Detectives Beyond Borders

Tuesday, April 05, 2016

"It is coated with a yellow poison paste and comes from Canada"

Why Robert Musil's story "Flypaper" might interest readers here at Detectives Beyond Borders: First, because the opening sentence of his story "Flypaper" gives my native country a shout-out:

"Tangle-foot flypaper is approximately fourteen inches long and eight inches wide; it is coated with a yellow poison paste and comes from Canada."

That's enough to make anyone from Kitimat to Come By Chance proud.

Second, while the story is cooler and more detached than noir generally is, its final paragraph includes this:

"Sometimes even the next day, one of them wakes up, gropes a while with one leg or flutters a wing. Sometimes such a movement sweeps over the lot, then all of them sink a little deeper into death."

Noir is sometimes about the horror of sliding toward death. Musil's story is about the horror, and the dirty little thrill, of watching something else do the sliding.

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

Musil's great novel, The Man Without Qualities, which remained unfinished when he died in 1942, weighs in at about 1,100 to 1,700 pages in English translation, depending on how one counts. But I once boiled it down to six words, in response to a challenge on social media:

"Empire decays. People talk. War looms."

You should still read the book, my choice for greatest novel of the twentieth century. But if you don't have time, my summary is accurate.

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

Labels: noir, Robert Musil

Sunday, March 13, 2016

Why I like Henri Pirenne better than "Chris" Wickham, plus Black Wings Has My Angel

I've read all or parts of three books recently by the great historian Henri Pirenne, who wrote in the last century, and never once does he use the words narrative, storyline, or interventionist. That's one reason I like him better than I do his successor in our time Chris Wickham. Another is that Wickham writes under the name Chris, even though his name is Christopher. Call me old school, but I say save that informality for the pub. If you're going to write a book about ancient Rome and its heritage in the Middle Ages, use your full name.

2) Black Wings Has My Angel is as chilling a work of noir as it is said to be, and it has been reprinted by New York Review Books, so you know it packs a ton of literary respectability. But don't hold that against Elliott Chaze's 1953 novel, originally published by Gold Medal. The novel follows several conventions of mid-century noir (readers of Jim Thompson might like it, or of Charles Williams at his darkest, for example), and it does does so thoroughly and well. But Chaze's writing is so understated, its narrator/protagonist's reaction to his hellish so circumstances so heartbreakingly matter-of-fact at times and so tragically noble at others, that the book becomes at the same time something more.

Labels: Chris Wickham, Elliott Chaze, Henri Pirenne, history, noir, Stark House Press

Thursday, May 28, 2015

Paul D. Brazill's 13 Shots ..., or Noir: I know it when I see it

I don't think much about what noir is or isn't, but every once in a while, as Potter Stewart did with obscenity in Jacobellis v. Ohio, I know it when I see it.

My latest epiphany has come with the opening stories of Paul D. Brazill's 13 Shots of Noir. The stories are all dark, of course, in the sense that their characters do terrible things, but they are filled with humor, and one even has a happy ending of a kind.

So, what makes Brazill's stories noir? Just this: Better than most authors whose work gets tagged noir, Brazill makes every villain, as the saying goes, a hero in his own story. In addition to the attendant irony and humor, that is apt to fascinate and horrify a reader at the same time. And that, it says here, is one of noir's defining characteristics.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Labels: 13 Shots of Noir, noir, Paul D. Brazill, short stories

Saturday, April 04, 2015

Noir, while you stand on one foot

I've found the quintessential noir sentence. It's from Gil Brewer's 1960 novel, The Three-Way Split, and it goes like this:

"For the first time, I felt a sense of real fear."

