes about were just some of the early ones. Toronto. Vancouver. New Hope. Texas. New Jersey. Portland. Baltimore. You name it, Noir at the Bar has conquered it.  And, like the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, it started here in Philadelphia.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Welcome to Gerard Brennan's Belfast octagon

Back in September, Eric Beetner and Terrence McCauley took part in a panel I moderated at Bouchercon 2013, and talk turned to novellas they had written for the Fight Card line, a series of boxing stories by new pulp and hard-boiled authors under the house name Jack Tunney.

What is the appeal to younger authors in the 21st century, I asked them, of writing stories set in the 1930's, '40s, and '50s, using a byline fashioned from the names of two athletes of the 1920s, about a sport that has not loomed large on the American scene since the 1970s?

Beetner dismissed the widespread belief that boxing is no longer popular, citing the rise of mixed martial arts (MMA). And lo, it was one of Fight Card's two MMA novellas that not only opened my eyes to the nuances of a sport that took shape only in 1993, but also demonstrated in its purest form the appeal of those old-style boxing stories.

The novella in question is Welcome to the Octagon, and the author is Gerard Brennan, a  longtime friend of Detectives Beyond Borders and an author with a growing list of credits for the stage and the page. That he sets Welcome to the Octagon in contemporary Belfast only emphasizes his fidelity to the old-time conventions of pulp boxing stories: the good guy, the gangster, the girl, the temptation, the tug of war between old and young.

The story has wry, self-deprecating humor:

"My heart wasn’t in it, but I had to live up to my nickname. The Rage! That was a joke. There and then I felt like The Disappointment. But I roared at the crowd and they roared back."

It has sharp social observation that reminds the reader he or she is no longer in New York or Los Angeles or a tumble-down precinct of some other American city:

"The Troubles had gone away. Except for the new age scum that was rising to the top. Maybe TapouT didn’t typify the real gangsters pulling the strings in Northern Ireland — we’d get to them quicker by looking at our politicians first — but he was a wannabe villain that slipped through the cracks of a mostly law-abiding society. A wannabe villain that would have been crushed by the RUC or the paramilitaries of old."

Brennan knows how to keep a story moving, planting narrative hooks toward the ends of his chapters and throwing in at least one character wrinkle unlikely to have shown up in an old-time boxing story. But what may have impressed me most is his engagement with MMA, a sport until now shoved somewhere back in my consciousness next to street luge, half-pipe, and bicycle motocross. MMA is compounded of styles and techniques taken from many fighting sports, and Welcome to the Octagon is full of observations about the resulting complexity and the demands it places on the fighters.

Welcome to the Octagon has heart, humor, and respectful engagement with its subject. What's not to like?

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Props for Laukkanen, plus an aside on Bouchercon book bags

I've finished my first piece of post-Bouchercon reading, and it was good.

Owen Laukkanen's second novel, Criminal Enterprise, has me wanting to read his first, The Professionals, and his third, due out next year. Criminal Enterprise does some familiar crime-fiction tricks well, and it rings refreshing changes on others. It manages the considerable feat of keeping all its subplots interesting, and its twists are surprising but plausible.

I had heard of Laukkanen, but it was Eric Beetner's Noir at the Bar-style open readings at Bouchercon that got me reading him, and he's my top discovery of Bouchercon 2103 so far.

*

Don 't laugh, but the Bouchercon book bag, given to each attendee and containing programs, award ballots, and books, was pretty cool this year. After six years of attending conventions, I'll never need to buy a shopping, beach, or laundry bag again. But this year's model was shaped like a miniature duffel bag or an enlarged version of those old-time flight bags that airlines used to give passengers. It's perfect for carrying a computer, one's lunch, and a few books.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Bouchercon 2013 panels: Why Eric Beetner is righteous (James Sallis, too)

I'm resurrecting another previously posted post today, and not just because I'm too deep in Bouchercon preparations to do much new posting. My remarks about Eric Beetner's novel The Devil Doesn't Want Me play directly into what makes his brand of wisecracking, self-aware noir what it is, and I hope they fuel the discussion when Beetner takes part in one of my Bouchercon panels.

