Cambodia, crime, and history

Andrew Nette (right) with your humble blogkeeper
at Philadelphia's Noircon convention in 2014

I've been so immersed in such a welter of Cambodian history and crime fiction that I can't remember just which book is the basis for each of the following observations.

First, the books on which the observations are based:
1) Phnom Penh Noir, edited by Christopher G. Moore
2) A History of Cambodia, by David Chandler
3)  Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare, by Philip Short
4) Ghost Money, by Andrew Nette
5) The Pol Pot Regime, by Ben Kiernan

For one, at least two of the stories appear to include allusions, conscious or otherwise, to Casablanca. This makes sense; Casablanca was a refuge or a last stop for dubious sorts with agendas of their own from all over the world. So was Phnom Penh after Vietnam ousted the Khmer Rouge in 1979. Among the dubious sorts in Phnom Penh, living high amid the local squalor, were workers from non-governmental aid organizations. This is the heart of the first story in Phnom Penh Noir, by Roland Joffé. who directed The Killing Fields.

Second, orientation by landmark is less frequent than I expected in the stories set in Cambodia and written by foreigners, but it is nonetheless present. Without descending into travelogism, the stories will situate places in the story by their relation to major landmarks in a way I suspect native writers would not.

Third, the mutual enmity of Cambodians and Vietnamese, whose best-known manifestation in recent decades is probably Vietnam's 1979 invasion, may have its roots in conflict of countries that fell under the sway of Asia's two great ancient civilizations of India (Cambodia) and China (Vietnam).

Finally, to scramble the notions of native and foreigner, came "Broken Chains," a selection of rap poetry interspersed with biographical snippets in Phnom Penh Noir by Kosal Khiev, born in a Thai refugee camp, migrated to the United States as an infant, convicted of attempted murder, jailed for 14 years, then deported to Cambodia. Where does he belong?

While you ponder that question, here's Andrew Nette on Phnom Penh Noir and writing noir in Asia. 

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Hear Detectives Beyond Borders read, and celebrate David Goodis

(Photo by your
humble blogkeeper)

Erik Arneson (right) has posted a podcast of "Three Minutes of Terror" from Noircon 2014 in Philadelphia. I was one of about twenty authors who read from their work, three minutes maximum, or risk being attacked with a chainsaw.  Have a listen; I'm up at the 18:45 mark in this second part of the two-part podcast.

Then on Saturday, I'll join a few dozen Goodisheads to celebrate the life and work of David Goodis, Philadelphia's greatest crime writer and one of the best noir writers anywhere. This annual event has in part years included visits to sites associated with Goodis' work as well as to the cemetery where he was buried.

We'll discuss Goodis, we'll read from his writing, and a convivial meal is generally on the itinerary. Here's a favorite moment from the one year I attended the celebration previously.  Weather forecasts call for temperatures more comfortable than they were that year.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Detectives Beyond Borders around the world, in the news, and on the Web

I am pleased to have been quoted at length in the Irish Examiner's review of Akashic Books' upcoming Belfast Noir volume of  crime stories. The piece appears under the entirely appropriate headline "`Belfast Noir': Move over Scandinavia, the Irish are the real thrillers ...," and it calls me "an international authority on crime-writing, whose blog ‘Detectives Beyond Borders’ has for many years been the last word on all things noir." Grateful thanks to my Irish peeps, and don't go accusing them of committing blarney. 

Stuart Neville, author
and member of my
Belfast Noir panel.
Photos by your formerly
humble blogkeeper.

I'll discuss Belfast Noir next week at Bouchercon in Long Beach. The panel is called "Belfast Noir: Stories of Mayhem and Murder from Northern Ireland," and it happens at 11:30 a.m., Friday, Nov. 14. I'm not saying I'll buy a pint of Guinness for everyone who shows up, but there's only one way for you to find out.

Paul Charles, also part 
of the Belfast Noir panel
 at Bouchercon.

Over at Dietrich Kalteis' Off the Cuff, which has published a number of my noir photos, I put down my camera to join Dietrich and co-host Martin Frankson for a chat about crime-fiction conferences. Dietrich and Martin talk a bit about how how authors might approach conventions from a business point of view. I talk fun, including a link to the story of the wandering bridesmaids of Bouchercon 2009.

*

I took the two author photos at Noircon 2014, the most fun one can have without leaving Philadelphia. Here are two more photos, from the event's concluding program at Port Richmond Books, just before the pierogi-fueled piss-up.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Noircon 2014: The pierogi-fueled piss-up

A foggy night outside the Philadelphia 
Mausoleum  of Contemporary Art, 
site of the second evening  of
Noircon programming. Unless otherwise
indicated, photos by Peter
 Rozovsky, your humble blogkeeper.

