"The Criminal Kind: Bardsley, Piccirilli, and Woods" at The Los Angeles Review of Books

Over at the Los Angeles Review of Books, my Criminal Kind column continues with reviews of Greg Bardsley's Cash Out, Tom Piccirilli's The Last Kind Words, and Jonathan Woods' A Death in Mexico.

Read the full article here.

Fulfilling all of the promise of Bardsley’s short story “Crazy Larry Smell Bacon” ... Cash Out marks an exciting new entry into the mystery field. Flat-out funny prose that doesn’t resort to parody is a rarity. Bardsley’s clarity and eccentricity should be treasured. Here’s hoping that a follow-up novel isn’t too far around the corner.

If Shadow Season was a turning point for Piccirilli — signaling a maturation of theme and style — then The Last Kind Words marks the start of a major new period in Piccirilli’s oeuvre, and it stands among his finest and most moving works to date.

Jonathan Woods’s debut novel, A Death in Mexico, [is] an outrageous and unruly mescal-soaked murder mystery packed with plenty of euphoric and hallucinogenic highs and none of the regrettable aftereffects. Readers looking for a by-the-books police procedural won’t find anything so straight-laced or conservative in this book; adventurous readers — those willing to drink without first asking what’s in the glass — will savor Woods’s unorthodox mélange of sex and slaughter under the sun.

NoirCon 2012: Friday Panels

Friday morning when I arrived at the Society Hill Playhouse, I found the backroom abuzz with this year's participants. A nice-sized crowd that filled the room without feeling overcrowded. There was enough room to take a look at Farley's or Port Richmond's books without having to resort to murder.

First up was Heide Hatry and "The Art of Noir." She showed slides of her body of work, including many of the performances shown on the opening night for participants who weren't able to make it out. Lots of blood and pig skin in the name of provocative, political performance art. Heide imparted a few important noir lessons from her career. First, don't leave dead animals in your luggage when traveling -- the authorities always take them away. Your backpack is much safer. And second, if you live in a shared apartment building, don't leave dead animals in the communal freezer in the basement if you don't want the cops to show up thinking they've located a serial killer.

Next, I humbly took the stage to moderate a conversation between S.J. Rozan and Wesley Stace (aka John Wesley Harding) called "Career in C Minor." Stace's most recent book is a classical music-themed mystery called Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer -- it's a terrific book, just imagine Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus with a little more murder. Rozan's latest is Ghost Hero, the 11th in her Lydia Chin / Bill Smith private eye series, another stellar NYC novel fueled by an art-related murder that goes back to the Tiananmen Square Massacre. Stace and Rozan discussed their respective backgrounds in music and architecture and its affect on their subsequent work as novelists. Stace also graced us by singing two songs.

"Good Country People: Deranged Preachers, Crazed Cops and Other N’er Do Wells of Southern Noir" followed. Jonathan Woods, Vicki Hendricks, Jake Hinkson, Joe Samuel Starnes, and Peter Farris discussed a wealth of Southern Noir writers whom they admired. These are just a few of the topics. Jonathan Woods presented on how obsession and "mad, first person narrators" links Poe with Jim Thompson. Joe Samuel Starnes discussed the noir side of Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom. Jake Hinkson talked about religion, noir, and The Night of the Hunter and Flannery O'Connor. And Vicki Hendricks spoke about Harry Crews and his advice to young writers that that "If you can be discouraged, you should be discouraged."

After lunch, Lawrence Block, Anthony Bruno, Ed Pettit and Duane Swierczynski took the stage for "The Movie Was Better," a discussion about which films have influenced these writers. Anthony cited Chester Himes' Cotton Comes to Harlem. Duane mentioned that seeing Faces of Death at age 9 had a profound affect on him and was, perhaps, one of the reasons why he turned in decapitation stories while attending Catholic grade school. Some of the nuns loved it, he mentioned, but some of them were terrified. "Nuns are my target audience still," Duane joked -- or maybe he was serious? Block mentioned that the anthology television shows of the 1950s "taught me something about dramatic instruction." He mentioned one particular episode whose program title he can't remember -- it was about a group of people plotting an assassination. At first, you are rooting for them, but at the end it is revealed that it was Lincoln's assassination they were planning, which makes you re-think everything you previously felt. "Your sympathies were inverted in a wonderfully tricky fashion," said Block. The mysterious nature of the show continues to intrigue Block, but not in the same way that it used to. "The fact that it has disappeared from the public consciousness has tempted me to write it." Here's hoping he does.