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 Two gems from my recent crime fiction reading, the first from Eric Beetner's The Devil Doesn't Want Me, the second from Drive, by James Sallis:

"Used to be, in this town, to get anywhere you had to be with the family. You had guys like Sinatra kissing your ring. Now it takes a decent criminal a year to pull down as much cash as Steve Wynn takes in over one weekend of legitimate business."

*

"No way he remembered. He’d treated dozens of them in his day. Back in the day, as they said now—and found himself wondering again where that came from. Back in the day. Up in here. You’d never heard these phrases before, then suddenly everyone was using them."

I like Beetner's wry recognition that his Las Vegas is no longer the one of movie and crime-novel myth. Beetner has clearly thought about the nature of twenty-first-century crime even if he would not admit anything so serious.

As for Sallis, his remark makes him the first crime writer in the Detectives Beyond Borders Things That Drive Them Nuts Hall of Fame. I bet I'll never find "going forward," "reaching out," "scenario," "basically," "noise level" (instead of just "noise"), or "the fact that" in any novel by Sallis — unless he's making fun of them.

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Eric Beetner will be part of my "Goodnight, My Angel: Hard-Boiled, Noir, and the Reader's Love Affair With Both" panel at Bouchercon 2013 in Albany on Friday, Sept. 20, at 10:20 a.m.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

My Bouchercon 2013 panels: Noir, hard-boiled, fantasy, and reality

My noir and hard-boiled panel at Bouchercon 2013 in Albany, N.Y., next month will also be a reality and fantasy panel, fantasy meaning nostalgia, pulp, and other forms of retreat from the everyday.

In this corner, representing reality, Dana King's Grind Joint, with its utter lack of illusion about the supposed benefits of a casino for an economically ravaged Pennsylvania town. In that corner, Terrence McCauley's violent Prohibition-era novel Prohibition and Eric Beetner's post-apocalyptic cannibal/survivor tale Stripper Pole at the End of the World.  Somewhere between these extremes, showing affinities at times with one, at times with the other, are Mike Dennis and Jonathan Woods, who join King, McCauley, and Beetner on the panel.

McCauley harks back to Dashiell Hammett and Paul Cain (and to writers and movie makers who harked back to Hammett and Cain). While his book's themes of loyalty, doubt, and betrayal are confined to no one era, the cover of the novel, at upper left, quite accurately reflects the early- and mid-twentieth-century gats 'n' gloves mythos to which McCauley makes a modern-day contribution. He and Beetner are acutely aware of periods in American popular culture that preceded their own.

King, on the other hand, writes about a world where beaten-down cities are desperate for the next big thing, where governments happily throw cash at companies to relocate to (or remain in) their state, and a lot more money seems to circulate among corporations and politicians than among the relocated workers. For all King's affinities with Elmore Leonard, George V. Higgins or King's amico Charlie Stella, it's a world you can find lurking behind today's headlines.

Fantasy? Reality? Pulp? Bad juju? You'll find it all at Bouchercon ... and here, at Detectives Beyond Borders.

How about you, lovers of noir and hard-boiled? Is your favorite reading reality? Fantasy? Or some mix of both?

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Eric Beetner, Mike Dennis, Dana King, Terrence McCauley, and Jonathan Woods will be part of the "Goodnight, My Angel: Hard-Boiled, Noir, and the Reader's Love Affair With Both" panel, with your humble blogkeeper as moderator, at Bouchercon 2013 on Friday, Sept. 20, at 10:20 a.m.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

My Bouchercon 2013 panels: Stripper Pole At The End Of The World

Pick up a book called Stripper Pole At The End Of The World, and you expect something over the top, especially since the book is part of an imprint called Schlock Zone Drive-In, which has to be one of the better names in publishing.

