No cats, just books

Book Carnival in Orange was closed when I was in the neighborhood Sunday, but no worries; I bought some books from them in the dealers' room at Bouchercon in Long Beach last week.

A trip to the nearby Bookman yielded two novels by Joe Gores and three Executioner novels. The latter fit a trend I've noticed in secondhand bookshops here to take vintage paperback originals in general and men's adventure in particular more seriously than do bookshops on the uncivilized East Coast.

Here's the men's adventure section at The Bookman:

Here's my photographic version of an, er, iconic American painting, as shot by me at Knott's Berry Farm:

And here's what Orange County looks like after a hard day's driving, eating, and book shopping:

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

More book shopping, more cats

Basketball players and midgets can take their custom elsewhere. (Photos by Peter Rozovsky, your humble blog keeper)

First, San Diego's Balboa Park is now one of my favorite places in the world. What more could one ask than botanical wonders, lush grass, a good restaurant or two, and more museums than you could shake a palm frond at?

Iconic!

Saturday's book shopping at the Adams Avenue Book Store and Marston House in San Diego and Counterpoint Records & Books in Los Angeles yielded Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities; two by P.G. Wodehouse, including a collection of his one-liners; thoughts on evolution from E.O. Wilson; Mischief, by Bouchercon discovery Charlotte Armstrong; and a good photo of one of the Adams Avenue shop's two cats.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Book shopping in Southern California

Cat at Gatsby Books, Long Beach, Calif. Photos by Peter
Rozovsky, your humble blogkeeper.

Secondhand bookshops may not be the first thing that comes to mind when one thinks of Southern California, but there are some good ones here. Gatsby Books in Long Beach, welcomes crime writers in to give readings, and I bought a handsome book on Long Beach architecture in its local-history section.

Booktown USA in Anaheim offers antiquarian books, a big mystery section, and shelves full of Western and men's adventure books, which one does not often see these days. I bought titles in the Executioner and Destroyer series, a Pocket Books edition of Donald Westlake's The Hot Rock, and a nice old hardback called Pictures of the Gold Rush, and I got change back from a twenty-dollar bill. You might well stop there on your way to Disneyland or the Mexican border. No cat there that I could find, though.

And, because one must keep up one's strength while buying books ...

(For more independent bookshops, go here. For more In-N-Out Burgers, go anywhere in Southern California. You can't miss them.)

*

Don't let me forget Dave's Olde Book Shop, in Redondo Beach, where I bought Line of Fire, by Donald Hamilton.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Port Richmond Books — For all your Bouchercon shopping needs

I needed a Doc Savage novel for one of my Bouchercon  panels, and I thought Port Richmond Books might have one or two if anyone did. "Oh, yeah," owner Greg Gillespie said, with a solemn nod. He ducked into an office and fetched not one, not two, but a box full of Docs and then, before I could pick my jaw back up from the floor, he handed me another armful, some omnibuses, some single-novel volumes, mostly 1960s reprints of the books, which first appeared in the 1930s and 1940s. (I bought two books, not two boxes of books.) Port Richmond Books  — Your Doc Savage Headquarters.

I also bought 77 Sunset Strip, a novel by Roy Huggins, who created the television series of the same name.  Max Allan Collins will discuss Huggins on the same moderated-by-me Bouchercon panel where Sara J. Henry talks up Doc Savage's main author, Lester Dent. Port Richmond Books — For all your Bouchercon shopping needs.

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

The panel in question is Beyond Hammett, Chandler, and Spillane: Lesser Known Writers of the Pulp and Paperback Eras, and it happens at 3 p.m., Friday, Nov. 14, at the Hyatt Regency, Long Beach. Gary Phillips, Charles Kelly, and Sarah Weinman will join Max and Sara on the panel. See you there.

I took some photos on the way to and from Port Richmond.  Can you detect a theme common to my photography ad my shopping?

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Detectives Beyond Borders discovers a Black Mask writer

One of the catcher's
masks looked like this.

Good fun in New York yesterday at a party HarperCollins threw for book bloggers in conjunction with BookExpo America (BEA) 2014.

I didn't meet any other bloggers, but I did renew acquaintances with James Hayman, an author who was part of a panel at Bouchercon 2013 that struck me with its commonsense stance on e-books and electronic publishing.  A chat I had with Hayman's editor could eventually lead to posts on editors and book promotion and ways to keep midlist authors from leaping out of high windows. The sliders and little hot dogs and other hors d'oeuvres were just fine, too, and the wine flowed like water.