I'm drifting slowly into happy post-Noircon slumber on a giant pieróg-shaped cloud of good fellowship and beer.

The fourth edition of the world's greatest little noir convention wrapped up on Sunday with a shopping trip and a final presentation at Port Richmond books, followed by a right good mid-afternoon piss-up at a local bar in the heavily Polish neighborhood.

Noircon's programming has always been eccentric and stimulating. We have heard from strippers, sexologists, sculptors, and, this year, the author/investigator who is positive his father was the Black Dahlia killer.

But, as is usual with the intimate gathering of inquisitive, intelligent crime and noir readers, writers, editors, publishers, agents, and fans, some of my favorite moments happened outside the convention programming, and not all of them at the bar.

So, for instance ...

Fuminori Nakamura

1. I had the great pleasure of hearing Eddie Muller hold forth on his work with the Film Noir Foundation. I know no one else as devoted to, or so knowledgeable and enthusiastic about, any worthwhile subject as Eddie is about film noir, and by God, he channels his passion into action, with his work at the FNF.  OK, the Muller discussion happened at the bar.



Stuart Neville

2. So did the next highlight, actually, at the very same bar, when the sights and sounds of a wedding party of overripe frat boys and superannuated cheerleaders had several of us recalling this incident from Bouchercon 2009 in Indianapolis. But we were no ordinary gang of nostalgic barflies, and by the time we'd got done speculating about what those Indianapolis bridesmaids were doing with that pizza, we'd imagined them into a gang of bloodsuckers migrating slowly south for the winter. I'm thinking of calling the screenplay Vampire Bridesmaids With a Pizza.



Me and Andrew "Pulp
Curry" Nette.

3. I spent some time with the ultra-knowledgeable Andrew Nette, who had come all the way from Melbourne, Australia, to visit Noircon and see the East Coast. Andrew was pleasant company, and he suggested what will likely turn out to be a vital reference for one of my Bouchercon 2014 panels.

4. 

   Suzanne Solomon

   I realized I've been in Philadelphia long enough to have become a bit of a local expert, playing guide throughout the four-plus days to a cast of characters that included friends old, new, and in between.

Your humble blogkeeper, Scott Adlerberg, Duane Swierczynski, Ed "Philly Poe Guy" Pettit, Jeff Wong, and Mike White at Donna's  Bar. Photo courtesy of Andrew Nette.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014 

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."

*

"Half man, half sponge."

*

"He was so wicked, he had to go live in Switzerland."

© Peter Rozovsky 2014 

Noir at the Bar @Noircon

Sarah Weinman

A few photos I snapped at Wednesday evening's Noir at the Bar, MC'd by the guy who started Noir at the Bar (me), and featuring a roster of twelve readers that included four from the original Noir at the Bar gang, from back in 2008.

Jon McGoran

The evening was part of NoirCon 2014, that other great crime fiction happening that started in Philadelphia. (I think of the two as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitutional Convention of crime fiction.)

Jonathan Woods

More to come!

Oh, and %^%$! Jed Ayres and ^&*$#! Scott Phillips.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Welcome, Noirconians!: A photographic guide to Philadelphia

With crowds pouring into town for Noircon 2014, here's a photographic tour of Philadelphia (you know: dark underbelly, the things visitors never see, and all that crap), courtesy of Peter Rozovsky, you humble blogkeeper.

Noircon: It's like the Phillies winning the World Series, but without anyone flipping cars over in the street.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Noircons then and now

People tell me I'm too negative:
Your humble blogkeeper talks
about noir songs at the Philadelphia 
Mausoleum  of Contemporary Art
at Noircon 2012. Photo
courtesy  of Cullen Gallagher

With Noircon 2014 coming to Philly this week, here are some wise, entertaining, and interesting things that people said at previous Noircons. This year's version kicks off Wednesday night, with me MC'ing a Noir at the Bar back in the city where I created Noir at the Bar in 2008.

=========

 “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, 2012

***

"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?"

— Overheard at the hotel bar, 2010 (I should have replied: "Bitch-slapping takes a hyphen — and likes it." )

***

"Chubby Cambodian hotties." 

— Christa Faust, 2008

***

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

Me: "Neither. I'm a vegetarian." 

— Exchange at hotel bar Saturday night, Noircon 2012

  © Peter Rozovsky 2012, 2-14

NoirCon 2014 is almost here // Noir at the Bar comes back home

I'll be part of another con before Bouchercon, the fourth incarnation of the event that introduced me to the joys of the con, Philadelphia's own Noircon.