Duane recalled working with Brett Simon on an adaptation of his novel Severance Package. In a reversal of the cliche, this time it was Duane who wanted to make a lot of changes to his novel and Simon who wanted to be more faithful to the source material. Sadly, the studio's initial enthusiasm mysteriously disappeared and the project fell through. Sigh ... well, I still have my fingers crossed the movie will see the light of the projector soon, as I'd love to see that. Block also mentioned that Hammett's style increasingly moved towards "prose screenplays" because he realized that movies were the future of his income as a writer. Block also shared this wisdom that too many filmmakers and screenwriters don't realize: "When you have good actors, you don't have to have the words do all the work."

Robert Polito and Joan Schenkar, two of Noir's finest and most original scholars, shared some of their great findings. Polito recontextualized Maya Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon as a Noir film, and Joan enlightened us with maps of Patricia Highsmith's literary murders and real-life lovers -- it's chilling how they line up when compared!

"Noir is the spider that sits on top of the world," said Schenkar -- that's one of the best definitions of Noir I've heard.

Author and former Private Eye Writers of America president Jeremiah Healy interviewed Otto Penzler, winner of the Jay and Deen Kogan Award for Literary Excellence. Their conversation covered the beginnings of Penzler's career, from his small apartment in the Bronx in the 1970s when he was a one-man operation, writing receipts, fulfilling orders, editing manuscripts, and shipping the first Mysterious Press books. When Penzler began his limited edition, cloth-bound, signed editions, it was groundbreaking for the mystery field. Of course "literature" and "poetry" had been treated so ceremoniously before, but never crime fiction. Since then, Penzler has continued to give crime writers, and readers, the respect they deserve, both through his Mysterious Press and Bookshop.

The Bookshop is a miracle that couldn't happen today. With only $2050 in his bank account, Penzler found a partner to buy a building behind Carnegie Hall for $177,000. Penzler's contribution to the down payment was $2000 -- the other $50 he kept to celebrate. His idea was that the first floor would be all paperbacks, the upstairs all hardcovers. All the publishers told him that readers didn't buy mysteries in expensive hardcover edition. History proved Penzler right, and his good judgement has kept him at the front of the field for many decades since.

The conversation was truly great, and I could have listened all day and night to Healy and Penzler. Among my favorite parts were when Penzler gave his list of favorite books. Here's what he listed:

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White
Raymond Chandler
4/5s of Hammett ("The Dain Curse is silly.")
Fredric Brown ("The Night of the Jabberwock is so fascinating ... a tour de force.")
Ira Levin's A Kiss Before Dying
Lawrence Block's Matthew Scudder series
Michael Connelly
Rober Crais ("Consistently wonderful.")
Lee Child
Dennis Lehane
James Crumley's The Last Good Kiss ("The best Hardboiled novel.")
Charles McCarry ("The best American Espionage writer.")
"I love too much," Penzler said. "I could go on all day."

As Penzler's list shows, he's a man of great taste, and his publishing record is astonishing. I'm happy he won the award and very pleased that he was able to come out to NoirCon to speak.

And now, some candid shots of the NoirCon crowd from throughout the day.

Jonathan Woods Interview

Jonathan Woods’ short story collection Bad Juju & Other Tales of Madness and Mayhem (New Pulp Press) was one of the wildest literary rides of 2010. Some of the stories reminded me of Bukowski writing a 70s Men’s Action Novel, others had the surreal fever of the Hell sequence at the end of Jim Thompson’s The Getaway – but these comparisons don’t do justice to the originality of Woods’ collection. They’re funny, sexy, thrilling, and all-around terrific stories.

