Noir at the Bar: The History

Over at LitReactor, Keith Rawson presents an oral history of Noir at the Bar-- interviews with me and with some of the people who took the N@B idea and ran with it: Jed Ayres in St. Louis, Todd Robinson and Glenn Gray in New York, Eric Beetner in Los Angeles. Duane Swierczynski, the reader at the first Noir at the Bar ever, right here in Philadelphia, weighs in with a highly entertaining excerpt from the piece he read at the first L.A. N@B.

The photo above, from October 2008, which I sent Keith for inclusion with his article, captures a seminal moment in Noir at the Bar history.  Scott Phillips (lower left, miming the theft of a bicycle) had dropped in to the fourth Noir at the Bar to hear John McFetridge (top left) and Declan Burke (center) read. (That's me behind the perp.)  Scott liked the idea, took it back to St. Louis, where he organized a Noir at the Bar with Jedidiah Ayres, and the rest is history, Noir at the Bar spreading across North America like a slow-moving, persistent, incurable virus.

It's nice to see how much the event has meant to writers all over North America, and the Noirs at the Bar Keith writes about were just some of the early ones. Toronto. Vancouver. New Hope. Texas. New Jersey. Portland. Baltimore. You name it, Noir at the Bar has conquered it.  And, like the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, it started here in Philadelphia.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Scott Phillips is full of creosote and horseshit*

Scott Phillips' novels Cottonwood and the new Hop Alley take farmer/salonkeeper/photographer Bill Ogden through Kansas, Nebraska, and into Denver in the 1870s, and Hop Alley's final chapter suggests that a sojourn in San Francisco is not out of the question:

"And what would you say is the worst part of [California], Mister? South or north?"

"I'll tell you, I've never encountered a worse or baser bunch than those in San Francisco. Debauchery and vice, and all in the name of mammon. It was gold that cursed that town, sir, and the more gold they brought up from the ground, the more Satan smiled."

"I nodded and thanked him ... and as I boarded the train I found the idea growing in me: William Sadlaw, Photographic Gallery, San Francisco, Cal., Sittings by Appointment Only."

That's where Kevin Starr comes in. Phillips writes fiction so rich and detailed that it could be history; Starr writes histories of California so vivid that they could be fiction, and he singles out San Francisco for its blend of frontier lawlessness and the hastily imported cosmopolitan sophistication of an Atlantic trading port. It's the perfect destination for Ogden (who here calls himself Bill Sadlaw, in an effort to escape the law's attention).

Phillips' version of the American West is richer, bawdier, and funnier than most, but there's no hint of the self-congratulatory alternative about it. Phillips simply has a breathtaking sense of the possibilities open to a young man on the run, plunked down amid wide-open spaces and credulous populations. There's even a whodunit at the heart of Hop Alley: Ogden/Sadlaw knows the real killer of a pressman for the local newspaper (It wasn't the Chinese residents of Hop Alley, attacked by angry mobs.) He saves an innocent victim from lynching, but he moves on rather than going to the law and trying to set things right. Hop Alley is no conventional crime novel, after all, but if you're looking for a richly detailed picaresque crime Western of America, you won't go wrong with Scott Phillips.

(The Ogden name will be familiar to readers of Phillips' novels set in more recent times. Wayne Ogden is the protagonist of The Adjustment, a spiritual as well as a familial descendant of Bill Ogden.)

=====

* "With the eastern range of the Rocky Mountains in the near distance and the smell of creosote and horseshit mingling in my nostrils I sat on the flat rooftop, exposing prints and idly contemplating the great rectangles of glass that comprised the skylights of my studio."

— Hop Alley, page 33

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Johnny Shaw is a hardass with a tender heart

Johnny Shaw is a Scott Phillips of the American Southwest, like Phillips setting his novels in bleak, flat landscapes, and populating them with dangerous, violent characters who, call them bad or call them immoral, are almost always endearingly human. Oh, and, like Phillips', his books will always make a reader laugh out loud while only rarely descending into jokiness.

What redeems Shaw's characters? Their cleverness, even when they seem stupid at first. Their self-knowledge, and the zest with which they screw up. The funny things they say without seeming to pat themselves on the back for being funny.

Here's a favorite example, all the more endearing because it occurs at what could be an awkward moment of truth between two characters, without undercutting the seriousness:

"`Look,' Buck Buck said, `I know you're used to sidekicking for Bobby and not me. And I'm used to Snout being my sidekick. But I'm sure we can work it out. Batman usually's got Robin, but I'm sure he teamed up with Aqualad or Speedy and they still beat the bad guy.'