The rest is commentary. Go and learn it.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Labels: Gil Brewer, noir, paperback originals

Sunday, January 25, 2015

More on Ross Thomas, plus a visit to Regrub King

I think "Regrub King" is a fine name for a restaurant, don't
you? (All photos by Peter Rozovsky, your humble blog keeper.)
==================

Friday's Ross Thomas post wound up being mostly about George V. Higgins, so here are some things I liked about Missionary Stew, the 1983 Thomas novel that sparked the post:

"An hour later, Draper Haere's secretary called Citron and told him she was, to use her participle, `messengering' him out $ 2,000 in cash." The scorn embodied in those inverted commas is delicious. How many crime writers today would use participle in a novel? How many people know what a participle is? What would Ross Thomas have done in a culture that thinks texting is a word?

"Instead of one, there were two of them. There was the tall skinny one in the cheap suit, and the other one, not quite so tall, wearing the banker blue suit and looking as if somebody had just run over his dog."
Two recurring tag lines, which I won't repeat here, that are all the funnier because the characters who hear them are never in on the joke.

Labels: noir, photography, Ross Thomas

Wednesday, July 23, 2014

The Donner after party: More from Kevin Starr on California's noir history

I made my travel reservations this week for Bouchercon 2014, and I celebrated by reading a bit more of Kevin Starr (click the link, then scroll down), that lively chronicler of California history whose work I discovered when I visited the state last year.

Starr ranges widely, writing not just about events, people, and phenomena, but also about California's image of itself and about the state's place in the psyche of Americans everywhere. It's no accident that each book in his multi-volume history of California has the word dream in its title.

Starr occasionally invokes noir as a reflection of the disillusionment that must necessarily result when a person, place, or thing becomes the focus for such desperate dreams as California does, and I opened Americans and the California Dream: 1850-1915 at random on one of the most horrible episodes in American history, though horrible for a reason one might not expect. That episode is the Donner party, and Starr's account makes clear that the lingering horror lay not in the cannibalism and privation of the stranded party of would-be California settlers, but in its afterlife.

Survivors of the party, Starr wrote, resumed normal lives, and in time "became respected for what they had undergone." The real victim, in Starr's version, was a survivor named Lewis Keseberg, discovered by a party of rescuers-cum-scavengers out for $10,000 in cash the Donners were said to be carrying. Convinced that Keseberg knew where the money was, Starr writes, the reward-seekers beat him and accused him of killing Mrs. Donner. Keseberg protested his innocence, and, years later, did so before Donner's daughter Eliza, who had survived the party. She believed him, Starr writes.

In the meantime, though, the scavengers' accusations made the newspapers, and Keseberg became a pariah and a tragic figure, the scapegoat for the collective barbarities of the party. He sued for slander, won -- and was awarded a dollar in damages. "In 1895, after fifty accursed years," Starr writes, "Keseberg died in Sacramento--peacefully, saying nothing, asking nothing of anyone, like those who have long lived beyond the reach of human sympathy."

That sounds pretty noir to me.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Labels: Americans and the California Dream: 1850-1915, California, Donner party, history, Kevin Starr, noir

Saturday, March 22, 2014

Noir is a state of mind: Giorgio Scerbanenco's A Private Venus

Here are some reflections inspired by my second reading of Giorgio Scerbanenco's 1966 novel A Private Venus, available in the UK from Hersilia Press and in the U.S. from Melville House:

1) The novel is thoroughly noir long before it portrays any violence or criminal acts. This may remind some readers of David Goodis.
2) Its protagonist, Duca Lamberti, is a doctor who has been struck from the register for an act of euthanasia. That sounds like Goodis' ex-singer or piano player protagonists, but unlike them, Lamberti has not hit the skids. He has a sister, a niece, a powerful friend on Milan's police force, and a place to live. Noir is not synonymous with squalor. It's a state of mind, not an economic category.

Labels: David Goodis, Giorgio Scerbanenco, Hersilia Press, Italy, Melville House, noir

Sunday, January 05, 2014

Curzio Malaparte's The Skin: Life during noir time

Commentators lapse into cliché or trivial vulgarity when discussing Curzio Malaparte's 1949 novel The Skin, and it's hard to blame them. Almost anything one can say about the book comes off as incomplete, as a stance, or an attitude.