Woods’ has that rare zing of spontaneity and impulsiveness that make a story seem to come alive on the page. Temptation lies around the corner for his characters, and more often than not they follow it to the end of the line. They do it for sex, money, a need for adventure, out of drunkenness, and occasionally just plain stupidity. Woods’ characters are a diverse lot, and they’re a fun, albeit sometimes dangerous, lot to be around. But isn’t that what you want from a story? Something to take you out of your everyday life for 10 minutes and give you a jolt, some charge of narrative electricity to wake you up from the quotidian humdrum nausea? Woods takes you around the world – Mexico, Venezuela and, heck, even Southern Vermont – and there’s plenty of exhilaration and peril to experience at every turn.

Take “Drive By” – for my money, one of the best stories in the collection – about a frat boy taken for a ride by a gorgeous, mysterious woman who encounters danger, sex, and excitement. This pulpy cocktail is at the heart of many of Bad Juju’s stories, and it’s irresistible. In the excellent story “Looking for Goa,” a criminal couple’s bond is put to the test as they hide out after a bank robbery. Woods mixes taut suspense with perceptive comments about human behavior and relationships, capping it all off with an effectively clever twist. My favorite of Woods’ endings is from “Dog Daze,” about a woman who tries to come between a man and his dog. Woods times the punchline just right, achieving a nice balance of ironic humor and an open-ended ambiguity that leaves you wondering where the characters will go next.

I had the pleasure of meeting Jonathan Woods at NoirCon 2010. Afterward, he was kind enough to answer some questions by email for Pulp Serenade.

Pulp Serenade: How did this collection come together?

Jonathan Woods: The stories in Bad Juju were written over about 2½ years. The first was “Ideas of Murder in Southern Vermont.” I stole the title from Wallace Steven’s famous poem. After that story, I have no recollection which stories were written before or after which other stories. My friend the painter Bill Komodore was my first reader for most of them.

The organization of the stories in the published book was the result of consultations with the spirit world and some dreams I had. One of my favorite plays is called 52 Pickup by T.J. Dawe and Rita Bozi. The titles of 52 scenes from a relationship, from beginning to end, are written on a pack of playing cards, one scene per card. To begin the play one of the two actors throws the cards in the air. The two actors randomly pick up cards one at a time, acting out each scene of the relationship in the random order in which each card is retrieved. I think this same idea applies to the arrangement of the stories in Bad Juju. That being said, I like the order in which they appear in the book. And the last line of the last story ends the book perfectly.

PS: At what point did New Pulp Press get involved, and how did you link up with them?

JW: I met Jon Bassoff in May 2009 when we signed the agreement by which New Pulp Press agreed to publish Bad Juju. I went up to Denver to meet him in person, to make sure he didn’t look like Quasimodo. He favors black T-shirts, jeans and local Denver microbrews. A few weeks before that he’d read Bad Juju and loved it.

Jon’s company New Pulp Press is one of the really exciting new ventures in crime fiction publishing. Along with the crime fiction series published by PM Press and Europa. The best new writing is being published by small presses. Examples on the lit side include: Tinkers by Paul Harding, publisher: Bellevue Literary Press; Joshua Mohr’s Termite Parade published by Two Dollar Radio; and Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon from McPherson & Company. That’s where it’s happening. And on the web. About half of the stories in Bad Juju were originally published in various webzines. 
 


PS: Where do your stories typically begin -- with a character, a location, a title, or something else?

JW: They begin when I lower a bucket into the old id and draw it back up. “Maracaibo” – I just liked the name. It felt like one of those late 1940s adventure movies with William Bendix and some sexy broad set in the tropics. “An Orphan’s Tale” was inspired by two sentences in a Eudora Welty novella called “Moon Lake.”

PS: What is your writing routine like?

