Noir at the Bar

It's official: NOIR AT THE BAR will hit Vancouver on Tuesday June 10th. It'll be held in the Shebeen Whiskey Room in the Irish Heather, 212 Carrall Street. The lineup includes E.R. Brown, Dietrich Kalteis, Owen Laukkanen, Linda L Richards, Robin Spano, and myself. Should be fun.

I haven't done a ton of readings, and definitely not with so many established authors. The last one I did was in college: I read an anecdote about voiding my iPod of all the shitty songs I'd downloaded and learned while playing with cover bands. Big Sugar, Sheryl Crow, etc. ["Don't you miss playing the drums?" people sometimes ask. I think about having to learn three Big Sugar songs for a rehearsal at Bully's jam space in New Westminster, for a band that would ultimately lead nowhere, and then I smile contentedly and go back to doing research on forensic accounting or Jonestown.] 

I'm excited to be a part of this--please stop by!




I read Tana French's novel In the Woods last year. French writes beautifully about sociopaths. As does Scott Snyder in his graphic novel The Black Mirror. Both of those books involve sociopathic killers. But non-violent sociopaths are relatively common, and dealing with them is stressful for a number of reasons. 

If you've ever been bullied, you know that a bully is never placated by receiving the thing he (predominantly but not limited to 'he') wants. No bully in the history of bully-dom ever took your lunch money and said, "Thank you kind sir, that will be sufficient." Now, not all bullies are sociopaths, but a similar mechanism seems to be at work. Equivocation and compromise are seen as weaknesses to be exploited. I was talking about this recently with a friend. A person pestered their supervisor for something they didn't deserve, didn't receive it, went up the ladder to the supervisor's supervisor, and eventually got what they wanted. Everything they wanted. Wouldn't it be lovely if you got everything you wanted? But that was only the beginning. The next week, this same person had a new set of demands. And will probably receive them. Being a sociopath doesn't just allow you to treat human beings as chess pieces, it allows you to treat yourself as a chess piece. You can actually create a different self, or an alternate set of facts, for each social experience. There is no perfect system, and therefore there's no system that can't be exploited.

Anyway, both Snyder and French are great writers, and I look forward to reading more of their work. I'm also looking forward to cracking the two Derek Raymond novels on my shelf, He Died With His Eyes Open and I Was Dora Suarez. I've heard nothing but great things about Raymond: James Sallis, the author of Drive, wrote the forward.