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 

Why they're coming to NoirCon

NoirCon 2012 happens in Philadelphia next week. Here's what some of the panelists and honorees have to say about previous NoirCons and about why they'll be at this one. (Read more hosannas for NoirCon here.)

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“My favorite moment was [2010], when Christa Faust ran into the theater a few minutes late for her panel, Butch — her dog — scampering beside her on his leash. She was wearing a red skirt that matched his jacket and had gone to dark hair with a stripe of white to match Butch's coloring. It was the best entrance I've ever seen.

“There were several hilarious moments involving goat fornication, but I'll let someone else tell that story.

“This is my third Noircon. The intimacy of the venue and closeness of the group are what mainly bring me back, as well as the strict focus on noir and quality panels. Also, this year I came to pay my respect to two of my favorite writers, Harry Crews and Larry Brown.”

— Vicki Hendricks

“At the last, lovely NoirCon, I was the Keynote Speaker. The keynote speech, for reasons which only people who love Noir could forgive, was scheduled at an unusually early morning hour. The audience and I had been up late the night before imbibing freely at the sumptuous banquet. In the morning, we were all enveloped in that atmospheric swirl of dislocation and loss of identity by which the art of Noir lives, breathes and propagates. I scarcely had to lift my voice.

“This year, I am stranded in my apartment in Paris (no hardship at all, by the way) by Hurricane Sandy, and will fly in Saturday night to a Greenwich Village which is without electricity, heat, water or phone service. Once again, Noir form is following Noir function. And my four days in New York will be a fine preparation for this year's NoirCon.

“What makes NoirCon different from all other conferences is the genius, enthusiasm, the solid sweat equity, and the real love of Noir its wonderful director and co-founder Lou Boxer has exhibited for the genre, the conference, and all of NoirCon's participants. Our native American art form of Noir – it's the black backside of the American Dream – owes a great deal to this conference.”

— Joan Schenkar

“This is my first Noircon. What attracted me is that I was asked to be the Guest of Honor, and no one could resist that.”

— Otto Penzler

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Biographies of crime writers: Who deserves to get a life?

I cross a new border this week, into literary biography, with Richard Layman's Shadow Man: The Life of Dashiell Hammett.

What makes someone a fit subject for biography? Towering achievement, for one, and Hammett has that in spades. But he also appears to have been entertaining and elusive quarry. Here's the beginning of Layman's short preface:

"Dashiell Hammett seemed, for most of his life to crave privacy."

Standard celebrity stuff so far. But the paragraph goes on:

"Unlike many literary celebrities, he never took his fame seriously. He never relied on it, never expected it, and he was always contemptuous of those who treated him with deference because of his literary reputation. When he was in certain moods, he delighted in fooling interviewers, interested listeners, and sycophants with fabricated tales about his past and his future plans."

And here's the 1924 extract from Black Mask, in Hammett's own words, with which Layman heads the first chapter:

"I was born in Maryland, between the Potomac and Patuxent rivers, on May 27, 1894, and was raised in Baltimore.

"After a fraction of a year in high school ... I became the unsatisfactory and unsatisfied employee of various railroads, stock brokers, machine manufacturers, canners, and the like. Usually I was fired."

One can tell Hammett had fun writing that — no surprise to readers who delight in the wit of his fiction.

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In November I heard Joan M. Schenkar talk about her biography of Patricia Highsmith. And the British crime fiction and film critic Barry Forshaw has written a life of Stieg Larsson.

What other crime writers have been subjects of a biography? What crime writers should be? Whom would you like to read about — and why?

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Noircon Day 3: The Tremor of Highsmith

Back when I read Patricia Highsmith's The Tremor of Forgery, I noted one critic's suggestion that Highsmith had abandoned character almost entirely for the political by the time she wrote the book.

I suspect Highsmith biographer Joan M. Schenkar might disagree; she took a more personal approach in her talk Saturday at #Noircon2010. Schenkar stressed the importance of forgery in Highsmith's fictional world, for example, particularly in the person of Tom Ripley, protagonist of The Talented Mister Ripley plus four additional novels and a number of film adaptations.

The Tremor of Forgery, Highsmith tells us, is the slight shake that even the most expert forger produces at the beginning and the end of his false signatures. A novel whose title conceit undermines a theme so important in the writer's work? Sounds pretty personal to me.

Even better: The novel's murder weapon — if indeed the victim has been killed — is a typewriter and the protagonist/killer a writer. The machine, Schenkar says, is identical to Highsmith's own, a typewriter the author treasured. (The apparent murder renders the machine inoperable, an especially suggestive state of affairs.)

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Later, fellow Noircon attendee Richard Edwards interrupted a Star Wars techie chat with Mike "Cashiers du Cinemart" White that had begun in a hotel bar long ago and far away and offered welcome news: Out of the Past: Investigating Film Noir, the podcast series Edwards hosted with Shannon Clute, will resume this summer. Unfortunately, their Behind the Black Mask: Mystery Writers Revealed series is not coming back.

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Overheard at the hotel bar: "Bitch-slapping the synapses of your brain," upon which another fellow attendee, knowing what I do for a living, asked, "Does bitch slapping take a hyphen?"

(To which I should have replied: "Bitch-slapping takes a hyphen — and likes it." )

© Peter Rozovsky 2010