Noir fiction for the modern reader.

The onset of the Internet Age has, and will continue to, decentralize the publishing business, exactly as it has the record business. Remember when there were just a few major record companies? They had all the big action, all the big artists, and all the money. If you wanted to make a mark as a recording artist, you had no choice but to get with one of them.

Now…the record business is in shambles, scrambling for its very existence. Because of sophisticated recording software, bands and songwriters can produce their own albums and distribute them themselves via well-constructed internet platforms. In addition, they tour in order to hype these albums. Many more albums are being produced than ever before, almost none of them with blockbuster sales figures, but the small, unknown artist who once had no shot with a major label is now enjoying modest success instead of guaranteed eternal oblivion.

This effectively created a direct line from the artist to the consumer. Independent record stores were quickly swept aside, leaving only the big chains, whose inventory and customer base continued to shrink until the chains, too, are disappearing.

Any of this sound familiar?

Well, like good music, good stories will never go away. Navel-gazers may wonder which sub-genre will pull to the forefront. What will happen to the PI novel? The hardboiled?  The cozy? The real answer is, there’s going to be more of everything, thanks to POD technology and ePublishing, among other things. It’s quite likely that little or none of this new writing will sell in the Stephen King stratosphere, but who cares? More writers will be published, read, and encouraged to continue writing. And one day, who knows what might happen to any of them?

Once shunned by big publishers and published authors alike, POD and ePublishing are now being quietly embraced by them. Publishers see value in starting up POD and ebook divisions: they can throw untried writers out at the market for a tiny fraction of the cost of going hardcover. If one or two of them catch on, they make money. After all, the next Michael Connelly is out there somewhere, slaving away over his computer, and this is a pretty cheap way of finding him. Meanwhile, small POD presses and ePublishers are sprouting up all over the landscape.

For the hopeful writer, good writing and perseverance are the key elements.

A professional is simply an amateur who didn’t quit.

I’m currently sitting in the Phoenix airport waiting for my connection back to Las Vegas.  There are remnants of activity still going on at Bouchercon today, but all the serious stuff wrapped up last night.

Overall, I’d have to rate the conference with a “C” grade.  A big part of my negative feeling toward it stems from the fact that yesterday, I started coming down with a cold, so I left the Hyatt at around 1:30 to return to the Omni, where I was staying, and never returned to the conference. Colds really piss me off, so that becomes my problem.

And speaking of the Omni, I wasn’t crazy about it. Everything about it was way overpriced, including $10/day for wi-fi access, and I was told the building went up in 1913!  Granted, the Omni company spent a lot of money on renovations, but my room was tiny. It was also two blocks from the Hyatt, making it unbelievably inconvenient, especially in the terrible weather that blanketed Indianapolis.

As far as Indianapolis goes, this was my first time there, and if I never go there again (which is clearly possible), I don’t think I’ll be missing anything. There are some cities that just beg you to return, to see and experience that which you missed on your first visit. Cities like New York, Los Angeles, and New Orleans fall into this category. Indianapolis falls way outside of it.

Another obstacle I couldn’t quite overcome was the fact that I didn’t know a soul there. All the published authors tended to stick together before they vanished, while everyone else seemed to know each other or seemed to be part of a group, and based on other early reports of conference attendees who were well-acquainted with large groups of people, I’m not too far wrong. At times, it felt like I was the lone Red Sox fan in Yankee Stadium. As with the cold, I suppose this is my problem.

But it wasn’t all bad. The conference itself was very well-run. I liked the idea of the “continuous conversations”. Even though there were no jaw-dropping moments at the ones I attended, they were a harmless, comfortable way to pass the down time. The panels, of which there was no shortage, generally started and ended on time, and they usually stayed on topic, with plenty of time allotted for Q and A from the audience.

The guests were well-chosen, for the most part, and most of them had something to say. Michael Connelly would be the major exception to this, as he appeared to be on automatic pilot. He does a lot of these events, though, so I’ll cut him slack.  Anyway, his presence alone seemed to satisfy the large crowd, which ran upwards of 1500 people.

By far, however, my biggest beef was with the panel moderators, who generally would not make the panelists speak directly into the microphone. Some of the panelists had a natural projection, and didn’t need to “eat” the microphone, but far too many tended to mumble, and when they were asked to speak into the microphone, they leaned forward about two inches. Then, before their sentence was completed, they had relaxed back into their original inaudible position. Michelle Gagnon was an exception to this. At her panel, she repeatedly asked the panelists to hold the microphone closer, and they all did.  Memo to Bouchercon organizers: it’s no fun to have to strain to hear someone. We shouldn’t have to do it, especially when they have a microphone that the conference paid for.

