NoirCon 2012, Nov. 8-11 in Philadelphia

NoirCon 2012 is coming up in Philadelphia, Nov. 8-11. I hope you'll be there with distinguished folks like Lawrence Block, Otto Penzler, Vicki Hendricks, Joyce Carol Oates, Megan Abbott, and Duane Swierczynski, and not so distinguished folks, like me.

Click on the NoirCon link for more information and a registration form. In the meantime, I'll count down the days until the convention with a few special posts including this one from the first NoirCon, in 2008.

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If you'll indulge me for one more post before I send NoirCon 2008 fondly into the sunset, I'd like to share a few remarks that Ken Bruen, one of the event's two guests of honor, made over the course of the convention's four days.

Most pertinent to this blog was his statement, and I don't remember the context, that Irish readers seem to lack pride in the country's wonderful crime writers. This was a surprise to me on my side of the Atlantic, considering the wealth of Irish talent about which one can read on Crime Always Pays, Critical Mick, Crime Scene NI and elsewhere.

Bruen also said that "All my influences are American. That's how I learned to read. That's how I learned to write. For an Irish person to say that is a heresy." Perhaps this accounts for his stated love for the U.S.

Finally, thanks to Bruen, I fulfilled a long-held dream of hearing an Irishman say "shite."

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Nothing if not diacritical: More conventional wisdom

On the eve (or, if you prefer, the brink or the cusp) of Bouchercon 2009, here are some favorite things that fellow convention-goers have said or written at, about or after my three previous crime-fiction conventions:

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"Chubby Cambodian hotties."

— Christa Faust, Noircon 2008

"A KNOB is a COCK!"

— Ali Karim, Bouchercon 2008

"For years I wrote poems, nothing but poems, and all but about five of them were shite."

— Ken Bruen, Noircon 2008

"Tense vowels don't do a man's reputation any good."

— Don Bartlett, Crimefest 2009
(After I'd worried about pronouncing
Jo Nesbø's name correctly. If "Joe
Nesbow" is good enough for the man
who translates Nesbø's books into
English, at least when he's addressing
an English-speaking audience,
it's good enough for me.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

NoirCon 2008: Eat to the beat

Two of the people whom it was my pleasure to meet at NoirCon, Christa Faust and Ed Pettit, posted similar remarks about the event's raucous awards banquet.

Here's Faust's account, in part:

"There were uniformed police in black rubber gloves lined up to frisk everyone entering that half of the restaurant (which incidentally was where the only bathrooms were located.) The food was lousy, mostly bland, uninspired Chinese junk that even their hottest hot sauce couldn’t save, but the parade of chubby Cambodian hotties in micro minis and platform heels more than made up for it.

"The high-decibel Cambodian warbling continued all through the meal and the actual award ceremony. Nothing but a thin, folding wall separated us from the festivities. ... Meanwhile Bruen is just hanging his head in the background and dying a long slow death. It was hilarious, excruciating and surreal. I’ve been to way too many boring, endless rubber chicken dinners at conventions in the past, but whatever else you may say about this event, it was anything but boring."

Here's part of Pettit's:

"There was even tight security ... with police searching each and every partygoer before they were allowed to enter their party. The music was so loud that the presenters could barely be heard giving their congratulatory speeches to the honorees, Bruen and McMillan. But when it came time for Bruen to give his thanks, he showed how loud an Irishman can be. The whole event was surreal. And we loved every minute of it. Who wants to be at another boring awards ceremony?"

And here's a clip from a different concert at the same restaurant that gives an accurate impression of what it was like trying to listen to the NoirCon speeches.


Me, I liked the quiet conversation. Since there was no way I'd hear much of what was happening on the NoirCon stage, I surrendered myself to pleasant chat with my convivial tablemates.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

NoirCon 2008 podcasts

Or is that NoirCast 2008 podcons?

Shannon Clute and Richard Edwards, whose cyber-noir panel at NoirCon explored exciting new ways to think about, publish and broadcast noir, have begun posting their podcasts of the convention at Out of the Past and Behind the Black Mask. So far, they've posted on-the-street and in-the-theater interviews, including Ken Bruen and Gary Phillips, and talks with members of the George Lippard, Philly noir and editors and publishers panels.

Their format is simple but effective: After each panel discussion, Clute and Edwards snatched a member or two for an interview about the panel. The segments are no mere TV-style sound bites. The interview subjects go into considerable depth about the issues the panels had raised.

I was there for the discussions, and I still enjoyed Clute and Edwards with panelists William Lashner and Jon McGoran on why Philadelphia is a great city for crime writers. Civic boosters might not like what the interviewees had to say, though, which buttresses another notion floating about the conference: that noir is and should be a subversive genre.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

NoirCon 2008: Everybody else's wrap-ups

I've posted my NoirCon 2008 wrap-up; now you can read everyone else's. Ed Pettit offers a round-up of the wrap-ups at The Bibliothecary. They're worth reading because many reflect the event's high spirits and because so much was going on that no one person could capture everything, not even if she posted a photo of five crime writers in bed.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

NoirCon, Part VI: Philadelphia's own George Lippard

At least one suggestive and unexpected connection emerged between NoirCon's (mostly) American subjects and this blog's (mostly) non-American ones.

