The Longue Goodbye

In honor of author Richard Stark, reader Joe Barrett, and their correct rendering of chaise longue in the audiobook version of Stark's novel Butcher's Moon, here's a story I wrote a few years back.
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Rick Ollerman enjoys a
moment of nail-biting
suspense. Photos by
Peter Rozovsky for
Detectives Beyond
Borders.

Here are more photos from Sunday's Noir at the Bar in New York along with the other story I read there. I've included a face from earlier in the day at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that would not have been out of place at the reading. (See if you can spot the interloper.)  See my other story and the first batch of photos on the previous post here at Detectives Beyond Borders.)

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The Longue Goodbye

Nick Kolakowski, Suzanne Solomon.

I pushed open the door to the pool deck and inhaled chlorine and death. Fen slumped in the chase lounge. He looked smaller and sicker than he had when I'd seen him three days before.

Hellenistic dramatic mask

Spit and blood caked around his broken mouth, and for a moment I thought he was dead. "Got anything to tell me, Fen?" I knelt by the chair.

Jeff Markowitz

His lips cracked when he tried to talk, and I knew Fen was more than halfway to where he was going. I leaned closer.

"It's chaise longue, not chase lounge, you illiterate fuck," he said. "It means long chair."

Jen Conley

He died happy.

— Peter Rozovsky

Albert Tucher, Jen Conley, Suzanne Solomon, Terrence McCauley

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

Bouchercon 2016, Part III: One panel and another mess of pictures

Eric Beetner and his sister Gretchen don't take no
mess. Photos by Peter Rozovsky 

My only complaint about the panels on lesser-known writers of the pulp and paperback-original eras that I've moderated at the last three Bouchercons is that time inevitably runs out well before I run out of questions and the panelists out of answers.  This year's panelists helped out by anticipating some of those questions and incorporating the answers into their replies to questions I did ask. Eric Beetner, for example, offered some interesting comparisons of the writing style and literary chops of the two writers he discussed, William P. McGivern and Charles Williams.

Rick Ollerman

Alexandra Sokoloff

I chided several of the panelists for stealing my questions, but I was grateful to be up there on stage with such interested panelists. Thanks, Eric, Martin Edwards, Rick Ollerman, and Gary Phillips. You can buy CDs and MP3 files of the panel and all other Bouchercon sessions at at VW Tapes Conference Recording, http://vwtapes.com/bouchercon2016.aspx, purveyors of fine Bouchercon recordings for a number of years now.

Steve Cavanaugh shot by Ayo Onatade
shot by me, Noir at the Bar, Voodoo
Lounge.

Danny Gardner

Craig Faustus Buck

Johnny Shaw

Harlan Coben

Sarah M. Chen

Josh Stallings

Christa Faust

© Peter Rozovsky 2016 

Bouchercon 2016, Part II: One book, lots of pictures

French Quarter, New Orleans. Photos by Peter Rozovsky
for Detectives Beyond Borders.

I rarely find time to read at Bouchercon because I'm too busy doing other things, and that was about five times truer for New Orleans than it was for the previous eight cities where I'd attended the annual world mystery and crime fiction convention.

Photo not by
Peter Rozovsky

The first acquisition that I've dipped into is Harold Q. Masur's novel Bury Me Deep, published in 1947 (despite Google's assertion that it first appeared in 1924). I bought this one on the advice of J. Kingston Pierce, part of a coterie of wise men who know a lot more about vintage paperbacks than I do and who were frequently hovering around the old paperbacks at Mystery Mike's table in the Bouchercon book room. (The other members of the triumvirate were Bill Crider and Rick Ollerman. Only the best can tell me how to spend my money.)

A baby alligator and its admirers in the bayou country.

