Noir at the Bar is Real

Over at Ransom Notes last week I posted on Daniel O'Malley's debut, The Rook, which reminded me of Charles Stross's The Atrocity Archives big time, but I enjoyed both enough to have them peacefully co-exist, but today at Ransom Notes I'm enjoying the slightly less speculative history of a mob hit man in the latest from RJ Ellory, A Quiet Vendetta and another New Orleans post/Katrina missing persons bit Storm Damage by Ed Kovacs. I just picked up Cathi Unsworth's Bad Penny Blues, Dan Chaon's Stay Awake, Joe R. Lansdale's Edge of Dark Water and Sean Doolittle's Lake Country - so it's been a kick-ass week for bookery in St. Louis. Really looking forward to more January sweetness from Ryan David Jahn's The Dispatcher and George Pelecanos's What it Was which you can take a gander at in the new issue of Playboy with some kick-ass artwork (or you can sample both online right here by 'liking' the page on Facebook.)

Have you checked out the five minute sequence from Steven Soderbergh's latest Haywire? You can access it, like I did, through them handsome fellas over at The Criminal Complex. Now, I'm pretty pumped for it. Looks badass. That Gina Carano has the physicality for it (we'll see about the acting, hard to tell how that'll go over just from this clip - better, I suspect than Sasha Grey in The Girlfriend Experience - and hey, it's already the single best Channing Tatum performance ever), and she's supported by a deep bench, so yeah, count me in.

Soooo, you've cleared your calendars for Tuesday, February 28's N@B with Gordon Highland (Major Inversions) and Caleb J. Ross, (Stranger Will) right? Well, it just got sweeter. Mark W. Tiedemann, the author of speculative and horror fiction (Diva, Remains) is joining the lineup and he won't raise the bar, he'll drop it on your head. Now you need to go ahead and clear the Tuesday before as well, because February 21st, N@B will host Benjamin Whitmer whose Satan is Real: The Ballad of Louvin Brothers is catching some mighty fine reviews and attention, and whose Pike pretty much blotted out the sun around here in 2010, and somebody I'm pretty confident you're gonna get to know soon, Sonia Coney will shock and offend you (me anyhow) for no extra fee. Yeah, February is chock-full of ooey-gooiness which more than likely will be found to contain human DNA. More names to drop for those events soon.

In N@B charter news, it seems them L.A. boys have rounded up another sweet-ass event with Robert Ward, Aaron Phillip Clark, AJ Hayes and Stephen Blackmoore for January 22. Man, wish I could be there. They're racking up a great track record betwixt Blackmoore, Aldo Calcagno and Eric Beetner (whose Dig Two Graves sounds like some uber-righteous hardboiled nasty right up my very own alley), and I'd love to visit one of their throwdowns, so we'll see, maybe I can swing a trip to Los Angeles some time this year...

Paul Von Stoetzel is moving forward with his short film adaptation of my short story Viscosity and I've now seen a script, so it feels like it's gonna happen soon. Anybody who's read Viscosity knows that the piece is nothing but dialogue and unattributed at that, and I don't know if that makes things easier or harder from a directorial standpoint, but it does mean that there's serious leaning on the actors. So, looking forward to this one and interested to hear the actors' performances.