HarperCollins is a subsidiary of Nosh Corp., and the bash happened at the NoshAmerica Building in Midtown Manhattan, in a room normally occupied by the sports division of Nosh News. The decor was all photos and exhibits, including a display of baseball catcher's masks from the 1880s through the 1950s, including one that looked like the famous helmet from the Sutton Hoo ship burial,  but with a turban on it.

I made a pre-party stop at Mysterious Bookshop, where I bought a fat volume of stories by Theodore A, Tinsley, a Black Mask author new to me, about Jerry Tracy, celebrity reporter, a character also new to me. The book grabbed me from the first line:

"Jerry Tracy opened a ground glass door and stepped into the dingy little Broadway office maintained for him by the Planet, New York's goofiest Tab."

The first few stories have all the wisecracking I've come to expect from detective pulps of the early 1930s, and little or none of the dated prose style I sometimes find obtrusive in such stories. And the story "South Wind" includes a brand of heartstring-tugging tragedy and humanity rare in any crime fiction, much less the kind that features speakeasies, hard-drinking reporters, and hard-boiled dames.

Tinsley wasn't Dashiell Hammett; no one was, and no one ever will be. But my early reading suggests he ought to be at least right up there with Frederick Nebel and Raoul Whitfield.

Finally, I also bought the complete stories of Paul Cain, one Black Masker who might well be up there with Hammett if he'd written more.  I have a good deal of this material elsewhere, but the volume has an illuminating introduction that's especially good in its assessment of Cain's critical reception as compared to Hammett's.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Why bookshops are important, or how Detectives Beyond Borders discovered the source of the Nile

I'd never taken any but the most casual interest in ancient Egypt until I came across Alexandre Moret's classic 1926 study The Nile and Egyptian Civilization.  Thanks to Moret, I now know something about the social upheavals that led to the downfall of Egypt's Old Kingdom and about the resulting social and religious differences between the Old and the Middle Kingdoms.

I learned about the political organization of Egypt before the Pharaohs from Moret, and about how Egypt came together as a centralized polity. His book introduced me to the great boasting and the touching laments of the pyramid texts. Perhaps best of all, Moret communicates the excitement that attended Jean-François Champollion's decipherment of the Rosetta Stone.

And it was Farley's Bookshop in New Hope, Pa., that introduced me to Moret. I'd gone in to buy Scott Phillips' new novel, Hop Alley, flipped through Moret's book, found it a readable exciting account of a subject about which much twaddle has been written, bought it, and have found as exciting a discovery as any I'd made in some time.

Try doing that on Amazon.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Things to do in Pasadena and Los Angeles

1) Do as I have done, and visit Book 'Em Mysteries and Book Alley. Support your local independents.

2) Look at Los Angeles City Hall, and think: "Hmm, that looks familiar."

3) Plan sequel to The Eastern Shore Caper, tentative title: It Started With Gas:

"When Palmqvist threw the door open,  the pump burst into flames and I rolled toward the Beetle like an overweight tumbleweed...."

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

The greatest intersection in the world: 58th Street and Woodlawn Avenue, Chicago

The excellent 57th Street Books.
on, er, 57th Street

The University of Chicago gave the world the atomic bomb and Milton Friedman. Its peacefully isolated campus in Hyde Park also contains what must be one of the world's most aesthetically elevating intersections, that of 58th Street and Woodlawn Avenue, whose northeast corner is home to Frank Lloyd Wright's Robie House, and whose southwest corner houses the Museum of the Oriental Institute.

Robie House, 1908-1910, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright

Wright was one of the twentieth century's great architects, maybe the greatest, and the Oriental Institute houses one of the world's best collections of Near and Middle Eastern antiquities. And it doesn't just show the treasures, it excavated many of them.  On top of all this dizzying cultural wealth at 58th and Woodlawn, you can get a terrific pizza just two blocks away. What intersection in what city can match all this?

(Photos by your humble blogkeeper, who will now get some sleep because he has museums to visit tomorrow.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Detail from the decoration at the palace
 of Sargon II of Assyria

Hand-wringing Mesopotamian priest.

Where we holed up

(Photos by your humble blogkeeper)

Get city folks in the country, and they think: "Where do we store the loot?"