Masur builds his story to a tight, efficient climax in the early chapters, something like how David Swinson does in his fine novel The Second Girl. Done well, that sort of thing knocks me off-balance in the best possible way and leaves me eager to find out what happens next--not that the stories degenerate into a string of cliffhangers, either. I think of it as a narrative apéritif that whets the appetite for the story to come. Or maybe it's more like an operatic overture, offering clues to the themes that will follow. Whatever your preferred metaphor, Masur pulls it off.

Nanci Kalanta, known on
Facebook as Mountain Jane
Laurel. I'm a gentleman, and
when a lady says, "Do me in
black and white," I smile
and oblige.

The pre-, post-, and para-Bouchercon activities were the most unusual and entertaining I'd enjoyed, and for whatever reason, it seemed that a larger group of folks from various circles of my friends and acquaintances than ever before mingled and intersected in a giant Venn diagram of gin, powdered sugar, and po'boys. What a city!

Garden District, New Orleans.

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

Mike Stotter, Sara Paretsky, Ali Karim.

In the bayou country.

Terrence McCauley

Alison Gaylin, Ali Karim

Jay Stringer, Eric Beetner

Christa Faust

Suzanne Solomon

Joe Lansdale

Bouchercon 2016, Part I: Crime with alligators

The Garden District, New Orleans.
Photos by Peter Rozovsky for
Detectives Beyond Borders

Bouchercon 2016 was like no other in my experience, with more music, more color, more humidity, more good food, more courtesy, more good fellowship, more nobility of character, more drama, more hospitality, and more alligators than any I'd attended before.   That's New Orleans and the bayou country, I guess.

My Thursday morning panel went as well as any I'd moderated. The panelists — Eric Beetner, Martin Edwards, Rick Ollerman, and Gary Phillips — were articulate, knowledgeable, and entertaining talking about their favorite crime writers of the past. Those crime writers included some I had previously read and enjoyed, including Charles Williams, Peter Rabe, and Michael Gilbert, and others new to me.

The latter included William Peter McGovern and the remarkable Clarence Cooper Jr. Ten minutes into the panel, Walter Mosley walked in and took a seat in the crowd. He even offered a trenchant and entertaining interjection during the session's question period. I have no photographic evidence of Mosley's presence, but you might be able to hear him on CDs and MP3 files of the session,  available from VW Tapes Conference Recordings.

Christa Faust

The fun had begun the previous night, with the best Noir at the Bar I have attended since I invented Noir at the Bar eight years ago. The Voodoo Lounge on North Rampart Street was a perfect venue: crowded, amiably seedy, with a low, steady buzz of talk punctuating breaks between the superb readings.

The highlights for me? Martyn Waites and Christa Faust, who write violence and grotesquery, which anyone can do, but who do so with sympathy and heart, which few even try.  John Rector's deadpan story, whose television food-show host character appears to cook something you'll never eat, was not just gross-out funny, but also superbly controlled. Johnny Shaw gave a hilarious reading-performance of a story featuring Chingón: The World’s Deadliest Mexican.

Chris Acker and the Growing Boys. French
Quarter, New Orleans

Sunday evening, two of us wandered the French Quarter, stopping in at bars or lingering in the street wherever the music sounded interesting. We heard funk and blues that brought home how important New Orleans was to the formation of rock and roll. We heard pure and clear country music from a sidewalk quartet whose audience included an 89-year-old woman who sang along to everything.

Jay Stringer, Noir at the Bar's
apparently headless host

But she couldn't top the blind man who walked into the first place we had stopped and danced up a storm using his impassive seeing-eye dog as a maypole. At one point in the evening a young man backing out of a doorway carrying an amplifier accidentally bumped my friend and said to her in a voice filled with concern: "Excuse me, sweetheart." That would not have happened in Philadelphia or Boston or Montreal or anywhere else I've ever been.

Music in the French Quarter,
New Orleans

Along the way we became separated from Ali Karim and Mike Stotter, much to Ali's consternation. But his anger had a benevolent cause: He had gone out of his way to help a fellow convention attendee who had got into trouble, and he was worried that the same had happened to us.  Ali is a good human being as well as a hilarious boon companion.