Milan Kundera comes closest to the mark among the comments attached to the new NYRB translation of the book with an assessment that reads, in part, "suddenly, good and evil have veiled their faces; the new world is still barely known." But even that brief excerpt, quoted on the back cover, does not take in the novel's dark humor.

The novel has a character named Curzio Malaparte accompanying American forces in and around Naples after Italy signed the Armistice of Cassibile and went over to the Allied side in World War II. This is no crime novel, but its scenes of desperation, self-laceration, pity, and squalor will make any crime reader think about what noir really means.

I'll post an excerpt or two in the coming days, and I hope it will be clear why I choose the excerpts I do:

"General Cork was a real gentleman—a real American gentleman, I mean. He had the naïveté, the artlessness and the moral transparency that make American gentlemen so lovable and so human. He was not a cultivated man, he did not possess that humanistic culture which gives such a noble and poetic tone to the manners of European gentlemen, but he was a `man,' he had that human quality which European men lack: he knew how to blush. ... Like all good Americans, he was convinced that America was the leading nation in the world, and that the Americans were the most civilized and the most honorable people on earth; and naturally he despised Europe....

"Then he had asked me which gods the Americans would have to respect in Europe if they were to be saved.

"`Our hunger, our misery, and our humiliation,' I had replied."

I have suggested that The Skin might interest my Bouchercon WWII panel friends James Benn and Martin Limón. J. Robert Janes might be interested as well.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Labels: Curzio Malaparte, Italy, Naples, noir, NYRB Classics, World War II

Tuesday, December 24, 2013

More from Starr on noir

Kevin Starr's California mentions noir again, this time at the beginning of a chapter on the arts:

"The twentieth century witnessed the debut of three entertainment media—film, radio, and television—dependent upon electronic technologies developed in California. Each of these media, film especially, took root in Southern California as it matured. To the traditional concerns of literature in California—nature, naturalism, and bohemia—were added the noir worldview and the apocalypse."

Has anyone ever argued with a lighter touch that crime movies and novels ought to be taken seriously? It's a truism that the hard-boiled loner of American crime fiction sprang from the Western, but how many people have found a geographic source for noir? Instead of asking "What is noir?" (and risking decapitation by Anthony Neil Smith), perhaps we might more fruitfully ask where noir came from—and why.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Labels: Anthony Neil Smith, California, history, Kevin Starr, noir

Saturday, August 24, 2013

Bcon panels: What's your favorite non-standard setting for noir?

Here are three brief excerpts from Setup on Front Street, first of Mike Dennis' Key West Nocturnes novels:

"`I'm Special Agent Ryder,' he said. `I understand you've been having some trouble with former mayor Whitney.'

"I had to laugh. Is there anything in this town that isn't public knowledge?"

***

"Now that I was running plastic, I needed to buy some new clothes, but I didn't want to chance any buys in Key West.

"Like Yale said, it's a small town."

***

"See, this is one of the downsides of living your whole life in a small town. The cop knows what happened, and he knows that I know. Pretty soon, it'll be in the fucking paper."

Those passages do double duty as a leitmotif, tying the story together, and as an answer to the question of why Key West is a good place to set a noirish crime story. Noir is all about constriction, about the world closing in on the protagonist, and since a small town can be a constricted place even for those not just out of prison trying to collect old debts, getting ripped off, and running into mobsters and corrupt politicians, you can imagine how tough it is on Dennis' Don Roy Doyle.

But let's talk about you. What's your favorite non-standard noir setting, i.e., not New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, et al.? How does the author convince you that his or her unusual setting is a good one?

