Bouchercon, Part IV: My first panel

Laura Lippman

I moderated one panel and one special-event discussion at Bouchercon 2015 in Raleigh, N.C.,  which seems long ago but from which I only returned on Tuesday. Here's the first part of what it was like.

Kevin Burton Smith

"Beyond Hammett, Chandler, Spillane, and Macdonald" was a reprise of last year's similarly titled panel in which authors, editors, and other crime fiction experts talked about their favorite lesser-known crime writers of the past.  This year's panelists included Laura Lippman (above right) on the YA author Zilpha Keatley Snyder, Kevin Burton "Thrilling Detective Web Site" Smith (left) on Norbert Davis, Sarah Weinman (below right) on Elisabeth Sanxay Holding, and Jordan Foster, who scarpered before I could snap her picture, on Ted Lewis.

Sarah Weinman

All four panelists were eloquent, illuminating, and entertaining, and, more to the point, they chose their subjects well. Lippman taught the gratifyingly packed room that an author who wrote fantasy for children could fill her stories with hard-boiled and even noir tropes.   Smith opened audience eyes to an author who proved that superb writing and hard-boiled toughness are compatible with slapstick comedy.

Weinman talked about Holding, writer of superbly tuned domestic suspense (and, I would argue, noir), and one of the best of the mid-twentieth-century female crime writers Weinman is doing so much to bring back into circulation. And Foster? She spoke comprehensively about Lewis, known for the novel now called Get Carter, but author of at least two other crime fiction classics, and one of the toughest of all crime writers, who combined sharp observational humor with Jim Thompson-like nightmare intensity.

I like to think the panel expanded the audience's idea of what crime fiction can accomplish as much as it expanded mine, because that's exactly what I set out to do.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

My Bouchercon 2015 panels: Norbert Davis and Max Latin

With Bouchercon 2015 just over a week away, here's a post from this blog's Paleolithic Era about an author will be a subject of one two panels I'll moderate:

I admit it: Norbert Davis was American. But he qualifies for this blog on two counts: He had a sense of humor, and Max Latin, just one of his creations in a short but busy career writing for American pulp magazines in the 1930s and '40s, had an interesting profession: He owned a restaurant.

Here's the opening of "Watch Me Kill You!", the first of five novellas collected in The Adventures of Max Latin:

"Guiterrez came out of the kitchen in a cloud of steam and slapped the heavy metal swing door violently shut behind him. He was a tall man with a dark, bitterly disillusioned face. He was wearing a white jacket and a white apron, and he had a chef's hat crushed down over his right ear. There was a towel wrapped around his neck, and he wiped his forehead with its frayed end, glaring at Latin.

"`What was the matter with it?' he demanded."

You're a sterner reader than I if you can resist that.

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Mr. Thrilling Detective Web Site, Kevin Burton Smith,  will discuss Norbert Davis as part of a panel I'll moderate at Bouchercon 2015 in Raleigh, N.C.,  called "Beyond Hammett, Chandler, Spillane, and Macdonald." The panel happens Thursday, Oct. 8, at 2:30 p.m.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007, 2015

My Bouchercon 2015 panels: Norbert Davis' hard-boiled slapstick

Last year's questions from the audience at my Bouchercon panel on "Beyond Hammett, Chandler, and Spillane: Lesser Known Writers of the Pulp and Paperback Eras" included one about Norbert Davis. I hope the questioner plans to attend Bouchercon 2015 in Raleigh, N.C., next month, because this year's version of the panel will include Kevin Burton Smith, the man behind the invaluable Thrilling Detective Web Site, talking about Davis.  The panel, its title slightly inflated to "Beyond Hammett, Chandler, Spillane, and Macdonald," happens Thursday, Oct. 8, 2015, at 2:30 p.m. Sarah Weinman, Jordan Foster, and Laura Lippman will join Kevin, each discussing a favorite crime writer from out of the past. 

While you rush out to register for Bouchercon, if you have not signed up already, here's a post from the past about Davis, who was known for his comic crime stories, but could get tough when he wanted to. 

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 Norbert Davis wrote novels with a dog as co-protagonist. He wrote stories set largely in a restaurant, and he created characters named Bail Bond Dodd and J.P. Jones (the J.P. stands for "Just Plain." That's the man's name — Just Plain Jones.) Yet despite those slapstick touches, and plots, dialogue and action to match, the stories work as hard-boiled tales. Little touches in some of the stories may even reflect the grimness of the Great Depression; Davis published his first stories in the early 1930s.

Here's the opening sentence of "Something for the Sweeper":

"Jones limped slowly along, his rubbers making an irregular squeak-squish sound on the wet cement of the sidewalk."

Is that slapstick (squish-squish), or is it gritty urban realism? In Davis, it's both. When you get to the end of this tale of murder and deception, you'll find the story has come full circle.

Read more about Davis at the Thrilling Detective Web site.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

My Bouchecon 2015 panels

The Bouchercon 2015 schedule is up, and I'll be moderating a couple of good panels, including one special event.  On Thursday, October 8 (Thursday, 8 October, for our English friends) I'll moderate "Beyond Hammett, Chandler, Spillane, and Macdonald," in which authors, editors, and other experts in present-day crime fiction talk about their favorite lesser-known, less-remembered crime writers of the past.

This year's lineup includes Sarah Weinman on Elisabeth Sanxay Holding, Kevin Burton Smith on Norbert Davis, Jordan Foster on Ted Lewis, and, Mark Coggins on Paul Cain in a late-breaking addition, Laura Lippman, who will discuss that mysterious writer TBA.

