Left Coast Crime 2025

 Travel and prior commitments prevented me from writing about march’s left Coast Crime conference in Denver. I’ll correct that today.

A quick note: I’ve been to over twenty conferences since my first, 2008’s Baltimore Bouchercon. I don’t take as many notes as I used to because each year there are fewer things I haven’t heard. The list below is by no means a comprehensive listing of all the interesting things I heard over that weekend, just those that were new, or of special interest to me.

PIs: Historical & Modern

SJ Rozan: The PI is the embodiment of having to make a difficult decision in an area of moral ambiguity.

Matt Coyle: PIs are the equivalent of the Western gunslinger. Once he’s done the job, he’s not so useful.

SJ Rozan: Short stories are like a liquor story robbery: in and out. Novels are long cons.

Noir: How Dark Can We go?

Christa Faust: Dark humor is a great way to help readers bridge the gap to an unlikeable protagonist.

CF: Hard boiled + Down these mean streets goes a man who is not himself mean. Noir = He’s mean, too.

CF: As an author, it can be hard to stick with a series. “I’m married to this series and I love it. but look at the ass on that idea.”

CF: There’s no level of “how far,” but how you handle it. If a scene can be cut and not hurt the story, cut it. Be as dark as you want, but not just the sake of darkness.

Conversation notes (Christa?):

Let the queer characters be messy. Too many cis writers make them perfect for fear of giving offense, which makes them two dimensional.

Humor can be a protective coating for the queer characters.

Medicine and Forensics:

DP Lyle: DNA is involved in less than 1% of cases.

The Craft of Writing:

Duane Swierczynski: A scene that comes to you right away is likely a cliché.

Rob Hart: Doesn’t want ‘sensitivity readers;’ he wants ‘accuracy readers.’

RH: Does one draft backward so he’s not running out of energy by the end.

Noir: Examining the Dark Side

Jon Bassoff: The reader doesn’t have to like the protagonist; he just has to be interested in him.

David Boop: In noir, the pro is the con.

DB: the reader can only spend so much time in the dark before you lose him. Comedy not only gives the reader a break, it intensifies the next bad thing to happen.

Mark Bacon: Car dealers put GPS and kill switches in cars for people with poor credit so they can keep them from driving the car and find it without bothering with a repo man, This can cause serious problems when a car dies on a busy highway.

Audience member: Postwar noir dealt with PTSD, though it wasn’t called that then. Now (neo)noir is nihilism.

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This was my second Left Coast Crime. Both were as well run as any conference I have attended, and I’ve been to more than twenty. If you get a chance to catch one – next year’s is in San Francisco -  you should go. You won’t be sorry.