"`Am I Aqualad in that scenario? I don't sidekick for Bobby,' I said. `I can't believe people can't see this. He's my sidekick. Which means you're Aqualad, I'm Batman.'

"`I'm really more of a leading man.'

"`Okay, how 'bout this? You're still Batman. I'll be Superman. They teamed up all the time. Snout and Bobby are the sidekicks.'

"`I can work with that. But I want to be Green Arrow instead.'"

You'd never guess the two are about to infiltrate a colony of dangerous bikers. Other things to like about Plaster City:

• Like The Simpsons, it stands four-square for family values, a beautiful thing, despite the shameful appropriation of the term by political opportunists..
• It condemns the exploitation of young women without, however, reducing the characters in question to titillating victimhood.
• Like Shaw's novel Dove Season, it uses the word fiasco in the title, and I'm for anything that has fiasco in it.

(Read Detectives Beyond Borders' posts about Johny Shaw's Big Maria.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2014  

Noir at the New Hope Bar

From left: Wallace Stroby, William Hastings, Dennis Tafoya, Scott Adlerberg

Noir at the Bar made a convivial, entertaining, informative return on Thursday evening to the state where it was born. The place was John and Peter's in New Hope, Pa., the literary midwife was Farley's Bookshop, and the author/readers were Wallace Stroby, William Hastings, Dennis Tafoya, Scott Adlerberg, and Don Lafferty.

Highlights included Stroby on why he called his upcoming novel Shoot the Woman First, Tafoya with a stunningly good bit of post-violence emotional confrontation from a novel that should see the light of day next year, and three guys who were either new to me or who I had not known were writers in addition to their accomplishments in other fields.

I may post more after a good night's sleep, but for now, I was pleased with the happy medium we achieved between my original one- or two-author Noirs at the Bar (I started the concept in 2008), with a question-and-answer session with each writer; and the high-spirited literary mosh pits that Jedidiah Ayres and Scott Phillips made of their events in St. Louis. (Noir at the Bar has since spread to New York, Los Angeles, Austin, I believe San Diego, and, in an unprecedented harmonic Noir at the Bar convergence, Denver, where a Noir at the Bar also took place last night.)

Each  of the five authors here in New Hope read from his work, I threw out a question, and the questions turned into discussions, with all the writers eventually gathering on stage to take matters largely into their own hands.  I'd like to do this again, and I think we will. The original Noir at the Bar lives.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

A degenerate American in Paris

I don't know what Scott Phillips got up to when he lived in Paris, but the protagonist of his new novel, Rake, set in that city, kidnaps an arms merchant, tries to swing a movie deal, and carries on simultaneous affairs with four women (so far), each more attractive, sexually imaginative, or both, than the last.

The protagonist, as cheerfully amoral and self-involved as he is, is a new kind of American outsider: an ex-Green Beret skilled in the killing arts and unable to restrain himself from using them, but also the star of an old American soap opera that has made him a star in France.

Sure, he's am immature, self-involved jerk, but he happily admits craving the attention he gets from ordinary Frenchmen and women who confuse him with his soap-opera character, so it's hard to dislike the guy.

And now, while I finish reading this latest book by the author of The Adjustment, The Ice Harvest, The Walkaway, and more, tell me 1) Who is your favorite likable bad guy in a non-cozy crime novel?, and 2) Who is your favorite ex-pat American character, in Paris or elsewhere, in crime fiction?

***

Scott Phillips was one of my "Eight crime writers worth tracking down," as seen in the Philadelphia Inquirer in December.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

The real Horace, plus a question for readers

I had read nothing by Horace McCoy, best known as the author of the 1935 novel They Shoot Horses, Don't They? until a friend send me a link to his story "The Mopper-Up." (Read "The Mopper-Up" free online.)

I'm a McCoy fan now, with They Shoot Horses, Don't They? and Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye shooting to the top of my TBR pile.

A posting on the Rara-Avis discussion board says that "the Frost series notwithstanding, many regard a non-series story entitled "The Mopper-Up" to be McCoy's best BLACK MASK submission."  I like the story for its convincing description of an oil boom town; for its telescoping that town's history into a wonderfully short space (I wonder if Scott Phillips likes McCoy) ; for its no-nonsense hero who, despite being a Good Man, is given a strong hint of menace; for its knowing depiction of fear and uncertainty; and for lines like these:

"When he came back downstairs the lower floor was emptied. Employees had deserted Patton in his hour of need and he stood alone and captured by a taxi driver." 

Since a comment above mentions Black Mask, today's question for you, readers is: Who is your favorite 1920s, '30s, '40s, or '50s hard-boiled crime writer not named Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler?

