Bcon panels: What's your favorite non-standard setting for noir?

Here are three brief excerpts from Setup on Front Street, first of Mike Dennis' Key West Nocturnes novels:

"`I'm Special Agent Ryder,' he said. `I understand you've been having some trouble with former mayor Whitney.'

"I had to laugh. Is there anything in this town that isn't public knowledge?"

***

"Now that I was running plastic, I needed to buy some new clothes, but I didn't want to chance any buys in Key West.

"Like Yale said, it's a small town."

***

"See, this is one of the downsides of living your whole life in a small town. The cop knows what happened, and he knows that I know. Pretty soon, it'll be in the fucking paper."

Those passages do double duty as a leitmotif, tying the story together, and as an answer to the question of why Key West is a good place to set a noirish crime story. Noir is all about constriction, about the world closing in on the protagonist, and since a small town can be a constricted place even for those not just out of prison trying to collect old debts, getting ripped off, and running into  mobsters and corrupt politicians, you can imagine how tough it is on Dennis' Don Roy Doyle.

But let's talk about you.  What's your favorite non-standard noir setting, i.e., not New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, et al.? How does the author convince you that his or her unusual setting is a good one?

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Mike Dennis 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

MCM

Welcome to Detectives Beyond Borders' 1,900th post. I celebrate the occasion with an homage to beauty. First up are two bits from Roger Smith's new novella, Ishmael Toffee, the title character freshly out of Cape Town's Pollsmoor Prison and surveying his new surroundings:

"When he leaves the shack in the morning the sea of rusted iron that is Tin Town sprawls out into so much space that it robs him of his breath and he almost runs back inside."

 and

"Distant Table Mountain and its cloth of cloud rises up clear and sharp over the endless shanties and box houses of the Cape Flats ..."

The Cape Flats, "apartheid's dumping ground," must be one of the most hellish places on Earth ("Smith's Cape Town slums are as grim as any steam-punk Victorian hell hole," I wrote after reading Wake Up Dead.) Yet the image of a sea of rusted iron sprawling "out into so much space" has a certain desolate beauty. One secret to good noir is keeping the beauty and the dread in perfect tension so the reader is attracted and repelled at the same time. Smith does it.

***

Vicki Hendricks' beauty is of a different kind: hot, steamy, sexy,  and doomed, what the movie Body Heat wishes it could have been on its best day. Everyone's headed downhill in Hendricks Edgar-shortlisted Cruel Poetry, but on their way, Hendricks gives them some lines as funny as Allan Guthrie's:

"He can’t imagine that a woman living at the Moons could write anything, but who knew? Maybe a female Charles Bukowski—frightening thought. He hopes she never asks him to look at her work."

and

"Despite the cold air conditioning of the office, he’s beginning to overheat. He scoots his chair closer to the desk to skim the last essay. He’d shuffled it to the end of the stack, in case he might die and never have to grade it."

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

The real world meets The Shark-Infested Custard

I copy-edited a story this week at work about new rules governing the number of consecutive hours physicians can work during the residency stage of their professional careers.

The new rules say 16 rather than as many as 30 without a break, and not everyone is happy about the change. I thought of this when I came to a passage in Charles Willeford's novel The Shark-Infested Custard. The viewpoint character is Hank, a pharmaceutical salesman who muses upon the tendency of doctors to abuse drugs:

"`I can handle it,' they thought, and they would pop a bennie to get through a six a.m. operation, and then another bennie at ten a.m., to get through their hospital rounds, and then, because they were bone-tired, and beginning to get sleepy by one or two p.m., and they had an office full of waiting patients to get through, they would take a couple of more bennies that afternoon. And so it would go, with emergency calls at night, and the first thing they knew they would be hooked--on bennies, or dexies, or nose candy, and eventually, on horse."

My early impressions of this book are that Willeford does a stunning job of portraying the lives of working men in the United States, and that he paints a convincing picture of Miami. (The book would make a nice companion for Stuart M. Kaminsky's Lew Fonesca stories, set in Sarasota, Florida.)  The prelude to Hank's attempted seduction of a woman who is not what she seems goes on a bit too long, but that's a quibble.

Here's a bit about Willeford at Wikipedia. And here are your questions: Who else has written about working men in ways that make you say, "He's got it!"? David Mamet? Donald Westlake? And has any novel ever had a better title than The Shark-Infested Custard?

© Peter Rozovsky 2011