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: Odds Against Tomorrow

The New York Times was right: William P. McGivern's 1957 men-on-the-run novel Odds Against Tomorrow is "a powerfully exciting action-melodrama." Let's look at the last part of that description.

Melodrama fell out of favor in the middle of last century, perhaps after French movie critics came up with a fancier name for the mid-century American movies that were called melodramas when they first appeared. The French called them films noirs and unleashed a wave of cultural cachet that swept up everything in its path.

So, what's melodramatic about Odds Against Tomorrow?: Two men, one white, one black, thrown together when a bank heist goes wrong and forced to overcome mutual hatred and suspicion and yadda, yadda, yadda (McGivern's novel was the basis of the 1959 movie starring Harry Belafonte and Robert Ryan and produced by Belafonte.)  What saves the novel from being a brave, dated relic? Astonishing characterization like this:

"He wasn't worried about failure, because he didn't have the imagination to picture disaster in vivid and personal terms."

The taut professionalism of McGivern's work. The repetition of certain words that work through, with, under, and around the narrative, reinforcing it and building suspense: Confused. Confusion. Unconscious (impressions).  Co-protagonist Earl Slater's invocation of his military background. Johnny Ingram's cool. Some delicious plotting, much of it involving the interpersonal dynamics between Slater and Ingram.  The canny decision to add a brief coda so the novel does not end on the somewhat schmaltzy note that brings the main action to a close.  McGivern knew what he was doing.

(Poster by Jon Jordan)

(McGivern also wrote the novels on which the movies Rogue Cop and Fritz Lang's classic The Big Heat were based.)

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Eric Beetner will discuss William McGivern as part of a panel I'll moderate at Bouchercon 2016 in New Orleans in September. The panel is called "From Hank to Hendrix: Beyond Chandler and Hammett: Lesser Known Writers of the Pulp and Paperback Original Eras," and it happens at 9 a.m., Thursday, Sept. 15, at the Marriott, 555 Canal St., New Orleans. The room is LaGalleries 1. See you.

© Peter Rozovsky 2016