Bravo Mark Thomas

By Jay Stringer

I have some strong memories from when I was a child. One of the clearest is driving around in my Grandfather's car, just me and him, listening to Johnny Cash. I didn't really know what it was then, and it sounded really old and silly, but I can still remember him looking over at me and explaining that it was a song about teaching your son to be able to fight for himself.

Cut forward to my teenage years, after I've been through a few musical phases that have been written out of my own personal history, and I'm too cool to like Johnny Cash, or country, or "any of that crap". My Grandfather passes away, a molotov cocktail of illness speeded along by cancer, and I have no idea how to articulate what is running through my head.

A friend gives me a copy of "American Recordings," and tells me to listen to the words, but I don't bother. Then I catch a glimpse of a music video -back when they could still change your life- and I saw an old man singing a brilliantly sick song about his dead wife, and Kate Moss is in it, and something about the old man's face and voice click.

I have a connection. I mainline Cash's songs, starting with the new and working back to the old. I learn his life-story inside and out and wear through a copy of his autobiography. I have a connection. I can sit and listen to this guy sing, and love it, and have someone else in the room with me. I can smell, hear and feel someone who's been lost to me since a couple of days before my seventeenth birthday.

My father and I have very different memories of the old man. For me he's a towering figure, almost mythical, a man who told me stories and dirty jokes, who drove me to self-improvement. Not without his harsher moments, like the time I fell and cut my knee and he made me walk back to the house rather than carry me. It's not my place to tell my Father's stories, but they would be different to mine, of a man who perhaps saw a different side of A Boy Named Sue, and always will.

But over the music of Johnny Cash we found a common ground, a common celebration and, in our ways, a common image of two different figures.

It's one thing to sit and write things like this, it would be something else to stand up in front of a sold out crowd in a comedy venue and lay myself even more bare.

At the weekend I saw Mark Thomas do just that, and I'm still thinking about it days later.

I've praised Thomas on here before. He's one of my personal touchstones, and even if it's not readily apparent in the prose of a moody crime writer, I can see the cues that I've taken from his work over the years.

At his last show, "Extreme Rambling," I was reminded of his ability to create a moving moment of silence in a comedy show. Way back in his show "Dambusters" I saw him willing to bring himself to tears to make a point about a human rights violation, again all in service of what was billed as comedy. But in his latest show, "Bravo Figaro!" Thomas has made that bravery the main drive of the show. There are laughs, some of them huge belly laughs, but this is a story with a beginning, a middle, and a bitter-sweet end.

Just as I found a new connection and new memories through music, so Thomas tells us of how his dads love of Opera gave him something to cling to as ill health started to eat away at the figure who had played such an imposing part in his life. Thomas never flinches from sharing home truths with the crowd, and in the best tradition of a writer he never hides from painting a picture of a very human father who has made some painful mistakes. But even with the harshest criticisms, it's always clear it's coming from a position of love, and as the show progresses we're routing for Thomas to get to do what so few of us ever do, and to turn that musical connection into something that matters while there's still time.

I won't ruin the ending. And there's also another aspect of the show that I'm leaving out -something that raises this from high comedy to high art- in the hope that some of you get to see it and experience it. But if you're in Edinburgh this month, or if the tour takes in a venue near you, you owe it to yourself to go watch.

Faust, Flynn, and Abbott: The New Noir

By Steve Weddle

I just don't know anymore, honestly. I mean, have you seen this Guardian article? The one that says a "new wave" of crime writers are bringing female characters "out of the shadows"?

The article says -- and perhaps the common argument is -- that publishers don't like women writing noir, that women should write series characters in more traditional mysteries.

Yes. Let's base our reading on that. Let's end up with Twilight fanfiction and committee-written thrillers, shall we?

These dumb arguments go on about how women authors shouldn't be pigeon-holed. Then the article -- this one, many like it -- will list some more women authors who shouldn't be pigeon-holed.

Here are a few women writers who are breaking barriers. Let's box them all into this neat little Women Authors of Noir Books, okay?

So this "new wave" of women is sweeping over the noir world, is it? Breaking news and all.

Flynn has at least three well-received books out, all of which have movie deals tied to them, I hear.

Christa Faust has been at this for many, many years, as has Megan Abbott. All have written fantastic books.

I hope those three sell a billion books by lunch. My lovely bride and I listened to GONE GIRL on a recent roadtrip and, you know, holy wows and all.