JW: When I’m writing a story, it’s like I’m in a fever, working night and day until it’s done. There are gaps of varying length between each story. Writing a novel is different. You have to hack at it day in and day out like cutting your way through a jungle with a machete. I write exclusively on a computer. Some of my revisions I do by hand on printed pages. I like to write late at night. There’s something about that time, when you’re totally enclosed in stasis. The world cast into darkness.


PS: Are these stories based on your own travels at all?

JW: I have traveled to all the places I write about except Maracaibo. All the stories are strictly made up by yours truly, though “Incident in the Tropics” was extrapolated from a real life incident I witnessed in Panama. 
 


PS: What character do you see yourself in most?

JW: I am all my characters. And they are me.


PS: You open the book with two terrific quotes. One is from Dashiell Hammett, "I haven't laughed so much over anything since the hogs ate my kid brother," and the other from Donald Barthelme, "Oh, there is nothing better than intelligent conversation except thrashing about in bed with a naked girl and Egmont Light Italic." How and why did you
select these two particular quotes?

JW: The ingredients of my stories are sex, violence and humor. Sex and violence are around us every day, in the newspapers, on the late night TV news. The humor part is to keep me from putting a bullet through my brain. The two quotes kind of tie into that. The Hammett quote combines violence and humor. The Barthelme quote combines sex, humor and a certain wistfulness. The two quotes just seemed like a great way to introduce my stories.

PS: What other writers would you pick as major influences?

JW: Chandler and Cain, obviously. Poe. Barry Gifford. Chester Himes. Henry Miller. Alexander Trocchi’s Young Adam. Nabokov’s Laughter in the Dark. Lowry’s Under the Volcano. Frank Miller. Quentin Tarantino. The list goes on.
 


PS: Let's put you in the shoes of Earl Thigpen in "Drive By." A gorgeous, strange woman picks you up, buys you dinner, then gives you an AK-47 and asks you to kill her brother. Do you say yes?

JW: Anything can happen.
 


PS: A reoccurring motif in your collection is characters traveling abroad who wind up in trouble. Do you think these same characters would get in trouble if they just stayed home, or are they unconsciously seeking out trouble themselves?

JW: For me noir and tropical countries just seem to go together. But actually ten of the 19 stories in Bad Juju are set in the States. My characters would get into deep shit no matter where they are.
 


PS: There's a terrific line from your story "Maracaibo": "Bill watches her leggy departure, fascinated by the enigma of desire." This "enigma of desire" seems to be a central theme to many of your stories, could you say a few words about what it means to your characters?

JW: Love and lust are major plot points in my stories, as they are in life. 
 

PS: Are there any plans to expand any of these stories into full-length novels?

JW: Not at the moment. I actually enjoy writing short stories more than novels. There’s an intense period of creation and then you have this object called a story that works like a multifaceted gemstone. I think short stories are one of the great contributions of America to literature. Think of all the great names of our short story writers: Poe, Bierce, Eudora Welty, Katherine Anne Porter, Raymond Carver, John Cheever, Paul Bowles. 
 


PS: Bad Juju has taken you on the road recently -- we met at NoirCon in Philadelphia. Where did you travel to, and what were your experiences like with your first book?

JW: Since Bad Juju was published in April 2010, I’ve been traveling around quite a bit promoting the book. This has included a reading at the KGB Bar in NYC, Noir@theBar in St. Louis, BookPeople and the 2010 Texas Book Festival in Austin, Murder By the Book in Houston, Bouchercon and Noircon and a bunch of appearances in my hometown of Dallas. It’s been great fun. I’ve met tons of great people. And I love reading excerpts from the stories aloud. It adds a whole other dimension.
 


PS: What's up next for you? Any news or projects you can share?

JW: I’m working on some new stories. There’s a new one up on Plots with Guns called “Swingers Anonymous.” This year 2010 has been very much devoted to promoting Bad Juju. Hard work, and lots of fun.

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Be sure to visit Jonathan Woods online at Southern Noir, and visit New Pulp Press to purchase Bad Juju & Other Tales of Madness and Mayhem.