The bookstore area was sensational. A great selection of new titles mixed with older ones, as well as a few first editions and other collector’s items were displayed in a sensible, accessible manner.

I’ll be going to San Francisco next year, and I’m definitely booking a room in the host hotel.

While browsing the “Do Some Damage” crime fiction blogspot, I came across an interesting post by Jay Stringer.  He talked about novels as part of a series, and how everyone asked him if his upcoming book was in fact the opener of a series.  It led me to think more about the idea of series novels.

Series writing is often exemplified by Raymond Chandler and his Philip Marlowe novels and stories, in which Marlowe traipses from one book to the next in what was supposed to be “beautiful” Los Angeles of the 1940s and 1950s.  In each book, he encounters his requisite quota of lowlifes, edgy cops, and double-crossing dames, and each book can stand quite nicely on its own.

Chandler was one of the first crime novelists to employ a central character whose principal trait was his world-weariness, rather than a square-jawed righteousness.  Marlowe didn’t give a shit about truth, justice, and the American way.  At least, not so you’d know it.  He appeared to be driven by a need for money far more than a need for justice, but beneath his tough-guy veneer was what might be referred to as a “heart of gold”. Chandler called it “nobility”.  Either way, Marlowe would never relinquish it for any amount of money.

Earl Derr Biggers penned a whole lot of Charlie Chan novels way back when.  Today, the movies that were made from them are way better known than the novels, but that series about the Honolulu detective and his global exploits was wildly popular in its day.  The characters–Chan, his numbered sons, and others–ran through all the books and, eventually, the movies, but as with Chandler, each book was a stand-alone, satisfying the reader by ending with a neatly-tied wrapup of the proceedings.

Another type of series writing features not only the same character or characters running through a group of novels, but also a continuous story line.  Herman Wouk authored a masterful two-book series, Winds Of War followed by War And Remembrance, a titanic tale of a group of individuals swept up in World War II.  Each book could stand alone if it had to, but I can’t imagine anyone wanting to read only Winds and not insisting on finishing the story.  It was, as I posted in Jay Stringer’s blog, really one huge book divided in two.

James Ellroy, about whom I have written on this site, spent a good many years assembling his LA Quartet of novels, which include The Black Dahlia, LA Confidential, The Big Nowhere, and White Jazz.  I suppose any one of these novels could be read as a stand-alone, but it would be pretty difficult, because the story arc begs you to continue to the next one.  Taken as a whole, the LA Quartet is a masterpiece, both in plotting and style.

Not to say you can breeze through it, mind you.  Ellroy’s a tough read.  His staccato style and graphic description are off-putting to a great many readers raised on Sidney Sheldon or Danielle Steele.  Without question, he’s profane to the max, but that’s the truth of the world in which his characters reside. It’s a profane world, and a monstrously evil one at that.  He shows us the evil, and I mean real evil, that festers (and even prospers) below the world most of us know. But truly grasping the scope of this evil–and it is vast–requires the reader to plow through the entire series.  He lifts the veil on the LA of the 1940s and 1950s in a way in which Chandler never could, because Marlowe was too steeped in nobility.  Ellroy’s characters can’t afford to be noble.  They’ll end up with their faces shot off.

Ellroy’s new series, Underworld USA, is currently winding up with his latest release, Blood’s A Rover.  Unlike the LA Quartet, whose broad story line was more or less confined to Los Angeles, this trilogy spreads out over the whole country, as well as Central America and the Caribbean, covering the period from 1958 onward. It includes the runup to the JFK assassination, then on through to around 1972, an era commonly called “the sixties”.  Again, I can’t really comprehend how anyone wouldn’t want to read all three books, even though each one could theoretically stand alone.

Two of my favorite noir authors are Jim Thompson and David Goodis.  They never actually wrote series books, but if you read five or six novels by each of them, you get a very clear idea of a running theme.  Thompson got inside the criminal mind better than anyone, showing how seemingly ordinary people can become vile beasts.  Goodis takes you to the meanest streets you’ll ever walk, and makes you glad you never had to walk them by yourself.  Together, these two guys lead you straight into hell and never lead you out.  It’s this sort of non-series series writing that makes them so compelling.

I’m onto another, more unusual kind of series writing, but I’ll get into that another time.