Ed Pettit's presentation early in the program focused on a mid-nineteenth-century Philadelphia journalist, author, social reformer and outsize character named George Lippard and his 1844-5 gothic/crime novel The Quaker City; or, the Monks of Monk Hall. Two days later, Pettit mentioned over coffee that Lippard had sued over pirated German translations of his work published in Philadelphia — and Germany. That sounds to me like an early and little-known instance of crime fiction crossing borders. That it crossed into Germany and not into France is especially interesting.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Technorati tags:
George Lippard

The Big Schiamazzo, or the best Hard Case Crime cover of the 17th century

Did I mention that I'd been to NoirCon in Philadelphia? You should have been there, too. You'll know from my previous posts about the quality of the presentations and the company. All that good stuff sparked some unexpected connections, including this:

Charles Ardai, founder of Hard Case Crime, said during a panel on publishing and editing that a proposed cover for one of the imprint's books ran into opposition from a major department-store chain. Ardai was told, he said, that "We don't like dirty feet or butt cleavage."

Now, painters in the Italian Renaissance and Baroque were not fazed by butt cleavage. In fact, they often showed the entire butt. But dirty feet could and did cause an uproar, and Ardai's comment made me think immediately of Caravaggio's moving painting of The Madonna di Loreto (above, in a too-dark reproduction) from the Church of San Agostino in Rome.

The woman is not disrobed here; she is the Virgin Mary, after all. But look at the rest of the picture: The ramshackle setting. The harsh contrast of dark and light. The stucco chipped from the wall to reveal the bricks beneath. Looks like a noirsh back alley to me.

Mary's elongated neck and legs would not be out of place on a Hard Case cover (of which you can see a complete collection on the Hard Case site, to which I link above). Notice, too, the dirty feet (here belonging to the kneeling pilgrim), which caused a big schiamazzo in Rome in 1604 just as it offended chain-store buyers in our own day.

Then there is the artist himself, whose life contains tantalizing bits and pieces from which to build a splendid noir story. A murder charge was probably the most famous event of this celebrated scapegrace's life, and a quick Web search for "Caravaggio" turns up some suggestive sentences:

"Even in his own lifetime Caravaggio was considered enigmatic, fascinating, rebellious and dangerous."

His female models include Fillide Melandroni, Anna Bianchini, and Maddalena Antognetti ... all well-known prostitutes, who appear as female religious figures including the Virgin and various saints."

and, best of all, this:

"His rage finally led him to commit murder, forcing him to flee Rome a hunted man."

Sterling Hayden, anyone?

So, here is my proposal: The book's title is The Big Schiamazzo, the cover is based on The Madonna di Loreto without the clothes and the baby, and the author is me. What about it, Ardai?

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

NoirCon 2008: The Big Wrap-up

I urge everyone to attend a crime-fiction convention just small enough to allow convention goers to mingle, drink, hang out with and pick the brains of the panelists and presenters, especially if these include people like Ken Bruen, Dennis McMillan, Reed Farrel Coleman, Christa Faust, Scott Phillips, Gary Phillips, Charles Ardai, Vicki Hendricks and Duane Swierczynski, as a start, and those were just the guests of honor, a few of the authors, and an additional publisher.

The program at NoirCon 2008 also included enough editors, publishers, podcasters, professors, scholars, screenings (and screenwriters), forensic sculptors and cold-case specialists to keep the old synapses crackling long after logic dictated that I should have been asleep.

And that was just the official events. The real action happened after hours, when everyone would gather in the hotel bar to talk about crime fiction and its social role. Tempers sometimes flared, and club soda and ginger ale spilled amid vigorous exchanges of views that lasted until well after 10 p.m.

The final event, for those still in town and not exhausted by the late nights, was Sunday afternoon's screening of Deadline U.S.A. in conjunction with the Philadelphia Film Festival. That 1952 Humphrey Bogart classic was one of two movies that the festival screened as part of NoirCon, along with the over-the-top Blast of Silence, from 1961.

I'll be back tomorrow after a good night's sleep, perhaps to offer another detail or two. Until then, why not visit the NoirCon home page and check out the podcasts and the links to the panelists' Web sites? You'll find material sure to expand your mind and your to-read list.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

A long day and a short post from NoirCon 2008

Day Three had an early beginning and a late end at NoirCon 2008. What I don't get to now, I'll discuss tomorrow night.