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Eight crime writers in the Philadelphia Inquirer

My article on "Eight crime writers worth tracking down" appears in Saturday's Philadelphia Inquirer. This one was close to my heart, a chance to big-up some of my favorite crime writers and their publishers, to put their names before a wider public, and to help out eight authors who suffer the handicap, for a crime writer, of not being from Sweden or Norway.

Readers of Detectives Beyond Borders know them already, but if you're joining us for the first time, the Big Eight are, in alphabetical order:

Declan Burke. Allan Guthrie. Vicki Hendricks. John McFetridge. Adrian McKinty. Scott Phillips. Giorgio Scerbanenco. Charlie Stella.

I recommend all eight as the perfect stocking stuffer. Now, get reading.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Books to Die For, Part I

I've begun my reading of Books to Die For with the essays by Scott Phillips on Charles Willeford, Adrian McKinty on Patricia Highsmith, John McFetridge on Trevanian, Mike Nicol on James McClure, Qiu Xiaolong on Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, and Elmore Leonard on George V. Higgins.

In each case but one, the essay is by a crime writer whose work I've read and the subject is another crime writer (or writers) whose work I've also read. In that exceptional case, the setting of the novel under discussion is my home town, so I feel that I can bring multiple perspectives to all six essays.

Each of the six probably says at least as much about its author as about its subject, with the possible exception of Nicol's on The Steam Pig, first of James McClure's six Kramer and Zondi novels set in apartheid-era South Africa. I can think of no author whose work looms larger over his country's crime fiction than McClure's does over South Africa's. Perhaps it's no wonder, then, that Nicol's fine summation of the great McClure seems to me more self-effacing than the other essays I read.

Scott Phillips (lower left) simulates
a larcenous act as, from left,
John McFetridge, your humble
blogkeeper, and Declan Burke
look on. (If this were a newspaper
rather than a blog, McFetridge,
Y.H.B.K. and Burke would not
just be looking on but also
sharing a laugh.) 

Elsewhere, McFetridge on Trevanian's novel The Main offers the same keen eye for social history that I know from McFetridge's own books. And Scott Phillips' observation that Charles Willeford's heroes "cheat, brawl, lie, and seduce their way, unencumbered by notions of fair play, through a postwar American landscape Norman Rockwell never painted" reminded me of nothing so much as the unsentimental but very funny world of Phillips' own novels.

And now, as Bob Dylan said, the hour is getting late. So I'll leave you with the thought that I see no reason Books to Die For and its editors, Declan Burke and John Connolly, ought not to be considered for next year's Edgar, Dagger, and other crime fiction awards in the critical/non-fiction categories.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Thuglit at the Bar

I discovered this week that some folks had staged a Noir at the Bar in New York, adding to a list of Noir at the Bar cities that includes L.A., Austin, Toronto, St. Louis, and the place where it started, right here in Philadelphia.

The New Yorkers brought in some good people to read, including Wallace Stroby, but the big find for me was Todd Robinson, because he's the Thuglit Web zine guy. I'd never read Thuglit even though it published authors like Stuart Neville and Hilary Davidson. But I'm a fan now, based on "Rags to Riches" by Joe Clifford and "Five Kilos" by Mike Wilkerson, both in Issue #38, and I've bought Robinson's own collection of stories, Dirty Words, plus Blood, Guts, and Whiskey (Thuglit Presents), a collection stories, most of which appeared first in the Web zine.

The blog post where I learned about the New York event properly credits Jed Ayres and Scott Phillips for what they've done with Noir at the Bar in St. Louis. But Ayres and Phillips, those generous gents, know how to acknowledge their inspirations.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

The Walkaway

(Scott Phillips)

I'm just a few chapters into The Walkaway (2002), Scott Phillips' second novel and both a sequel and a prequel to The Ice Harvest, his first.

It's been a pleasure to read, and if all crime fiction were this good, there would be none of this nonsense about genre fiction and serious fiction and literary fiction, and none of the slumming that leads reviewers to think they're paying a compliment when they call a novel a thinking man's crime book.  Instead, readers, reviewers, and critics would just accept that a novel's action can spring from a heist, and that that novel can still be touching and funny, unsentimental, harsh, and sometimes violent, and have much to say about the changing lives and times of its setting and characters.