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

Mike Dennis will be part of my "Goodnight, My Angel: Hard-Boiled, Noir, and the Reader's Love Affair With Both" panel at Bouchercon 2013 in Albany on Friday, Sept. 20, at 10:20 a.m.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Labels: Bouchercon, Bouchercon 2013, conventions, Florida, Mike Dennis, noir

Wednesday, August 21, 2013

My Bouchercon 2013 panels: Noir, hard-boiled, fantasy, and reality

My noir and hard-boiled panel at Bouchercon 2013 in Albany, N.Y., next month will also be a reality and fantasy panel, fantasy meaning nostalgia, pulp, and other forms of retreat from the everyday.

In this corner, representing reality, Dana King's Grind Joint, with its utter lack of illusion about the supposed benefits of a casino for an economically ravaged Pennsylvania town. In that corner, Terrence McCauley's violent Prohibition-era novel Prohibition and Eric Beetner's post-apocalyptic cannibal/survivor tale Stripper Pole at the End of the World. Somewhere between these extremes, showing affinities at times with one, at times with the other, are Mike Dennis and Jonathan Woods, who join King, McCauley, and Beetner on the panel.

McCauley harks back to Dashiell Hammett and Paul Cain (and to writers and movie makers who harked back to Hammett and Cain). While his book's themes of loyalty, doubt, and betrayal are confined to no one era, the cover of the novel, at upper left, quite accurately reflects the early- and mid-twentieth-century gats 'n' gloves mythos to which McCauley makes a modern-day contribution. He and Beetner are acutely aware of periods in American popular culture that preceded their own.

King, on the other hand, writes about a world where beaten-down cities are desperate for the next big thing, where governments happily throw cash at companies to relocate to (or remain in) their state, and a lot more money seems to circulate among corporations and politicians than among the relocated workers. For all King's affinities with Elmore Leonard, George V. Higgins or King's amico Charlie Stella, it's a world you can find lurking behind today's headlines.

Fantasy? Reality? Pulp? Bad juju? You'll find it all at Bouchercon ... and here, at Detectives Beyond Borders.

How about you, lovers of noir and hard-boiled? Is your favorite reading reality? Fantasy? Or some mix of both?

========

Eric Beetner, Mike Dennis, Dana King, Terrence McCauley, and Jonathan Woods will be part of the "Goodnight, My Angel: Hard-Boiled, Noir, and the Reader's Love Affair With Both" panel, with your humble blogkeeper as moderator, at Bouchercon 2013 on Friday, Sept. 20, at 10:20 a.m.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Labels: Bouchercon, Bouchercon 2013, conventions, Dana King, Eric Beetner, hard-boiled, Jonathan Woods, Mike Dennis, noir, Terrence McCauley

Saturday, July 27, 2013

Jim "1280" Thompson

I needed some leisure reading to match the mood into which I'd been plunged by one of the stories I had to read for my job, so I turned to Jim Thompson, The Kill-Off. Here's part of its first chapter, boldface mine:

"Manduwoc is a seacoast town, a few hours train-ride from New York City. It is too far from the city for commuting; there are no local industries. According to the last census, the population was 1,280 and I doubt that it has increased since then."

What was with Thompson and the number 1,280?

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Labels: Jim Thompson, noir

Monday, February 04, 2013

Detectives Beyond Borders reads London Boulevard

A recent discussion here at Detectives Beyond Borders touched on the relative merits of laconic and expansive prose. Ken Bruen can write both.

He's better known for his machine-gun verbal outbursts. A fair parody of Bruen on paper would include

Short sentences.

Idiosyncratic paragraphing.

Lists.

Mordant, rapid-fire jokes that bounce off the page like hailstones.

But London Boulevard is also chillingly laconic in the matter of its protagonist's reactions to the violence he inflicts, experiences, and has experienced. And that makes this 2001 novel more than just a revenge odyssey or damaged-hero story, though it is both.