The convention's one session that dealt explicitly and exclusively with international fiction unexpectedly had little to do with the usual subjects at Detectives Beyond Borders. The session was Saturday afternoon's tribute to Georges Simenon, with William Boyle and Scott Phillips.

Each expressed a preference for Simenon's romans durs, his hard, tough, psychological novels, over his books and stories about Inspector Maigret, and both offered sound, noir-based reasons for doing so. The romans durs put their protagonists in tight, tough, bad situations that get tighter, tougher and worse, sometimes, even often, when no crime is committed. Phillips' and Boyle's preferences made sense; the convention is called NoirCon, after all, and not CrimeCon.

This puts a positive spin on an artistic decision that some critics have regarded as a grubby bid for respectability on Simenon's part. Clive James, for example, wrote that "the Maigret novels acquired such prestige that Simenon’s action novels without Maigret in them started counting as proper novels, the absence of the star turn being thought of as a sign of artistic purity."

Noir, then, does not necessarily imply crime.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Noir Con 2008, Part II — No boundaries?

OK, maybe some boundaries, though no one at NoirCon 2008 seemed to be able to figure out precisely what noir is and isn't. Happily, no one seemed to worry much about this, and the confusion gave rise to some pregnant thoughts on Day Two, Year Two of this fine Philadelphia crime-fiction convention.

And why should I worry about what is international crime fiction and what isn't at a conference with a French name ("Noir") devoted to an American art form that honored an Irish author (Ken Bruen) and a publisher (Dennis McMillan) whose offerings have included seminal Dutch and Australian crime writers?

Highlights from Day Two:

1) Jason Starr's observation toward the end of his Friday panel discussion with Ken Bruen that "The French have a much wider definition of noir" than do Americans. Could he have meant that the French critics who coined the term as applied to film and fiction in the middle of the last century emphasized atmosphere more than today's writers do?

I recall a television interview with the director Jean-Pierre Melville and the star Alain Delon included as a DVD extra with one of Melville's movies. In today's terms, Delon was a laughable parody of cool, literally staring into space and blowing smoke while Melville talked about the movie. From the viewpoint of, say, any time after maybe the early '70s, that looks more kitsch than noir.

Maybe he meant that French writers have taken noir in directions more political than American crime writers have explored (Jean-Patrick Manchette, Jean-Claude Izzo, Didier Daeninckx)?

2) Bruen's declaration during the same discussion that, after having written a few "straight" novels, "I really wanted to write a crime novel, but I wanted to see if I could write it the way the American hard-boiled school writes."

3) The award for the publisher Dennis McMillan, whose offerings have included books from Janwillem van de Wetering, Robert van Gulik and Arthur W. Upfield.

4) News from Akashic Books that another novel from Juan de Recacoechea, author of American Visa, is being translated into English as we speak.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Conventional odds and ends

I'm just back from the first evening of my first crime-fiction convention, NoirCon 2008 in Philadelphia. Though the event is devoted principally to American crime, the opening sessions contained a touch or two of special international interest, starting, of course with the name: noir, a French word adopted for an American sub-genre of crime fiction and film.

1) David Schmid, a professor at the University of Buffalo and the kind of professor whose classes you would have wanted to take, opened proceedings with a talk about the wide use to which the term noir has been put. Schmid was educated in England and, from his accent, grew up there, too. Why does this matter? Because it's just one more piece of evidence of the international appeal that noir, like its fellow American art form, jazz, has enjoyed.

2) Scott Phillips, present for a screening of the superb movie based on his novel The Ice Harvest, said he had read about 150 of Georges Simenon's books and planned to be part of a Simenon panel later in the convention. He said he started reading Simenon as a way to keep up his skills in French when he was living in France.

He's not the only author for whom Simenon opened (or widened) a path into French. Janwillem van de Wetering, Dutch author of the Amsterdam Cops novels, has said in interviews that he started reading Simenon for a similar reason: to sharpen his French skills for business purposes. This, if I recall correctly, inspired him to start writing crime fiction.

3) One of the convention's two guests of honor was not on the first evening's program but put in a brief appearance nonetheless. I am happy to report that, based on a brief meeting, Ken Bruen seems to be a warm and personable a fellow as his reputation would suggest.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

NoirCon 2008 in Philadelphia this week

It began last year as GoodisCon, honoring Philadelphia's own David Goodis, whose work included the novels made into the movies Dark Passage and Shoot the Piano Player. This year's version is called NoirCon, and it honors the kind of writing Goodis exemplified.

The event runs from April 3-6, and it includes discussions, movies, meals, a silent auction and more. Tributes to Georges Simenon, Dorothy B. Hughes, Jim Thompson, Donald Goines, Charles Willeford and Carroll John Daly are on the agenda, though these are scheduled as early as 8:45 a.m., a highly un-noirlike hour to expect attendees to be out of bed. Guest of honor among a star-studded list of attendees, and a man I'll hope to meet, is Ken Bruen.

More information here.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008