I broke my NoirCon cherry last week. It didn’t leave a mark,
but I am a little sore.
Things got off to a quick start, with a screening of 1951’s The Prowler, followed by an interview
with “The Czar of Noir,” Eddie Muller. He hooked me early on, with his
definition of noir as a story where the protagonist willfully does a wrong
thing and pays for it. (That’s as simple and elegant a take on this slippery
subject as I have heard, the Occam’s Razor of noir definitions.) When asked to
sum up noir in one word, he said, “empathy.” The trick is to make the
protagonist the villain, and still make the audience feel for him.
That evening we adjourned to the Mausoleum of Contemporary
Art for what I thought was the best paced panel of the conference: Megan Abbott
moderating, with Christa Faust, Wallace Stroby, and Dennis Tafoya discussing
the kinds of underclasses only noir fiction seems to want to deal with. (Masked
wrestlers, rodeo bullfighters and barrel men (they’re not clowns anymore), circus
workers, carnies, and other folk decent, upstanding Republican Americans don’t
want to see their daughters bring home.) Tafoya believes modern fiction writers
have a reporting function, taking readers to populations they would otherwise
know nothing about. After some give-and-take about how The Godfather had elevated organized crime to operatic status,
Stroby commented on attending a dinner for a colleague at the Newark Star-Ledger, thrown by the wise guys
he’d covered over the past thirty years, because he had treated them fairly. I
can’t do the story justice here, but if you ever have a chance to talk to him,
ask about it.
A panel discussing the upcoming anthology, Trouble in the Heartland, a collection
of stories based on songs by Bruce Springsteen, then a handful of short films
written by Jonathan Woods (including the shamefully underappreciated The Curse of the Sponge Man) wrapped up the evening. (It’s yet another indictment of
the studio system that this fine film has avoided wider recognition. You can decide for yourself over at Vimeo.)
I spent the first 45 minutes of Steve Hodel’s presentation
Friday morning pondering the point of such a detailed biography of his father,
the next 45 with kind of a creepy feeling as I saw where he was going, and the
last 30 as convinced as Steve that his father, George, was the Black Dahlia killer.
(And a lot of other people, too.) Steve is a retired LA detective who worked
300 homicides, and the effectiveness of his presentation was made even more
eerie as one couldn’t help but wonder what it must have been like to peel back
the onion to learn these things about his father, who was as sick a fuck as
ever walked the earth. Kudos to Steve for his work and presentation.
The afternoon passed, frankly, pretty uneventfully. (I did
miss the reading at 4:00, which is on me, but my ass was sore.) Friday evening
was highlighted by a nice little soiree, hosted by Soho Books, capped off with
a showing of the noir classic, Get Carter.
Soho authors Stuart Neville and Fuminori Nakamura read.
“Stray Dogs: Tales From the Other America” discussed the
anthology by the same name, somewhat related to Thursday night’s panel, except
this time focusing more on the poor of the rural south. My favorite takeaway
here (sorry, I forget who provided it), was a quote from Gabriel Garcia
Marquez: If shit were as valuable as gold, poor people wouldn’t be allowed to
have assholes.
Defining “politics” as “power,” moderator John Grant set the
perfect tone for his panel, “Politics and Noir.” Jon McGoran noted that
thriller writers tend to be conservative and noir writers are more likely to be
liberal, as modern, 24-style
thrillers focus on military or paramilitary organizations and techniques, and
noir is about individuals. (McGoran phrased it better. Keeping up with him in
my note taking was a challenge.) He also told a story of how his publicist had
to walk away from one of his books because GMOs were not charitably treated,
and another client was heavily into them, placing the publicist in a classic
“fuck or walk” conundrum.
Richard Godwin sees two lines in each noir tale. The first
is where the situation tempts the protagonist to cross the line of legality.
The second is where he fails, often because the powers that be will not allow
him to succeed. Godwin feels strongly about noir tales where the protagonist is
forced into the situation, as opposed to being drawn in by his own lust or
greed. A key element of all noir is moral compromise, regardless of the
motivation.
This was a good panel, one of the two best of the weekend,
and Stuart Neville still stole it. Speaking without notes (this was not a
traditional panel of back and forth, but several brief speeches), Neville described
the lessons of growing up in Northern Ireland.
As he ages, he finds himself less willing to write about what is gained
by violence—nothing, now that he thinks about it—and more about what is lost:
everything. He is appalled that killers are now respected members of
government. Speaking of those who would kill a man in front of his son and call
it an act of politics, he is plainspoken: it’s not politics. It’s murder.
They’re not politicians; they’re criminals. Period. These men were always
criminals. The Troubles just gave them a “legitimate” outlet. (He also brought
a bit of a chill to the room when he said there’s a danger of writers using the
term “noir” as a way to try to set themselves a bit above those who write plain
old crime fiction.)
My vantage point made it a little hard to tell who said what
for the “Jewish Noir” panel. I did learn that the Jewish Bible is in a
different order than the Christian New Testament, ending on a more upbeat note.
Judaism is also the perfect noir religion, as one can follow the right path and
still get screwed. Oy.
I skipped dinner on Saturday to take a nap and rest up for
the last night at the bar, which was time well spent. One drawback to NoirCon
is that the evening activities are somewhat dispersed and no transportation is
provided. I didn’t feel like messing with another cab to go to dinner and I
appear to have chosen wisely, as sorting out whose cab was whose after what was
sometimes an extended wait apparently turned into a bit of a cluster fuck.
Buses would have been nice.
That’s a quibble. On balance, I had a great time, and
learned a lot. Aside from renewing acquaintances with the likes of Peter
Rozovsky, Absolutely Kate Pilarcik, Jon McGoran, and Mike Dennis, I got to meet
face-to-face for the first time such luminaries as Patti Abbott, Kate Laity,
Jed Ayres, Erik Arneson, and Vicki Hendrix. (To those who qualified but were
omitted here, my sincerest apologies, but there was drinking going on.) Well
worth the trip.
Scott Adlerberg