Me and Palmqvist — "Killer" Palmqvist; she says calling a woman by her last name is unladylike — figured that after we knocked over a couple of banks, we'd find some out-of-the-way farmhouse where we could hole up until the heat died down.

We found good escape routes and a place to divvy the dosh, only all the dinky banks that once made such easy targets along Maryland's Eastern Shore had been converted to upscale steakhouses and pizzerias.

So we'll move on. In the meantime, we posed as egg-headed collectors and riffled old books at Bookplate in Chestertown and Unicorn Bookshop in Trappe and Mystery Loves Company in Oxford.

I had to buy something in order to avoid suspicion. I came up with:

Not the Mississippi 
River delta

• A stack of paperback original mysteries
• The Oxford History of Ireland
• A nice old edition of Emerson's essays for three dollars and ten cents
• A book of extracts in the original French from Rousseau's Confessions, which doesn't mean I'm confessing anything
• Peter Ackroyd's retelling of Le Morte d'Arthur
• Poets and Murder by Robert Van Gulik
• Autumn of the Phantoms by Yasmina Khadra
• Soccer in Sun and Shadow by Eduardo Galeano
• A book about Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad
• A guide to trees because I figured nothing marks a fellow as an outsider as much as walking around and pointing up and saying, "What's that?" every two minutes.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Eastern Shore noir

Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge, Dorchester
County, Md. Photos by your humble blogkeeper

How noir is Maryland's Eastern Shore? I ate dinner this evening under one large poster from Cape Fear and another from Out of the Past. It takes a tough man to lend his name to a tender steak.

My nice haul at Mystery Loves
Company in Oxford.

When not eating at Mitchum's Steakhouse (really, the blackened rib eye was fine, and so, to the eternal credit of cattleman Mitchum, was the salad), I made a nice haul at Mystery Loves Company in Oxford. The book at the upper left is not, in fact, confidential. It's The Ravagers, by Donald Hamilton, back cover up by mistake.

We drive by night.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

After Bouchercon II: The Delmar Loop plus more books

I'm on my way to pick up the box of books I shipped home from Bouchercon (titles by Mukoma Wa Ngugi, Derek Raymond, Christa Faust, Scott Phillips, Gianrico Carofiglio, Roslund & Hellström, and Jakob Arjouni, among others, plus goodies from the book bag that I haven't looked at yet). While I'm away, here's a bit more from St. Louis.

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Wikipedia tells me that the Delmar Loop in St. Louis is "One of the 10 Great Streets in America," according to the American Planning Association. But I already knew it was great; I was there last week after Bouchercon 2011.

I wrote briefly about Delmar Boulevard's America's-coolest Walk of Fame; here are some of the street's signs. Delmar Boulevard is also home of the Meshuggah Café, site of St. Louis' version of Noir at the Bar; and of Subterranean Books, one of three(!) independent bookstores I visited over the course of the week. (The others were Big Sleep Books and Left Bank Books. Read about them and others on this list of dealers who set up shop in Bouchercon's book room.)

Meshuggah Café is a fine place for a reading, to judge from the clientele the night I visited: beautiful evening around 10, crowds out and about, the sidewalk in front of the store lined with people reading. Not jabbering on their phones or sending apps flying around their iPad screens, but reading books. It was probably the most startling and definitely the most heartening sight of my Bouchercon week.

(Photos by your humble blogkeeper)

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

DBB goes to Toronto

In Toronto to visit Brother Beyond Borders and to hear Hilary Davidson read from her novel The Damage Done at Sleuth of Baker Street on Wednesday.

On the ride up, I:

• Read "$106,000 Blood Money" and cursed Dashiell Hammett for not having written more.

• Wondered when plain old bus and train stations became transportation centers.

I should have figured from her pleasing manners at Noircon 2010 that Hilary Davidson was Canadian, and if that was not clue enough, her titling her debut novel for a Neil Young song should have given her away. More tomorrow.

***

On the subject of fine independent bookstores, here's a belated thanks to Farley's Bookshop of New Hope, Pa., official book purveyor to Noircon 2010. These guys brought in not just books by festival attendees, but a well-chosen selection of related noir and hard-boiled and, to my pleasant surprise, a nice selection of international crime fiction from Bitter Lemon, Soho Crime, and maybe a title or two from Europa Editions.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

After Bouchercon, or San Francisco, crime city

Bouchercon 2010 ( #Bcon2010 ) lasted four days for most but eight for me, and the bulk of my sightseeing came after my fellow attendees had gone home, exhausted by four nights of carousing at a hotel bar that stayed open as late as midnight.