New Orleans food you know about already. Suffice it to say that the spices will wake you up and that the best meal I had was the andouille-crusted fish at the Palace Café. Cajun music? Sone of the rhythms are tricky, but a lot of the songs are based on a simple I-IV-V chord progression that even I can play.

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

The long Thursday morning: My last Bouchercon 2016 book arrives

The book I'll need to complete preparation for the panel I'll moderate at Bouchercon 2016 next week arrived today. 

The novel is The Long Saturday Night by Charles Williams, the panel is called "From Hank to Hendrix: Beyond Chandler and Hammett: Lesser Known Writers of the Pulp and Paperback Original Eras," and, for the third straight year, preparation for the "Beyond Chandler and Hammett" panel has expanded my idea of what crime fiction is.

This year's version includes four of today's sharpest, savviest crime writers talking about their favorite crime writers of the past: Eric Beetner on William P. McGivern and Charles Williams, Martin Edwards on Michael Gilbert, Rick Ollerman on Peter Rabe and Jada Davis, and Gary Phillips on Clarence Cooper Jr., with a word or two on Gil Brewer.

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"From Hank to Hendrix: Beyond Chandler and Hammett: Lesser Known Writers of the Pulp and Paperback Original Eras" happens Thursday, Sept. 15. at 9 a.m.,  at the Marriott, 555 Canal St., New Orleans. The room is LaGalleries 1. See you there.

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

My Bouchercon 2016 panel: Peter Rabe and Murder Me For Nickels

Whereas Charles Williams loved to write about tough, self-reliant men who find themselves in situations tougher than they think they can cope with, his fellow star author at Gold Medal Books, Peter Rabe, specialized in men who clash with their crooked bosses, or try to protect them, or watch them disintegrate, or who suffer at their hands.

The Box (great title, terrific book), Kill the Boss Goodbye (crap title, excellent book), Benny Muscles In, A Shroud for Jesso, and Dig My Grave Deep all take up the theme, and that's just among the Rabe novels I've read.

Rabe's 1960 novel Murder Me For Nickels (great title, damn fine book) states the theme in a comic tone that shift from major key to minor, its mordant wisecracks where least expected gradually shifting to a tone of real menace.

The opening line is typical: "Walter Lippit makes music all over own." Sounds jaunty, even whimsical, but Lippit is a gangster who controls the local juke-box racket.

And there's this bit, in which the violent tone works its way under the jaunty theme of the first sentence. (You'll have to read the book for context):

“`You think, Jacky, with the pull you have in this company, we could all get another cup of coffee?'

“I did not think I could go through another five, or let’s say, three and a half minutes like this, even without sweet roll time. So I said no, I didn’t want to take advantage."

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Rick Ollerman will talk about Peter Rabe as part of my panel called "From Hank to Hendrix: Beyond Chandler and Hammett: Lesser Known Writers of the Pulp and Paperback Original Eras" at Bouchercon 2016. It happens at 9 a.m., Thursday, Sept. 15, at the Marriott, 555 Canal St., New Orleans, Room LaGalleries 1.  

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

My Bouchercon 2016 panel: Meet Peter Rabe

Peter Rabe's gangster/fixer characters seem driven toward confrontations with their bosses that do not generally end well (though Daniel Port, the political fixer of the Glass Key-like Dig My Grave Deep, [1956] survived his confrontation long enough to feature in a series of novels.)

The Box (1962), A Shroud for Jesso (1955), and, believe it or not, Kill the Boss Good-By (1956), also turn on conflicts between ambitious underlings and the top men who punish them or stand in their way.   Can you imagine what sort of father-figure  psychobabble Ross Macdonald would have wrung out of material like that?  Rabe, a trained and practicing psychologist, on the other hand, avoided Macdonald's embarrassing amateur Freudianism, concocting instead stories of men who, while not necessarily trapped, just do what they have to, as dictated by their temperament, or circumstances, or ambition.