This year's event happens Oct. 30-Nov. 2, and it has a more international flavor than the versions in 2008, 2010, and 2012, including several authors who will be part of my Bouchercon panels two weeks later in Long Beach. Stuart Neville will be here. So will Paul Charles, who will join Stuart, Adrian McKinty, and Gerard Brennan on my Bouchercon "Belfast Noir" panel.  Sarah Weinman and Charles Kelly will be here, sharpening their oratorical skills for their appearances on my "Beyond Hammett, Chandler, and Spillane: Lesser Known Writers of the Pulp and Paperback Eras" panel in Long Beach.

The gang from Soho Press is coming to Noircon to receive awards. The delegation will include author Fuminori Nakamura and Paul Oliver, whose current reissues of Ted "Get Carter" Lewis' novels are an event of high importance to noir readers. Trust me: You want to read these books.

I'll be doing my part by MC'ing a NoirCon edition of Noir at the Bar as N@theB returns to the city where I staged the very first ones in 2008.    The list of readers includes several of the original Noir at the Bar authors and moderators, so here's a special thank you to Duane Swierczynski, Jon McGoran (who set this event up), Dennis Tafoya, and Sarah Weinman. Welcome back.

NoirCon 2008 was my first convention, my first chance to meet authors and others in the profession. It's where I met Ken Bruen and Christa Faust and Scott Phillips and Sarah Weinman and Reed Farrel Coleman and Ed Pettit and Charles Ardai and Megan Abbott and more, and not just met them, but hung out with them and talked with them. The experience was so much fun that I signed up for that year's Bouchercon almost immediately, and the rest is history. 

NoirCon: Because Not Everything Great That Started in Philadelphia Was Run By Guys Who Have Their Faces on Money.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Sour on Swedes plus more on NoirCon

The wise and discerning keeper of the Crime Scraps Review blog, long a champion of Scandinavian crime fiction, asks after reading Autumn Killing by Mons Kallentoft: "Are we now getting the average Swedish crime novel translated simply because it is Swedish?"

*

Back in Philadelphia, Jeremiah Healy is the latest NoirCon 2012 attendee to weigh in with his thoughts on the conference: 

"This will be my third NoirCon, and I attended the first two. I think my favorite story from the conference/convention was learning that David Goodis didn't just write noir: He also lived it, and probably more from desperation than enjoyment. ...

"NoirCon is different from most other conferences/conventions in that it is dedicated to a sub-genre of crime writing, something like the EyeCons (focusing on private-investigator fiction) sponsored by Gary Niebuhr and Ted Hertel in Milwaukee and Robert Randisi and Christine Matthews in St. Louis. As a result, it's like a wine-tasting dedicated to one varietal, say Pinot Noir (sorry), and therefore an event in which all the attendees have a common, if narrower, interest."

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Why they're coming to NoirCon, part II

It's a commonplace at crime conventions that the darker the writing, the more generous and gregarious the writer. Or maybe that's just the good vibes at NoirCon, the crime conference I'm proud to say takes place in Philadelphia every two years. NoirCon 2012 begins Thursday, and here's what a few more NoirCon panelists have to say about the event and its director. (Read previous huzzahs for NoirCon here.)

=============

"Favorite NoirCon story — 2 a.m., some bar in Philly, drinking beers with Ken Bruen. And if I could remember it, I'm sure the conversation was brilliant.

"What's so different — Nobody's there to sell anything, nobody's slugging their latest book or their new series. We're there to talk about what we love to read.

"How's that?"

— Charles Benoit

"Noircon 2012 is my second Noircon. From my experience at Noircon 2010, I can say that Lou Boxer is one of the great and most generous of conference organizers and hosts. When I first contacted him in 2010, it was too late for me to be on a panel or to write something for the Noircon 2010 program book. In the end Lou said, `Send me a one-page ad for your book (Bad Juju & Other Tales of Madness and Mayhem).'

"I did, and it appeared at no charge in the back of the Noircon 2010 program book, notwithstanding that I was a new, unknown writer. Neato!

"The Noircon 2010 program book was a thing of beauty in and of itself, designed to look like a used 1950's pulp paperback collector's item. It even came in a plastic sleeve with a sticker showing the condition and price: VG 100--. It was intended to look like the paperback editions of the pulp novels of Jim Thompson, David Goodis and others of that period, with faux creases, rubbings, dirt stains, etc. on the cover.

"Unlike the hugeness of Bouchercon (which is fun in its own right), Noircon is a very intimate gathering of crime-story writers and fans, held in a vibrant inner-city Philadelphia neighborhood where there are great restaurants and bars for the overflow from the conference. Overall the quality of the presentations and panels in 2010 was excellent and more intellectually focused than Bouchercon.