San Francisco's North Beach neighborhood reminded me of Vertigo, the Embarcadero put me in mind of The Lineup, and Nob Hill was saturated with Hammett.

And then there was Inner Richmond (left/above), home of the excellent Green Apple Books. The neighborhood reminded me of no particular book or movie. But, like other areas of the city, it had the general feeling of an older time. If Nob Hill looks like the 1920s, Richmond looks like a small city in the 1940s or '50s. In both cases, the noir and hard-boiled ambience is rich.

Paradoxically, the city's modernity is partly responsible. The streets are honeycombed with overhead cables that power San Francisco's environmentally friendly electric buses. This evokes the days before power and other cables went underground.

The palm-lined block at left is somewhere on the way from Noe Valley to the Mission District, and if you saw a street that pretty in a movie or read about it in a crime novel, you'd know something dreadful was about to be revealed.

Finally, a mural from the Mission District (above right), just because it's cool, and a political candidate whose name is bound to keep the voters mellow.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Posts and outposts

Welcome to the Gutter

Crime Always Pays brings the happy news of a new crime-friendly bookstore in Dublin. The Gutter Bookshop, conveniently situated in the happening Temple Bar district, has hosted or will host the likes of John Connolly, Arlene Hunt and Colin Bateman. Give store owner Bob Johnstone a round of applause, and give the store lots of support and money.

Out of the frying pan and into the Shrier

Former Noir at the Bar star Howard Shrier is up for Canada's best-novel Arthur Ellis Award for High Chicago. Shrier won the best-first-novel award last year for Buffalo Jump.

High five for Ghosts

Finally, Stuart Neville's criminally neglected debut novel, Ghosts of Belfast (called The Twelve in the UK, where the name Belfast apparently makes folks shuffle awkwardly and stare at the floor), has won a Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the mystery/thriller category. Well done, Irish Stu.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

A rage in Houston

One thing I love about crime bookstores like Houston's Murder by the Book and Belfast's No Alibis or Toronto's Sleuth of Baker Street is the sense of community among workers and readers. Here in Houston, it's de rigeur to belong to at least two crime-fiction book groups, and some people are in more.

Tonight it was the noir group's turn, and they discussed Chester Himes' A Rage in Harlem and The Jook by Gary Phillips, led by the capable Anita Thompson.

Before and after, I bought books by Bill James, Peter Corris, Reed Farrel Coleman and Ken Bruen, and Colin Cotterill. David Thompson is no relation to Anita, but he does help manage Murder by the Book, and he founded Busted Flush Press, and he'll recommend mysteries if you tease it out of him. He suggested The Wooden Overcoat by Pamela Branch, and I bought it.

Oh, and Houston also has good Mexican food.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Sleuth of Baker Street (Toronto)

Had a pleasant and productive Sunday afternoon at Toronto's Sleuth of Baker Street crime-fiction bookstore. I bought what promises to be some good Canadian, Norwegian and Cuban-Canadian books, and I enjoyed the easy, familiar interaction between the shop's owner and customers. More cities should have bookshops like this one.

I also met with John McFetridge to plan Wednesday's first Noir at the Bar outside the U.S., and I took a picture that could win me some free books in this contest at Central Crime Zone.

All told, a well-above-average crime-fiction day, though I seem to have lost an hour somewhere.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Belfast's and Bateman's little shop of crime

The estimable Gerard Brennan of Crime Scene NI gives a thumbs-up to Colin Bateman's upcoming novel Mystery Man:

"There’s a new PI in Belfast. His qualifications? He owns No Alibis, a bookshop specialising in crime fiction. Is he a fast-talking, hard-drinking, skirt-chasing tough guy? Um, no. Not at all, really. He’s a bit ... well, he’s cut from a different cloth. Oh, and he most definitely is not David Torrans."

Now, Mr. Brennan is always worth a listen when the subject is Irish crime fiction, but that's not why I bring the matter up. No, I mention Mystery Man because I have not only visited No Alibis (may its sales increase!), but I have met its real-life owner, the same David Torrans on whom the protagonist of Mystery Man is definitely not based. I offer photographic evidence here. I'm the one with the beard (I looked so much older then. I'm younger than that now.)

(Read the first two chapters of Mystery Man here, and learn what a good author can do with a pair of leather women's trousers.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009