It's harder to find crime-fiction parallels for Rabe than it is for some authors, perhaps because, with two exceptions, Rabe said his influences came from outside crime fiction. (One of those two exceptions was Dashiell Hammett, so you know he had good taste.)

If you don't know Rabe or his work, this 1989 interview with him is a good place to start. If you do know Rabe, you may find his admiring comments about Donald Westlake especially interesting. Rabe also comes across as surprisingly genial for a man whose life included escape from Germany to avoid the Nazis, a false diagnosis of a terminal disease, several marriages and divorces, and ups and downs in his writing career that eventually led him so stop writing for publication. The man seems to have been pretty well adjusted for a psychologist.

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Rick Ollerman will talk about Peter Rabe as part of my panel called "From Hank to Hendrix: Beyond Chandler and Hammett: Lesser Known Writers of the Pulp and Paperback Original Eras" at Bouchercon 2016. It happens at 9 a.m., Thursday, Sept. 15, at the Marriott, 555 Canal St., New Orleans, Room LaGalleries 1.

© Peter Rozovsky 2016 

My Bouchercon 2016 panel: Rogue cops, fool's gold, and more!!!

I have the singular honor of being the first name on the panel schedule for Bouchercon 2016. That's because I'm moderating a session at 9 a.m., Thursday, Sept. 15, and it's a good one.

The panel is From Hank to Hendrix: Beyond Chandler and Hammett: Lesser Known Writers of the Pulp and Paperback Original Eras. This is the third year I'll moderate this panel, in which authors, critics, and editors discuss their favorite lesser-known crime writers of the past. The sessions always expand my appreciation of crime's fiction's range, and this year is no exception.

The panelists for 2016 are: Patti Abbott, Eric Beetner, Martin Edwards, Rick Ollerman, and Gary Phillips, and they already have me reading authors new to me. So come see us in LaGalleries 1, in the Marriott, 555 Canal St., New Orleans, 9 a.m. on Thursday, Sept. 15.

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

Lionel White and definitely established mathematical odds: A classic heist novel revisited

Sixteen months after I made this post about the wince-making first scene of Lionel White's novel Clean Break (filmed by Stanley Kubrick as The Killing), I went back and read the whole novel; it's a hell of a novel. Rick Ollerman was right to invoke Richard Stark's Parker books in his comment below. The Killing (1955), and also White's The Big Caper, from the same year, are like Parker novels such as The Score, with their emphasis on the build-up to a heist and the ever present danger of interpersonal complications. White's story stays closer to film noir's roots in melodrama than Stark does, and the narrative pace is faster, but if you like one, you're liable to like the other. White appears to have published at least four novels in 1955. Perhaps the haste of publication deprived the book of the editorial scrutiny that would have remedied to faults I highlight in the post. \

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 The occasional lapses in prose style in paperback original novels get me thinking about the conditions under which their authors wrote. I remind myself that the verbal lapses may be due to those conditions rather than to lack of talent. But here's the opening of Lionel White's 1955 novel The Clean Break, which Stanley Kubrick filmed as The Killing (the novel, not just its opening):

"The aggressive determination on his long, bony face was in sharp contrast to the short, small-boned body which he used as a wedge to shoulder his way slowly through the hurrying crowd of stragglers rushing through the wide doors to the grandstand.

"Marvin Unger was only vaguely aware of the emotionally pitched voice coming over the public address system. He was very alert to everything taking place around him, but he didn’t need to hear that voice to know what was happening. The sudden roar of the thousands out there in the hot, yellow, afternoon sunlight made it quite clear. They were off in the fourth race.

"Unconsciously his right hand tightened around the thick packet of tickets he had buried in the side pocket of his linen jacket. The tension was purely automatic. Of the hundred thousand and more persons at the track that afternoon, he alone felt no thrill as the twelve thoroughbreds left the post for the big race of the day.