It also is the author's version of Sunset Boulevard and, with a possible quibble about a surprising personality switch on the part of the Erich von Stroheim character, that aspect of the novel holds together beautifully and without intruding on the novel's suspense and mystery. Discussion of Bruen tends to focus on his raw emotion, tragic humor, and this like—on feeling rather than craft. But London Boulevard shows he’s capable of a well-crafted mystery while retaining all the rawness you’ve come to love. And that's why it's probably my favorite, and maybe the best, of the seventeen or so of his novels that I've read.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Labels: England, Ireland, Irish crime fiction, Ken Bruen, London, noir

Friday, December 07, 2012

"Take this, Job, and shove it"

So, how is the Book of Job like a crime novel, anyhow? Like many crime novels, not all of them Scandinavian, it has an ominous prologue before it gets to the good part.

And here's some of that good part, from Stephen Mitchell's translation:

"Why is there light for the wretched,
life for the bitter-hearted,
who long for death, who seek it
as if it were buried treasure,
who smile when they reach the graveyard
and laugh as their pit is dug."

That's noir, but it sounds more like a noir author or reader than a noir protagonist, most of whom go more meekly or at least resignedly to their fates. It's as if one of David Goodis' wretched protagonists sat down to write his own story instead of letting Goodis do it.

***

And now, turning from the substantive to the atmospheric side of noir, here's a view right around my corner, photo by your humble blogkeeper.

Labels: Bible, Book of Job, David Goodis, images, miscellaneous, noir, noir photos, Philadelphia, Philadelphia views, proto-crime fiction, Stephen Mitchell

Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Hard-boiled at the beach

I'm bursting with enthusiasm for my adopted country, for its misfits, its losers, its hard cases, and its beaches.

I've continued my project, announced here, of reading classic American hard-boiled and noir, and I'll likely continue to do so over the next few days at an undisclosed location on the Atlantic coast. And that means blogging may be light here at Detectives Beyond Borders until next week, lest I get sun screen and beach sand all over my keyboard. In the meantime, a few notes:

1) I like Jim Thompson's The Getaway better than Edward Anderson's Thieves Like Us. Each is saturated with sympathy for its characters, each occasionally lapses into speechifying, but Thompson, perhaps more in this novel than in his others, has considerable fun on the way to his hellish destination.

2) Why isn't Dan J. Marlowe better known? He did his best writing in the know-it-all, smirk-at-everything, over-the-top 1960s, yet his heist novels avoid both nostalgia and jokiness. And The Vengeance Man combines Ross Thomas' eye for political shenanigans with Jim Thompson's fatalism.

Happily, readers will soon be able to learn more about Marlowe and his interesting life (He was a professional gambler, a Rotarian, a Republican city councilman, and a friend of a notorious bank robber.) Gunshots in Another Room: The Forgotten Life of Dan J. Marlowe is scheduled for publication this fall. In the meantime, here's an appreciation of Marlowe from the biography's author, Charles Kelly.

3) Why is Paul Cain's Fast One not included in the Library of America's American Noir of the 1930s and 40s collection? It's the best, toughest, hardest-hitting American crime novel whose author is not named Chandler or Hammett. I'll be sure to ask the LofA volume's editor, Robert Polito, the reason for the omission when we meet in good fellowship at Noircon 2012 in November.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Labels: Charles Kelly, Dan J. Marlowe, Edward Anderson, hard-boiled classics, Jim Thompson, Library of America, noir, NoirCon, Noircon 2012, Robert Polito

Saturday, April 21, 2012

Goodis the great

Some of the borders I've crossed recently have been ones of time, into American crime writing of the 1940s and '50s.

Based on my first readings of all three authors, I like Bruno Fischer and Fletcher Flora a little better than I like Day Keene. But none was as good as David Goodis.

I'd read some Goodis before, the short story "Black Pudding" and the 1951 best-seller Cassidy's Girl, and I'd been impressed, notably by the heart-breaking compassion he mustered for his characters. But Dark Passage (1946) is, in its opening chapters, even better, a knockout of a book.