On Saturday, October 10, at 8:30 a.m., I'll discuss the greatest crime writer ever with two of the people who know his work and life best. The discussion is called "Inside the Mind and Work of Dashiell Hammett," and the two insiders are Julie M. Rivett, Hammett's editor and granddaughter; and Richard Layman, Hammett's biographer and perhaps the leading name in Hammett scholarship.  This is an especially good time to talk about Hammett, what with Nathan Ward's new book and this past spring's donation of two major collections of Hammett's papers to the University of South Carolina. Layman donated one of the collections, Hammett's family the other, so this panel will be the center of the Hammett universe, and I hope you'll all attend.

Bouchercon 2015. The time: Oct. 8-11, 2015. The place: Raleigh, North Carolina. See you there.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Stuffed crowdedly with adverbs

Adverbs are out of favor in crime fiction these days, but American pulp writing in the middle of the last century was full of them — stuffedly full.

In Norbert Davis' stories, characters shave, kick, flip, search, punch, stab, fade, and flip through hotel registration cards "expertly." A  street car clangs its way emptily down the street. Raoul Whitfield, too, used adverbs more than is fashionable today and, if my memory serves me well, Raymond Chandler and perhaps even Dashiell Hammett would have a light blinking redly from time to time.

When did adverbs slip out of fashion? And why?

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Was good grammar ever looked down on in tough-guy crime writing? The first-person narrator of a Mickey Spillane story originally published in Manhunt in 1953 tells us that "But having learned my lesson the hard way, he never got the chance to impose upon me again."

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Finally, here's a bit from one of Elmore Leonard's stories published in 1951 (yes, the man has been writing for that long) that may be more pertinent today than ever:

"When he was through, he shook his head and silently cursed the stupidity of men trying to control a powder-keg situation two thousand miles from the likely explosion. ... Sometimes things get a bit hot; otherwise you just sit around and watch the desert."

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Laughs and death, or, what are the funniest crime stories ever, and why are they so funny?

The spring issue of Mystery Scene magazine (sample articles here) includes Art Taylor's article on "10 Comic Crime Movies." The list includes Sherlock Jr., After the Thin Man, Arsenic and Old Lace, Kind Hearts and Coronets, A Shot in the Dark, Murder by Death, Foul Play, Raising Arizona, A Fish Called Wanda and Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang. Discussions of the individual movies mention scores of other films. Unless I missed something, Taylor omits Big Deal on Madonna Street, possibly the funniest caper movie ever. Still, his list will generate a thousand arguments, conversations and DVD rentals.

What belongs on a similar list of comic crime novels and stories? I'd start with 32 Cadillacs and Cons, Scams and Grifts by Joe Gores, Donald E. Westlake 's Dortmunder novels and Bill James' Harpur and Iles books. Norbert Davis' stories about Bail Bond Dodd and Max Latin deserve a place, and I'd make room for Bust by Ken Bruen and Jason Starr as well as Bruen's Brant and Roberts series. Janet Evanovich's first and fourth Stephanie Plum novels offer deliciously comic opening scenes, and the set pieces with Plum, her father and her grandmother are gifts.

I like to think that most of my choices work both as comedy and as crime writing. How about the movies on Taylor's list? Most are fine film comedies. Are they fine crime films as well?

OK, now it's your turn. What are your favorite comic crime stories, and what makes them so funny?

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

Technorati tags:
Comic crime fiction

Australian crime novelists and humor

I don't want to get weighty and sociological, but it certainly seems as if Australian crime writers are more willing than Americans or even the British to suffuse a crime novel with humor. I've just finished Shane Maloney's Something Fishy. Recently I read The Big Ask by the same author, and I'll soon begin X and Y, part of David Owen's Pufferfish series. I even noted that Garry Disher's Kickback, for all its debts to Richard Stark's Parker novels, has moments of humor that a Parker book would never have.

I can't think of any American counterparts off the top of my head, not the excellent and sometimes hysterical Janet Evanovich; her Stephanie Plum novels seem more like picaresque romance novels to me -- comedies that happen to have something to do with crime, as opposed to crime novels written with humor. And not Parnell Hall. I tried one of his novels, but the yuk-yuk, aren't-I-droll? first chapter left me cold.

Among British crime writers, Ian Rankin can write with wit and sly humor in a short story, but he turns grim and weighty when it comes to novels. Bill James can be howlingly funny, but his are not primarily humorous novels. The Long Firm? Well, maybe. And cozies and academic mysteries, with their built-in drolleries, don't count. I'm talking about a full-bore, hard-boiled, action-packed detective story that just happens to be funny from beginning to end.

I'm not the first to speculate about American unease over humorous crime writing. At least one critic wrote that the 1940s writer Norbert Davis was cursed with a sense of humor. That, the critic said, may have accounted for the relative scarcity of his publications in Black Mask, the premier pulp magazine of the time -- just six stories, if I recall correctly.

I'd be especially interested in having Australian readers weigh in on this. I'm not sure Australians are naturally funnier than anyone else. But they certainly seem more willing to stretch that humor out over a few hundred pages. Or maybe Australian readers are responsible for this state of affairs. God bless them for being more willing than readers elsewhere to accept humorous crime novels!

© Peter Rozovsky 2006

Technorati tags:
humorous crime fiction
Shane Maloney
David Owen
Garry Disher
Australian crime fiction