Now, back to my reading.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

The Adjustment: Scott Phillips says things funny

It may not be kosher to cite an author's personal inscription when discussing his book, but in this case the message is very much in the style of the novel that follows:

"To Peter `Fuck Peter Rozovsky' Rozovsky — the real father of NOIR@ the BAR

from your pal,

Scott Phillips"

The profanity is an allusion to the equally earthy thanks Phillips and Jedidiah Ayres sent my way in their Noir at the Bar anthology, and the repetition of the names is typical Phillips: He writes things funny rather than merely writing funny things. And that's why his new novel, The Adjustment, an increasingly dark tale of a Wichita man's involvement in addiction, infidelity, blackmail and killing, is laugh-out-loud funny even when the action is not particularly so:

"`Shut your noisemaker,' Red said. `You don't determine what gets discussed.' He gestured to her. `Wayne, this here's my wife, Betty.'"

Sorry, but I horselaughed when I read that, just as I did at:

"I had made a nice illicit bundle off of Uncle Sam. In the little safe in the basement that contained among other things my discharge papers and my Purple Heart — probably the only one ever awarded for getting stabbed by a rival pimp — was a whole lot of illicit cash I'd managed to smuggle back from Europe."

The book reminds me a bit of Charles Willeford's The Shark-Infested Custard. Each is the story of an everyday working man, or men, who get  involved in criminal matters, and each uses its characters to create a vivid sense of place, Florida in Willeford's book, post-World War II Wichita, Kansas, in Phillips'. But The Adjustment is darker and funnier and maybe sadder, and I like it better.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

A welcome Rut

I had no idea it was coming, but yesterday I received the welcome news that Scott Phillips (crouching at lower left in the photo at right) is about to release a new novel.

Rut, published by Concord Free Press,

"takes readers to the Rocky Mountains circa 2050, where the once thriving burg of Gower is about to become a 21st-century ghost town. Thanks to extreme weather and plenty of toxic waste, the skiers and celebrities are gone, along with the money and the veneer of civilization. What’s left? Old-time religion and brand-new pharmaceuticals, bad food and warm beer, mutated animals and small-town gossip. Can the town survive? We’ll see."

Now, that sounds like one believable speculative novel.

Phillips has written three previous novels: The Ice Harvest, The Walkway, and Cottonwood. The first of these was made into a fine movie starring John Cusack and Billy Bob Thornton. He also writes some of the most deadpan hilarious short crime fiction anywhere.

I'll be looking for Rut. And you should, too.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Up with e-shorts!

I bought Allan Guthrie's novella Bye, Bye Baby last night, and I asked last week when someone was going to put out a collection of Scott Phillips' short stories.

I mention this because I bought the Guthrie as a downloaded e-book, and if electronic books are here to stay, we might as well take advantage of what the medium can do. I don't mean weird technological gimcrackery that in most cases adds up to nothing more than what a simple paperback does at a fraction of the cost, I mean the flexibility to publish narrative forms such as novellas and short stories that might be economically unfeasible as traditional books.

Bye, Bye Baby is about seventy pages; hard to imagine a publisher taking a chance on a traditional book that size (though Five Leaves Publishing Crime Express series does so with, among other novellas, Guthrie's Killing Mum, and Barrington Stoke with his Kill Clock). But lower production and distribution costs might encourage them to do so with books in electronic form.

And where is a reader to turn who loves an author's short fiction and would like it collected in one place, as I would with Phillips or Jean-Hugues Oppel or Dominique Manotti? (Ken Bruen, too, though he's popular enough that some publisher might be able to sell his collected shorts as a traditional book.)

Short-story collections by a single crime author are few and far between, and I suspect uncertainty about their sales prospects helps account for this. So why not sell collections as cheap e-books, or even let readers build their own books electronically out of the short stories they want to read?

What are the barriers to doing things this way? And which crime writers would you like to see come out with collections of short stories?

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Paris Noir

1) This is not Akashic Books' Paris Noir. That book appeared in 2008. This Paris Noir appeared in 2oo7, published by Serpent's Tail, edited by Maxim Jakubowski.

2) Michael Moorcock's story may be my entree into fantasy and alternative history. Its science-fiction aspect didn't do much for me, but the imitation of continental detective dialogue is dead on, and the references to the story's alternative history is unobtrusive enough to get a reader wondering and speculating without hitting him over the head.

3) Dominque Manotti's (or visit her Web site, in French, here) and Jean-Hugues Oppel's contributions are terse, cutting, and politically aware, in a manner that I am coming to think of as typically French.

4) When is someone going to publish a collection of Scott Phillips' short stories?

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Crime Factory and classical gas

Who's in Issue #1 of Crime Factory? Ken Bruen, Adrian McKinty, Scott Phillips and Dave White, for a start. (A hat tip to Crime Scene NI.)

Bruen offers an excerpt from an upcoming novel, Killer, that looks to be as good as anything I've read by him, and it contains as pertinent a bit of self-reference as any I've read in crime fiction.