I'll likely have more to say later, but for now it's interesting to view the novel as an argument for the old proposition that the way to become a good writer is to write, and write, and write. Dark Passage was Goodis' second novel, and it appeared seven years after his first. In between, Goodis wrote prodigiously for pulp magazines, more than five million words in five years in the early 1940s, according to his own estimate. (See Robert Polito's notes to David Goodis: Five Noir Novels of the 1940s and 1950s.)

The result may not tug at the heartstrings quite as hard as some of Goodis' later works do, but it is self-consciously stylish without going over the top, a difficult feat for any writer, much less one not yet thirty years old. The book's first chapters are full of words repeated to amusing effect. And if you like how Ken Bruen and Allan Guthrie use humor at dark moments and somehow make it seem right, you'll find the roots of the practice in protagonist Vincent Parry's conversation with the taxi driver in Chapter Seven.

But first, my favorite line of the book so far, tough, naive, funny and touching at the same time:

"Being good to people sounds nice but it's hard work."

***

Labels: Allan Guthrie, David Goodis, Ken Bruen, Library of America, noir, NoirCon, Noircon 2012, Robert Polito

Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Descent into Death: A glimpse at 1950s American crime fiction

Are the 1950s the most luridly masochistic, twisted, self-obsessed, self-voyeuristic decade in American history? Based on the period's crime fiction, yep.

I've been reading a fair number of crime novels and stories from the 1950s, reissued by Wonder Publishing Group with suitably lurid covers after original publication in magazines of the time, notably Manhunt. Two highlights have been "As I Lie Dead" by Fletcher Flora and We Are All Dead by Bruno Fischer. In each, a first-person narrator relates a tale that takes him exactly where you'd expect from the title, and it's hard to imagine anything more self-involved than imagining one's own death.

Why did these authors have their characters do it? Is lurid embrace of death really more prevalent in American crime writing of the 1950s (and late 1940s) than in that of previous and succeeding periods? If so, why? As a gross generalization, I'd say that characters in 1950s crime melodrama embraced the forbidden when doing so could still exact a tremendous toll in guilt, psychological dissolution, even death, and that this lends stories of the time their giddy, nasty kick. Shed one's inhibitions, as we've all been doing since the 1960s, and you shed the possibility of writing such stories.

***

This is a fine time to ponder such questions. On Thursday I'll attend two events celebrating the Library of America's publication of David Goodis: Five Noir Novels of the 1940s and 1950s. The durable, handsome volume includes Dark Passage, Nightfall, The Burglar, The Moon in the Gutter, and Street of No Return, and you can meet the book's editor, Robert Polito, for a program at the Free Library of Philadelphia. The fun starts at 5:45 with a screening of The Burglar, for which Goodis wrote the script, and Polito takes the stage at 7:30. Visit the library's website for information.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Labels: 1950s, Bruno Fischer, David Goodis, Fletcher Flora, Free Library of Philadelphia, Gold Medal Books, Manhunt, melodrama, noir, paperback originals, Robert Polito, Wonder Publishing Group

Thursday, April 12, 2012

What I'm about to read on my sort-of vacation

I'm off to Boston tomorrow accompanied by Ciaran Carson, Cú Chulainn, Thomas Pynchon and, in case I get too cheerful, Dead Man Upright, part of Melville House's new editions of Derek Raymond's Factory novels.

I'll read Pynchon's Inherent Vice curious about why he chose the hard-boiled-detective form to tell a story set in the psychedelic 1960s and, according to a cover blurb, about the end of an era. (Reviewers call the novel noir, but I assume that most people who call a crime story noir really mean hard-boiled. If I'm wrong in this case, I'll say so.)

There's no such doubt about Derek Raymond. He's noir, and I've heard tell that next to Dead Man Upright, his previous bleak, funny, touching Factory novels are light entertainment.