But just because some reporter at a magazine or newspaper or website stumbled across something doesn't make it a new wave. Maybe it's an old wave you should have been paying attention to. Maybe it's not a wave at all. Maybe it's the tide coming in. Maybe it's the ocean rising. Maybe it's an iceberg, with a billion other writers underneath. (Probably went a little long with that, didn't I? Sorry.)

Oh, and GONE GIRL isn't noir. mkay?

And, yet, it's fantastic to see our friends and neighbors in the Guardian and at the Gawker sites and all over the best-seller lists.

What happens is that the media -- reporters, bloggers, whoevs -- cover this as if it were a sudden, new phenomenon. What happens is that, traditionally, these trends themselves don't have much staying power. Burns bright for a moment, then coverage fizzles.

When you're only covering something because it's trendy, the next trend displaces it.

Vampires. Zombies. Women authors.

Faust and Flynn and Abbott aren't women authors. They're amazing authors.

Having them covered in the big London paper is fantastic, of course. I guess calling them the Poster Children For Women Writers of Noir can boost sales on these titles. I only hope that each author continues to receive coverage, not because of their womanlinesses, but because of their writerlinesses.

Calling someone a "great regional writer" hurts as often as it helps.

Talent and hard-work have put these authors where they are. They should be on every shelf because of that, because of their great writing.

I'm looking forward to the time when authors such as these can have that extra adjective dropped.

When they become "authors" instead of "women authors" or "regional authors" or "genre authors."

When they're covered, not because their books are trendy, but because they're just flat-out terrific.

When they sell a million copies, not because they're writing about "women's issues" of family and cancer and divorce and family, but because they're writing books people can't stop talking about.

I'm looking forward to the day authors are on talk shows and in newspapers because their books become required reading, not beach reading.

And, I guess, the more readers Faust and Flynn and Abbott can reach, the more likely this is to happen.

The Good, the Bad, and the Serial Killer

While Dave White is out on paternity leave (congrats), we're fortunate to have Anonymous-9 taking over for a bit. (By the way, check out the Anonymous-9 novel HARD BITE.)

Guest Post by Anonymous-9

We lost a writer, a humorist, a thinker, and a perennial student of the human condition on June 25th, 2012. David J. Kane was a Holocaust survivor who, as soon as he was able, decided the glass of life was more than half full and he was going to drink every precious drop of it. Once WW2 was over, David was rarely seen without a smile and a quip on his lips. He had a tremor in both hands that lingered from severe starvation and hardship, but he had a strong mind that superseded any physical limitations. David once told me a story about his experience at the hands of a brutal serial murderer in Buchenwald concentration camp. The story illustrates his deep knowledge of human duality; how good and bad, dark and light, can reside in the same human being. As a crime writer, the story astounds me...

It was 1944. David was a boy of 15, starved to skin and bone. Otto was a brutalizer of women, a cold-blooded killer and a danger to society. He was tried, convicted, and incarcerated alongside Jews in Buchenwald. The Nazis saw fit to place a few Jewish children with him, so they could serve his needs. David was one of those children. What the Nazis didn't know was that Otto, although murderously dangerous with adult women, liked children. He had no impulse to kill or abuse them, and he liked to hear them sing. David was tasked to wake Otto in the mornings with his clear, sweet voice, singing songs in Polish. Otto would even sneak food occasionally, and feed the children a few extra noodles.

One day, David and another boy were sent to the kitchen to peel apples, locked in alone all day. There was no bathroom, and after many long hours, and not knowing what else to do, they relieved themselves in a corner. When discovered, David was ordered to a death camp to be gassed. He was to leave in just a few days.

When Otto found out he was going to lose David he devised a plan. He knew that if the Nazis thought he was torturing this child and making his life miserable, they would likely not bother to send him away. Otto got a pillow and handed it to David saying, "Put this pillow down the back of your pants. I'm going to beat on the pillow with a stick and you scream like hell while I'm doing it." Positioning David by an open window so the sound was sure to carry, Otto whipped the pillow mercilessly as David yelled and screamed—it sounded as though he were being thrashed to death. Throughout the camp, Nazis heard the beating and sure enough, they didn't bother shipping David off to die.

Anonymous-9

Everyone inside the camp was set free on April 11th, 1945 by American soldiers who broke in by driving a tank through the barbed wire fence. It is not known what happened to Otto.

David lived long and well to the age of 82, and his story lives on. HOW TO SURVIVE ANYTHING by David and Yetta Kane is available on Amazon.