"Without a doubt, Noircon is THE crime fiction writers' and fans' conference to attend."

— Jonathan Woods

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

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.)

==========================

“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

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.

==========

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

Hard-boiled at the beach

I'm bursting with enthusiasm for my adopted country, for its misfits, its losers, its hard cases, and its beaches.

I've continued my project, announced here, of reading classic American hard-boiled and noir, and I'll likely continue to do so over the next few days at an undisclosed location on the Atlantic coast. And that means blogging may be light here at Detectives Beyond Borders until next week, lest I get sun screen and beach sand all over my keyboard. In the meantime, a few notes:

1) I like Jim Thompson's The Getaway better than Edward Anderson's Thieves Like Us. Each is saturated with sympathy for its characters, each occasionally lapses into speechifying, but Thompson, perhaps more in this novel than in his others, has considerable fun on the way to his hellish destination.

2) Why isn't Dan J. Marlowe better known? He did his best writing in the know-it-all, smirk-at-everything, over-the-top 1960s, yet his heist novels avoid both nostalgia and jokiness. And The Vengeance Man combines Ross Thomas' eye for political shenanigans with Jim Thompson's fatalism.

Happily, readers will soon be able to learn more about Marlowe and his interesting life (He was a professional gambler, a Rotarian, a Republican city councilman, and a friend of a notorious bank robber.) Gunshots in Another Room: The Forgotten Life of Dan J. Marlowe is scheduled for publication this fall. In the meantime, here's an appreciation of Marlowe from the biography's author, Charles Kelly.

3) Why is Paul Cain's Fast One not included in the Library of America's American Noir of the 1930s and 40s collection? It's the best, toughest, hardest-hitting American crime novel whose author is not named Chandler or Hammett. I'll be sure to ask the LofA volume's editor, Robert Polito, the reason for the omission when we meet in good fellowship at Noircon 2012 in November.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

I don't like Nick Cave

I have a confession to make: I don't like Nick Cave.

Maybe you don't either, but I'm the one who's going to play and maybe talk about noir and crime songs at Noircon 2012, and Cave is the guy who recorded an album called Murder Ballads, his nod to murder ballads.

On first listen, I found the album noirish, all right, but too mannered, too studied, too aware of and pleased with itself. Indeed, one review had this to say (the courtesy title is a clue to the newspaper in which the review appeared:

"...Murder Ballads is about more than storytelling. In each song, Mr. Cave meticulously creates a macabre fable and then distills it to a single image of death in much the way a photographer arranges a studio shoot..."

Fair enough, but I like my ballads to sound more like ballads and less like carefully posed daguerreotype death portraits. And it's not that I'm a musical stick in the mud, either. I've got a song by Jack White on my list, and Tom Waits' album Bad As Me is even more eclectic and musically daring than Cave's, and I like it just fine.

So talk me into liking Murder Ballads better. If I picked one Nick Cave song from the record for my Project Noir songs list, which should it be?

Here's one that has some good lines: "The Curse of Millhaven." Fans of noir and crime songs might notice its melodic similarity to the Pogues' "The Boys From the County Hell." And here's an "Irish Ballad" of quite another kind from Tom Lehrer.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Project Noir Songs goes to Brazil

I knew Elizeth Cardoso’s “Ocultei” was a great melodramatic noir song before I understood the words. (Cardoso and the song are Brazilian, and she sings it in Portuguese.)

Atmosphere was everything: the languid, matter-of-fact singing of the opening verse giving way to vocal tremor, then building to intensity a good deal stronger than that of your average torch song. The jacket photo of Cardoso, eyes closed in concentration as she sings, a bead of sweat (or a tear) below her left eye.

Then I learned what she was singing (Lyrics translated freely if not downright ineptly by your humble blogkeeper):

  Ocultei
  Um sofrimento de morte
  Temendo a sorte
  Do grande amor que te dei

 (I blocked out
  A torment of death
  Fearing the fate
  Of the great love I gave you – and this is the matter-of-fact part!)

  Procurei
  Não perturbar nossa vida
  Que era florida
  Como, a princípio, sonhei

 (I tried
  Not to disturb our life,
  Which was going so well
  As I, at first, dreamed – A note of foreboding as sure any in a good '40s or '50s melodrama, the pause between third and fourth line adding to the effect.)

  Hoje, porem,
 Abri as portas do destino

(Today, however,
  I open the doors of destiny – and we skip to …)

  O meu ardente desejo
  Que Deus me perdoe o pecado
  É que outra mulher ao teu lado
  Te mate na hora de um beijo

  (My most ardent desire
– May God forgive me the sin! –
   Is that another woman, by your side,
   Kill you during a kiss.)