Here's some of what I've written about Raymond:

"He was a latter-day Hammett, I thought when I read Derek Raymond's I Was Dora Suarez. He was a new Chandler, I thought when I read the opening chapters of The Devil's Home on Leave.

"With one novel-plus of Raymond under my belt, I say he's a bit of both. His nameless detective-sergeant protagonist is as dedicated to his job as was Sam Spade or the Continental Op, and he yearns like Philip Marlowe, only there's not a trace of nostalgia about him. He's as hard and as heart-breaking as the best of the dark crime writers who followed him and who invoke his name as reverently as they do Hammett's and Chandler's."

Labels: Ciaran Carson, Derek Raymond, hard-boiled, Melville House, noir, Táin Bó Cúailnge, The Táin, Thomas Pynchon

Saturday, April 07, 2012

30 Days of the 5-2: A Month of Crime Poetry

April is National Poetry Month, and crime has a place at the table once again, thanks to Gerald So.

Gerald assembled a list of bloggers, authors, and other persons of interest and asked each of us to write about a poem from The 5-2: Crime Poetry Weekly and pick a day to post our thoughts.

My choice was simple, because Randall Avilez's "Outlaw at Peace" combines the resignation and grim humor that makes real noir fiction so attractive with the simple but deep self-knowledge that characterizes some of the Westerns I've been reading recently. And, like much of the rawest noir, particularly the melodramas of the 1950s, Avilez's poem is narrated by a first-person protagonist whose forthrightness is inextricable from his less-admirable traits. He may be a bad guy, but he knows himself, his world, and his place in it.

Some crime writers muse at great length upon justice, law, and the differences between the two. Avilez wraps that up quickly: "I asked what exactly an outlaw was / they gave me vague answers." And the self-knowledge and blunt assessment of the world don't get more much concise than they do in Avilez's last two stanzas.

If you lack the time to lead a life that brings you to resignation, doom, and perfect insight, read a Gold Medal paperback. And if you don't have time for that, try "Outlaw at Peace."

OUTLAW AT PEACE

when they asked me about the law
i told them i was an honest man
i swore on the bible but they did not care
life for them must be hollow

i asked what exactly an outlaw was
they gave me vague answers
i lit a cigarette not particularly worried
they read my sentence

a few years on drug possession, trafficking didn't stick
no one chokes on swallowed pride
the judge looked hard and mean
as i walked, i said, i regret nothing and god is forgiving

nobody tells a drug addict to be a drug addict
they just let him commit suicide in silence
and i liked that
slowly dying under blue skies

(Here's a full schedule for the 30 Days of the 5-2 Blog Tour.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Labels: 30 Days of The 5-2, Gerald So, noir, poetry, poets, Randall Avilez, The 5-2: Crime Poetry Weekly

Monday, March 19, 2012

Akko, or When days were long and knights were short

Fletcher Flora didn't just have one of the more unlikely names in noir; he could also write the stuff.

His story "As I Lie Dead" (1953) reminded me of why the American movies later called films noirs were once known as melodramas. It is overheated with sex and doom from the beginning and, as a bonus, I did not see its end coming.

I read "As I Lie Dead" on the train to Akko (Acre), one of the oldest in a land of ancient cities. Akko/Acre was the final stronghold of the Crusader states in the Holy Land, a place where all but the shortest Knights Templar must have taken the lord's name in vain as they smacked their medieval heads against the low roof of what some people today think was an escape tunnel.

The city's real big knights were the Hospitallers, whose "subterranean" Crusader fortress was spectacularly well preserved because subsequent occupiers simply filled its halls with rubble and buried them.

Anyone who was anyone knew about Akko, wrote about it, or invaded it: The pharaohs. The folks who wrote the Bible. Newcomers like the ancient Greeks, the Romans, the Crusaders, and Napoleon. I suggest that you follow them.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Labels: Akko, Fletcher Flora, Israel, noir, what I did on my vacation