Author Eric Beetner offers a mix between Mad Max and Gilligan's Island, a stripper on crutches, her wounded colleagues, bartenders, and bikers banding together to fight off cannibals in a post-apocalyptic landscape. An introductory note tells us, however, that

"The time is a not-too-distant future. It’s after The Collapse, but don’t call it an apocalypse. The trouble is man-made: financial ruin, panic and mass hysteria...."

That's social breakdown with a bit of brain behind it. But Beetner's novella works because he has the good sense to write about outlandish situations with relatively understated prose and the writing chops to poke the gentlest of affectionate fun at a genre he loves without going way over the top into tiresome luridness. And he does it all without becoming annoyingly arch or self-conscious. His characters, in other words, say and do outrageous things without appearing to know they are doing so. Two of my favorite bits:

"At first, all I could think was, for God’s sake it’s only been two years, how did we come to this so goddamn fast? Eating each other? I mean, what the fuck? But I didn’t have time to contemplate society’s downfall there in the aisle of a mini mart."

and

"I turned to see the two cannibals, a man and a woman who weren’t on fire, dragging away the woman with the burning hair. As they dragged her, the man was already taking bites of her arm. Normally they ate raw, but I wondered if he enjoyed a little barbeque."

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Eric Beetner will be part of my "Goodnight, My Angel: Hard-Boiled, Noir, and the Reader's Love Affair With Both" panel at Bouchercon 2013 in Albany on Friday, Sept. 20, at 10:20 a.m.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Bouchercon 2013 and what I'll do there

I'll be moderating two panels at Bouchercon 2013, which begins Thursday, Sept. 19, in Albany, New York.

First up, on Thursday at 4 p.m., is "World War II and Sons," in which I whip authors James R. Benn, J. Robert Janes, John Lawton, Martin Limón, and Susan Elia MacNeal into fighting shape with a discussion of crime fiction set in wartime and its run-up and aftermath.

Then, after a quiet evening with a good book followed by a solid eight hours of sleep and a frugal yet nutritious breakfast, it's "Goodnight, My Angel: Hard-Boiled, Noir, and the Reader's Love Affair With Both" on Friday at 10:20 a.m., with Eric Beetner, Mike Dennis, Dana King, Terrence McCauley, and Jonathan Woods.

That's a nice mix of authors I've read and admired, authors I'd heard about but not read until now, and a couple whose names were new to me. And that means I should be in for a stimulating and entertaining Bouchercon, and I hope you will be, too.

Here's the complete Bouchercon schedule. See you in Albany.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Jim Thompson, Benjamin Whitmer, Daniel Woodrell, mood-breakers, a question for readers

I wrote earlier this week that Benjamin Whitmer's novel Pike reminded me of Daniel Woodrell with a tougher edge, maybe with a bit of Jim Thompson mixed in. I had never seen those writers mentioned together, so I was pleased when I picked up a copy of Thompson's Pop. 1280 yesterday and found that it came with a foreword by Woodrell.

"Sheriff Nick Corey is Jim Thompson's greatest creation," Woodrell writes. "Pop. 1280, set in Texas, is so directly a southern novel, so clearly from that tradition, that it would stand high on the Southern Lit shelf (which means high on the Lit Shelf, period) if it were not so consistently misidentified as a work with its roots genre, and therefore arbitrarily reduced in stature. ... The vision is dark but the writing bizarrely hilarious, utilizing the strain of downhome joshing I love so well and learned at the knees of my old ones."

Now, I've been to Texas just once in my life, to Houston and Galveston, and, while my charming hostess does like to say, "Y'all, hush!" I can claim only the most cursory acquaintance with the state, the region, and their quirks and folkways. But I have to think Woodrell is right because fourteen chapters in, Pop. 1280 is dark, hilarious, a stunning performance that sustains its mood in every word, far and away the best of the limited amount of Thompson's work that I've read (Savage Night,  The Getaway, part of The Grifters).