She loves him, she hates him, she begs forgiveness, she fantasizes another woman into his arms even as she dreams of his death. That's enough seething emotion to burn holes in the page or on the screen, I'd say.

And now I'm happy to be able to say you can listen for yourself. Though written by Ary Barroso, one of Brazil's best-loved popular composers, "Ocultei" is one of his less-recorded songs. I bought my copy in Brazil twelve years ago, and I'd never been able to find another recording or clip of Elizeth's version — until yesterday. Ladies and gentlemen, Elizeth Cardoso.

***

I'll be presenting Project Noir Songs at Noircon 2012 in Philadelphia in November, a preliminary act for a Newport Folk Festival 1965's worth of crime-fiction talent including Megan Abbott, Lawrence Block, and Joyce Carol Oates. Yes, I'm excited!

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Goodis the great

Some of the borders I've crossed recently have been ones of time, into American crime writing of the 1940s and '50s.

Based on my first readings of all three authors, I like Bruno Fischer and Fletcher Flora a little better than I like Day Keene. But none was as good as David Goodis.

I'd read some Goodis before, the short story "Black Pudding" and the 1951 best-seller Cassidy's Girl, and I'd been impressed, notably by the heart-breaking compassion he mustered for his characters. But Dark Passage (1946) is, in its opening chapters, even better, a knockout of a book.

I'll likely have more to say later, but for now it's interesting to view the novel as an argument for the old proposition that the way to become a good writer is to write, and write, and write. Dark Passage was Goodis' second novel, and it appeared seven years after his first. In between, Goodis wrote prodigiously for pulp magazines, more than five million words in five years in the early 1940s, according to his own estimate. (See Robert Polito's notes to David Goodis: Five Noir Novels of the 1940s and 1950s.)

The result may not tug at the heartstrings quite as hard as some of Goodis' later works do, but it is self-consciously stylish without going over the top, a difficult feat for any writer, much less one not yet thirty years old. The book's first chapters are full of words repeated to amusing effect. And if you like how Ken Bruen and Allan Guthrie use humor at dark moments and somehow make it seem right, you'll find the roots of the practice in protagonist Vincent Parry's conversation with the taxi driver in Chapter Seven.

But first, my favorite line of the book so far, tough, naive, funny and touching at the same time:

"Being good to people sounds nice but it's hard work."

***

Mingle with Goodis-heads and noir fans this Nov. 8-11 at Noircon 2012 in Philadelphia.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

"Do you get much—"

(Two scenes on Bush Street, Nob Hill, San Francisco. Photos, as always, by your humble blogkeeper)

Your kind comments on my previous post got me reflecting fondly on San Francisco's Bouchercon 2010 and my other recent crime-fiction convention, and I realized I had more to show and tell. (So does Ali Karim, though he exaggerates about me and the waitress.)

Back in Philadelphia, a pair of profane utterances ran through Noircon 2010 like leitmotifs through a Wagner opera. Here, then, are some of that conference's best-loved lines:

"Do you get much pussy?"

— inmate to George Pelecanos after Pelecanos had talked to a prison audience about being a writer


"Do you get much pussy?"

— shouted response to "Any questions?" following every subsequent panel session. Much laughter ensued.


"Fuck you!" (and variants including "Fuck you, Cullen!", "Fuck you, Peter!" and "Fuck you, Megan!")

— panelists' response to the equally ubiquitous (and equally jocose) post-discussion question "How do you define noir?" Much laughter ensued.

Want more? See you at Noircon 2012, Nov. 8-11.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Noircon 2010: The boys of late autumn

That's my contribution to the coolest souvenir that anyone took home from Noircon 2010.

This is the guy the souvenir belongs to, Steve Weddle. He chose an appropriate memento given that baseball, once the summer game, is now played in November. (Read his Noircon report for an idea of the gentle camaraderie of crime-fiction conventions.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

What was new at Noircon / #Noircon2010 ?

For me, it was:

Meeting: Hilary Davidson, Jedidiah Ayres, Cullen Gallagher, Cameron Ashley, Meredith Anthony, Jared Case, Lawrence Light, Wallace Stroby, Larry Withers, Sharyn Pak Withers, Steve Weddle, Todd Mason.

Getting acquainted or reacquainted with: Fantômas, Patricia Highsmith,

Drinking: Hitachino Nest Real Ginger Brew.

And that was in addition to the congenial company I'd come to know from previous conventions.

New beer, new friends, new books. What could be better?

***

What books, authors or beers have you met for the first time at a crime-fiction convention?

© Peter Rozovsky 2010