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

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

Noir at the New Hope Bar

From left: Wallace Stroby, William Hastings, Dennis Tafoya, Scott Adlerberg

Noir at the Bar made a convivial, entertaining, informative return on Thursday evening to the state where it was born. The place was John and Peter's in New Hope, Pa., the literary midwife was Farley's Bookshop, and the author/readers were Wallace Stroby, William Hastings, Dennis Tafoya, Scott Adlerberg, and Don Lafferty.

Highlights included Stroby on why he called his upcoming novel Shoot the Woman First, Tafoya with a stunningly good bit of post-violence emotional confrontation from a novel that should see the light of day next year, and three guys who were either new to me or who I had not known were writers in addition to their accomplishments in other fields.

I may post more after a good night's sleep, but for now, I was pleased with the happy medium we achieved between my original one- or two-author Noirs at the Bar (I started the concept in 2008), with a question-and-answer session with each writer; and the high-spirited literary mosh pits that Jedidiah Ayres and Scott Phillips made of their events in St. Louis. (Noir at the Bar has since spread to New York, Los Angeles, Austin, I believe San Diego, and, in an unprecedented harmonic Noir at the Bar convergence, Denver, where a Noir at the Bar also took place last night.)

Each  of the five authors here in New Hope read from his work, I threw out a question, and the questions turned into discussions, with all the writers eventually gathering on stage to take matters largely into their own hands.  I'd like to do this again, and I think we will. The original Noir at the Bar lives.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

DBB slips into some shorts

Spring is a good time for shorts, and that's what I've been reading a lot of these days, a f*ckload of shorts, in one case. The list has included:

1. Mr. Calder and Mr. Behrens by Michael Gilbert
2. Erased and Other Stories by author, cameraman, and Detectives Beyond Borders friend Thomas Kaufman
3. A F*ckload of Shorts by cozy writer Jedidiah Ayres
4. Short Sentence by miscellaneous and, saving the best for last,
5. "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," by Ambrose Bierce

I suspect I'll have something to say about several of these items, whether about Gilbert's deadpan hard-boiled humor, Ayres' multiple points of view and general degeneracy, or artful, surprising but non-gimmicky endings by Kaufman and in Anne Zouroudi's contribution to Short Sentence.

Click on the the Bierce title above and read the story free online. When you get your breath back, see if you can guess how I think Bierce addresses the great philosophical problem of almost all crime fiction.

In the meantime, what are your favorite stories, crime or otherwise, and why do you like them?

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A kind DBB reader sends a link to this Oscar-winning 1962 film adaptation of "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge."

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A commenter informs me that May is Short Story Month. Thanks, Paul.

© 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

Thuglit at the Bar

I discovered this week that some folks had staged a Noir at the Bar in New York, adding to a list of Noir at the Bar cities that includes L.A., Austin, Toronto, St. Louis, and the place where it started, right here in Philadelphia.

The New Yorkers brought in some good people to read, including Wallace Stroby, but the big find for me was Todd Robinson, because he's the Thuglit Web zine guy. I'd never read Thuglit even though it published authors like Stuart Neville and Hilary Davidson. But I'm a fan now, based on "Rags to Riches" by Joe Clifford and "Five Kilos" by Mike Wilkerson, both in Issue #38, and I've bought Robinson's own collection of stories, Dirty Words, plus Blood, Guts, and Whiskey (Thuglit Presents), a collection stories, most of which appeared first in the Web zine.

The blog post where I learned about the New York event properly credits Jed Ayres and Scott Phillips for what they've done with Noir at the Bar in St. Louis. But Ayres and Phillips, those generous gents, know how to acknowledge their inspirations.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Not crap

Jedidiah Ayres' Hardboiled Wonderland blog offers If it's not Scottish – It's Crap!, an interview with author/agent/editor Allan Guthrie. By coincidence, the happy resolution of a mix-up at my post office brings a bumper crop of books, among them The Good Son by Dundee's own Russel D. McLean.

That novel's lead blurb from Ken Bruen says the novel has all the merits of Jean-Patrick Manchette "with the added bonus of a Scottish sense of wit that is like no other." Not crap, indeed.

Back to Guthrie. Ayres asks good questions, and Guthrie's answers are full of insight, humor and evidence of his knowledge of noir and its history. If he and Megan Abbott ever team-teach a course in noir, I'm going back to college.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

It's Sunday! It's St. Louis! It's Noir at the Bar!

Ginchmaster Scott Phillips sends the following:

"It's the return of Peter Rozovsky's Noir at the Bar!

"Delmar Restaurant & Lounge
(314) 725-6565

"6235 Delmar Blvd Saint Louis, MO 63130

"Doors open at 8 PM on Sunday August 2nd. Reading will be [Scott], from [his] `Uncage Me' story, followed by Malachi Stone reading from his novel St. Agnes's Eve, followed by Jedidiah Ayres reading one of his short stories, followed by the evening's headliner, Chicago's Theresa Schwegel, reading from her new novel Last Known Address. If you're not familiar with Schwegel's work you should be. She writes the best cop novels since Richard Price."

© Peter Rozovsky 2009