McKinty's contribution is a "making of" journal about his novel Fifty Grand, and Phillips offers an appreciation of Charles Willeford and what Willeford meant to his own writing. Lots of places publish crime fiction. Crime Factory offers glimpses of some of the sharp minds that create the stuff. May it live long.

*******

Over at A dead man fell from the sky ... , meanwhile, blogkeeper/author/classicist Gary Corby has been soliciting nominations for song titles of antiquity. My humble suggestions include:

"Get Bacchae (to Where You Once Belonged)"

"You Can Call Me Alcestis"

"Liver and Let Die" (This one's about Prometheus)

"Saturday Night's All Right for Phaëtōn"

You might also like a contribution from another reader that I wish I had come up with:

"I Want A Girl Just Like The Girl That Married Dear Old Dad" by Oedipus

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Finnish lines

An American Detectives Beyond Borders favorite makes it into the Finno-Ugric language family. Read an interview (in English) with the author here.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

It's Sunday! It's St. Louis! It's Noir at the Bar!

Ginchmaster Scott Phillips sends the following:

"It's the return of Peter Rozovsky's Noir at the Bar!

"Delmar Restaurant & Lounge
(314) 725-6565

"6235 Delmar Blvd Saint Louis, MO 63130

"Doors open at 8 PM on Sunday August 2nd. Reading will be [Scott], from [his] `Uncage Me' story, followed by Malachi Stone reading from his novel St. Agnes's Eve, followed by Jedidiah Ayres reading one of his short stories, followed by the evening's headliner, Chicago's Theresa Schwegel, reading from her new novel Last Known Address. If you're not familiar with Schwegel's work you should be. She writes the best cop novels since Richard Price."

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Authors in the blogosphere

A couple of authors mentioned occasionally in this space have taken to the blogosphere. First up is Scott Philips (right), whose odd new collection of items bears the marvelous title Pocketful of Ginch. I don't know what ginch is, but the blog looks like fun.

Matt Rees has had a blog for a while, but he's picked up the pace lately. One post that might have readers howling for his head is a scathing discussion of Stieg Larsson's Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. I don't expect the book's partisans will enjoy what Rees has to say, but he more fully articulates than do most critics one fault that even some of the book's fans acknowledge, and he has some fun with another aspect that I had not seen discussed previously.

Question to readers: What's ginch?

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Bouchercon II: Win three signed stories!

The late, lamented Murdaland magazine published tough, beautifully written crime fiction in a sturdy, attractive, well-produced package.

The magazine's no longer around, but you can win a copy of Issue 2 signed by contributors of three of the best stories in this outstanding collection: Scott Phillips, Vicki Hendricks and Henry Chang . All you have to do is name any of the last three winners of either the Edgar or the Dagger award for best short story.

WE HAVE A WINNER! Kerrie in Paradise (that's part of Australia) knew that Martin Edwards won the CWA Short Story Dagger in 2008 for "The Bookbinder's Apprentice" and that Peter Lovesey had won the previous year for "Apprentice." Congratulations, Kerrie, and enjoy this excellent magazine/book.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Noir at the Bar IV: Caught in the act

A stimulating time was had by all at Philadelphia's fourth Noir at the Bar reading last evening at Fergie's Pub when authors were not being nabbed in the act of pinching bicycles.

John McFetridge read from Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, Declan Burke read from The Big O, and subsequent discussion shed light on crime fiction not just from McFetridge's Canada and Burke's Ireland but from England and the United States as well.

I shall ponder and perhaps discuss further McFetridge's observation that American crime fiction had "removed the author's voice and given it to the characters."

Burke offered at least three possible explanations for the boom in Irish crime writing: the post-Troubles phenomenon of newly unemployed paramilitaries with finely honed criminal skills, the 1996 murder of Veronica Guerin, and an explosion of chick lit that may seem antithetical to crime fiction but nonetheless gave genre writing, including crime, a foothold in a country of towering "literary" writers.

Burke draws inspiration from Raymond Chandler and Elmore Leonard, McFetridge from Ed McBain. This naturally led to an examination of American crime fiction, and an audience member offered the astute observation that "Americans take you through a place" as opposed to the traditional English plot-driven murder mystery. This may interest readers familiar with sneering references to recent international crime fiction as mere "guidebooks." Americans did it first, Clive.

(In the photo above, Scott Phillips demonstrates American-style crime for an attentive international audience of, from left, John McFetridge, your humble blogkeeper, Declan Burke, Brian Rademaekers, and our courteous and efficient barmaid, Claire Wadsworth.)

Tomorrow: In Baltimore to see how pros run a Con, or drinks on Iceland.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008