"Turning into the abruptly deserted lobby of the clubhouse, his tight mouth relaxed in a wry smile. He would, in any case, cash a winning ticket. He had a ten dollar win bet on every horse in the race.

"In the course of his thirty-seven years, Unger had been at a track less than half a dozen times. He was totally disinterested in horse racing; in fact, had never gambled at all. He had a neat, orderly mind, a very clear sense of logic and an inbred aversion to all `sporting events.' He considered gambling not only stupid, but strictly a losing proposition. Fifteen years as a court stenographer had given him frequent opportunity to see what usually happened when men place their faith in luck in opposition to definitely established mathematical odds."

I'll give White "aggressive determination," though I think the phrase weak, bordering on repetitive. But every other word or string of words I highlighted crosses that border or is at best unnecessary and at worst grammatically ludicrous.  "Emotionally pitched"? What does that mean? Did the announcer sound as if he were about to break into tears? Why "everything taking place around him" rather than just "everything around him"? Why slow a sentence down by beginning it with an adverb ("unconsciously"), especially when White repeats himself in the next sentence, telling us the tension was "purely automatic"? And why "purely automatic" rather than "automatic"?

"Turning into the abruptly deserted lobby of the clubhouse, his tight mouth relaxed" is not only a dangling participle, it's wordy. Why tell us that the stragglers were rushing if you've just told us they're hurrying? And "the course of," "very," "in fact," and "at all" are throat-clearing. White should have cut each in his second draft or his editor on a first pass. As to "definitely established mathematical odds," all odds are mathematical, and "definitely established" is doubly redundant, each word with respect to the other, and the two when set against "mathematical."

OK, these guys churned it out, and their work probably did not get the care most novels got at hardback houses or that one associates with novels today, when authors will turn out maybe a book a year rather than a book a month. If  he'd had more time, Harry Whittington might occasionally have substituted another word for sickness in A Night for Screaming. Charles Williams might have found other ways to say "thoughtfully" in All The Way (also known as The Concrete Flamingo).  But those guys saved the repetition for later in their books, and it's easy to imagine them so caught up in the stories they were telling that verbal polish fell by the wayside. They didn't bog things down on the very first page, never a good idea, particularly not in thrillers or suspense novels.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Shtetl, with a glottal stop

Rick Ollerman, Adrian McKinty

You haven't lived until you've heard an Irishman say "shtetl." Thanks to Adrian McKinty, I can now say I've lived.

Oh, sure the audience at Sunday's Noir at the Bar in New York ate up McKinty's reading from his latest novel, Rain Dogs, and sure, his was not the evening's only good reading, but that was no shock. Hearing shtetl pronounced with a glottal stop, on the other hand, was an experience I never thought I'd have. (McKinty's wife's ancestors were from a shtetl, in case you were wondering how the subject came up.)

MC Todd Robinson

Rick Ollerman was there, too, and was too polite to correct me when I kept referring to his fine novel Shallow Secrets as Shallow Grave. Rick Ollerman: Editor, novelist, mensch.

Dennis Tafoya

The Philadelphia area's own Dennis Tafoya read from a work in progress—searing, hard-hitting stuff from one of the original readers from back when I created Noir at the Bar in 2008. (Dennis read the next year.)

New York's Noirs at the Bar happen at Shade Bar, and accolades to the bartender, Laurie, who not only mixes a good Hendrick's and tonic, but also knew my name. And thanks to Suzanne Solomon and Tim Hall, who joined forces for a two-part reading; Dana Cameron; Danny Gardner; Vincent Zandri; and Jason Pinter, who also read, and to Jen Conley, who sat quietly in the audience without organizing an event, reading a story, or announcing her engagement, all of which she tends to do at Noirs at the Bar.

Danny Gardner

Adrian McKinty, Suzanne Solomon, Tim Hall

© Peter Rozovsky 2015