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