What I got at Noircon

Here's what I bought, won, otherwise acquired, got hold of in preparation for, or added to my list after hearing about it at Noircon. Thanks are due to the discerning and opinionated folks from Farley's Bookshop, purveyor of fine books to Noircon since 2010.

• Like a Sniper Lining Up His Shot, adapted by Jacques Tardi from the novel The Prone Gunman by Jean-Patrick Manchette
• 23 Shades of Black by Kenneth Wishnia
• The Fifth Servant by Kenneth Wishnia
• Dirty Work by Larry Brown
• Dark Ride by Kent Harrington
• The Rat Machine by Kent Harrington
• Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer by Wesley Stace
• The Heartbreak Lounge by Wallace Stroby
• Bad Juju & Other Tales of Madness and Mayhem by Jonathan Woods
• Hell by Robert Olen Butler
• Line of Sight by David Whish-Wilson
• Time to Murder and Create by Lawrence Block
• Afterthoughts by Lawrence Block
• Crime Factory: Hard Labour

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

What they said at Noircon

Your humble blogkeeper talking
 about noir songs at the
Philadelphia  Mausoleum
 of Contemporary Art
 during Noircon. Photo courtesy
 of Cullen Gallagher.

More wise, entertaining, and interesting things that people said at Noircon 2012:

"It's like modern folklore, really."

— Alison Gaylin, on true crime

"It's increasingly impossible to tell an American noir story."

— Kent Harrington, on the globalization of crime

"Noir is "the beating heart of yearning. It's not about `problems.'"

— Robert Olen Butler

Fellow Noircon attendee: "Are you a dog person or a cat person?"

Me: "Neither. I'm a vegetarian."

— Exchange at hotel bar Saturday night

  © Peter Rozovsky 2012

Noircon 2012: More Block, Kent Harrington, ratlines in crime fiction

I don't remember how the subject came up, but Lawrence Block turned the talk to crime-fiction conferences during Saturday's keynote Noircon interview. During a panel at one such convention, Block told interviewer Duane Swierczynski, someone asked him:

"How are you going to spend eternity? I thought, `On a fucking panel.'"

Later, Block was asked about the genesis of his early paperback book about a successful assassination plot against Fidel Castro (republished decades later by Hard Case Crime as Killing Castro). In 1961, Block said, a third-rate paperback publisher ("He aspired to be second-rate") commissioned a quickie biography of Elizabeth Taylor from Donald Westlake, figuring Taylor was not long for the world. Then he asked Block for a similar book about Castro, figuring to capitalize on Castro's inevitable and imminent ouster.

"I never met" the publisher, Block said, "and I've always been grateful for that. ... alav ha-shalom, he's been dead for years, Elizabeth Taylor hung on until recently, and Castro, God love him, is still alive."

***

Kent Harrington, making it through his Sunday morning Noircon session in shape no better or worse than most of his audience, said he wanted his new novel, The Rat Machine, “to be a big novel but in the High Pulp style.”

The novel takes its title from ratlines, the escape routes set up for Nazis fleeing Europe at the end of World War II. Harrington described the book as a thriller about the importation of Nazis into the United States, the role allocated to the Sicilian Mafia in the international heroin trade in return for its cooperation in stamping out Communists and socialists, and the reverberations to this day of those decisions.

Stuart Neville’s next novel will be called Ratlines, and its story includes the Irish government’s embrace of Nazis after the war and its ripple effect in the present day. Asked if he thought more crime writers might take up the theme, Harrington, who called himself a moral if not a political crime novelist, said, “I hope so.”

© Peter Rozovsky 2012