I may have more to say on this astonishing book later, but for now some thoughts on why hard, dark writing may the most difficult kind of crime writing to do well. Here's what I mean: I've read plenty of the hard stuff recently, Thompson, Whitmer, Jedidiah Ayres' Fierce Bitches, Crime Factory's Lee Marvin-themed short-story collection Lee, Eric Beetner, and Blood and Tacos. Lots of that writing is good, some better than that, but what interested me were those stories where a not-quite-right word threw the atmosphere off just enough to take me out of the story, if only for a moment. No author wants to do that, but I suspect the stakes may be especially high in noir, hard-boiled, Southern Gothic, or any other genre that depends heavily on mood.

The slip-up need not be large; all it takes is a bit of jargon or psychobabble, a grammatical error ("Lying still, strapped down tight, the hostage's eyes meet his."), or some annoying quirk of contemporary speech creeping in (level, say, as in "his confidence level" rather than "his confidence.")  

That's me; What are your mood-breakers? What lapses will take you out of a story?

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Detectives Beyond Borders dissects a joke

The wait is over. It's been barely a week since I finished reading the first volume of Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities, but when the book in question is quite possibly the greatest novel of the twentieth century, a week seems long. But my copy of Volume 2 arrived today, and I shall keep you posted as appropriate. The novel's third part, with which Vol. 2 begins, is called "Into the Millennium (The Criminals)," so I suspect I'll come up with a post or two to interest the crime readers of intelligence and good taste who visit Detectives Beyond Borders.

I made good use of the inter-Musils interval, reading, among other things, one of the greatest Icelandic sagas, Allan Guthrie's funny, violent, touching novella Kill Clock, and a whole bunch of newer writing influenced by pulp, paperback originals, and 1970s and '80s adventure stories.

Along the way, I revisited a previous comment I'd posted about wiseass crime writers, talented authors whose good jokes occasionally obtrude on the story rather than helping it along. Such jokes sometimes seem to me the verbal equivalent of an actor mugging for the camera.

Eric Beetner has an interesting relationship to those guys. I read two of his books while waiting for TMWQ2, the novella Dig Two Graves and The Devil Doesn't Want Me, a novel. Beetner is good at creating entertaining variations on crime themes, such as the prison story and the revenge tale (you might call his takes on the former two, in Dig Two Graves, oral storytelling), the road epic, and the saga of the aging hit man and the hotshot young gun. (The latter works all the more because the young gun is such a little shit.)

I thought some of Beetner's jokes were a bit jokey in the novella, but hell, it's a novella. When he stretched out to novel length, in The Devil Doesn't Want Me, I was pleased to see an occasional rueful tone to some of the jokes, which shows me that the guy has chops and that he knows how to create a range of moods.

And the book is filled with good things: amusing byplay involving FBI agents who never get involved in the main story, and trenchant observations about the new Las Vegas and the old, among them. But a time or two, I think Beetner loved a joke too much to let go once he'd told it. Here's an example: The protagonist, Lars, a middle-aged hit man who keeps body and soul together with yoga, contemplates his superiority to the musclebound thug holding a gun on him:

"Guys like the big brute...smashing Lars' own gun hand into the tile floor cared only about the muscles. Lifting, squatting, pumping. For what? A thick neck like that can't turn to check out a great ass anymore."

That's the kind of touching, surprising, humanizing thought that Allan Guthrie is so good at. But Beetner has Lars continue the thought:

"And why did evolution put a swivel on a neck if not for that?"

That may be funny, but what does it add? What does it say that the preceding lines did not? I say Beetner should have cut the line and saved it for another book. To me that coda to the joke was a bit like being elbowed in the ribs and asked "Get it? Ya get it?" And that was all the more frustrating because the first joke was so good.

Your questions: Am I wrong? And what makes a joke function effectively as part of a story?

© Peter Rozovsky 2013