NoirCon 2012: Friday Panels

Friday morning when I arrived at the Society Hill Playhouse, I found the backroom abuzz with this year's participants. A nice-sized crowd that filled the room without feeling overcrowded. There was enough room to take a look at Farley's or Port Richmond's books without having to resort to murder.

First up was Heide Hatry and "The Art of Noir." She showed slides of her body of work, including many of the performances shown on the opening night for participants who weren't able to make it out. Lots of blood and pig skin in the name of provocative, political performance art. Heide imparted a few important noir lessons from her career. First, don't leave dead animals in your luggage when traveling -- the authorities always take them away. Your backpack is much safer. And second, if you live in a shared apartment building, don't leave dead animals in the communal freezer in the basement if you don't want the cops to show up thinking they've located a serial killer.

Next, I humbly took the stage to moderate a conversation between S.J. Rozan and Wesley Stace (aka John Wesley Harding) called "Career in C Minor." Stace's most recent book is a classical music-themed mystery called Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer -- it's a terrific book, just imagine Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus with a little more murder. Rozan's latest is Ghost Hero, the 11th in her Lydia Chin / Bill Smith private eye series, another stellar NYC novel fueled by an art-related murder that goes back to the Tiananmen Square Massacre. Stace and Rozan discussed their respective backgrounds in music and architecture and its affect on their subsequent work as novelists. Stace also graced us by singing two songs.

"Good Country People: Deranged Preachers, Crazed Cops and Other N’er Do Wells of Southern Noir" followed. Jonathan Woods, Vicki Hendricks, Jake Hinkson, Joe Samuel Starnes, and Peter Farris discussed a wealth of Southern Noir writers whom they admired. These are just a few of the topics. Jonathan Woods presented on how obsession and "mad, first person narrators" links Poe with Jim Thompson. Joe Samuel Starnes discussed the noir side of Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom. Jake Hinkson talked about religion, noir, and The Night of the Hunter and Flannery O'Connor. And Vicki Hendricks spoke about Harry Crews and his advice to young writers that that "If you can be discouraged, you should be discouraged."

After lunch, Lawrence Block, Anthony Bruno, Ed Pettit and Duane Swierczynski took the stage for "The Movie Was Better," a discussion about which films have influenced these writers. Anthony cited Chester Himes' Cotton Comes to Harlem. Duane mentioned that seeing Faces of Death at age 9 had a profound affect on him and was, perhaps, one of the reasons why he turned in decapitation stories while attending Catholic grade school. Some of the nuns loved it, he mentioned, but some of them were terrified. "Nuns are my target audience still," Duane joked -- or maybe he was serious? Block mentioned that the anthology television shows of the 1950s "taught me something about dramatic instruction." He mentioned one particular episode whose program title he can't remember -- it was about a group of people plotting an assassination. At first, you are rooting for them, but at the end it is revealed that it was Lincoln's assassination they were planning, which makes you re-think everything you previously felt. "Your sympathies were inverted in a wonderfully tricky fashion," said Block. The mysterious nature of the show continues to intrigue Block, but not in the same way that it used to. "The fact that it has disappeared from the public consciousness has tempted me to write it." Here's hoping he does.

Duane recalled working with Brett Simon on an adaptation of his novel Severance Package. In a reversal of the cliche, this time it was Duane who wanted to make a lot of changes to his novel and Simon who wanted to be more faithful to the source material. Sadly, the studio's initial enthusiasm mysteriously disappeared and the project fell through. Sigh ... well, I still have my fingers crossed the movie will see the light of the projector soon, as I'd love to see that. Block also mentioned that Hammett's style increasingly moved towards "prose screenplays" because he realized that movies were the future of his income as a writer. Block also shared this wisdom that too many filmmakers and screenwriters don't realize: "When you have good actors, you don't have to have the words do all the work."

Robert Polito and Joan Schenkar, two of Noir's finest and most original scholars, shared some of their great findings. Polito recontextualized Maya Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon as a Noir film, and Joan enlightened us with maps of Patricia Highsmith's literary murders and real-life lovers -- it's chilling how they line up when compared!

"Noir is the spider that sits on top of the world," said Schenkar -- that's one of the best definitions of Noir I've heard.

Author and former Private Eye Writers of America president Jeremiah Healy interviewed Otto Penzler, winner of the Jay and Deen Kogan Award for Literary Excellence. Their conversation covered the beginnings of Penzler's career, from his small apartment in the Bronx in the 1970s when he was a one-man operation, writing receipts, fulfilling orders, editing manuscripts, and shipping the first Mysterious Press books. When Penzler began his limited edition, cloth-bound, signed editions, it was groundbreaking for the mystery field. Of course "literature" and "poetry" had been treated so ceremoniously before, but never crime fiction. Since then, Penzler has continued to give crime writers, and readers, the respect they deserve, both through his Mysterious Press and Bookshop.

The Bookshop is a miracle that couldn't happen today. With only $2050 in his bank account, Penzler found a partner to buy a building behind Carnegie Hall for $177,000. Penzler's contribution to the down payment was $2000 -- the other $50 he kept to celebrate. His idea was that the first floor would be all paperbacks, the upstairs all hardcovers. All the publishers told him that readers didn't buy mysteries in expensive hardcover edition. History proved Penzler right, and his good judgement has kept him at the front of the field for many decades since.

The conversation was truly great, and I could have listened all day and night to Healy and Penzler. Among my favorite parts were when Penzler gave his list of favorite books. Here's what he listed:

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White
Raymond Chandler
4/5s of Hammett ("The Dain Curse is silly.")
Fredric Brown ("The Night of the Jabberwock is so fascinating ... a tour de force.")
Ira Levin's A Kiss Before Dying
Lawrence Block's Matthew Scudder series
Michael Connelly
Rober Crais ("Consistently wonderful.")
Lee Child
Dennis Lehane
James Crumley's The Last Good Kiss ("The best Hardboiled novel.")
Charles McCarry ("The best American Espionage writer.")
"I love too much," Penzler said. "I could go on all day."

As Penzler's list shows, he's a man of great taste, and his publishing record is astonishing. I'm happy he won the award and very pleased that he was able to come out to NoirCon to speak.

And now, some candid shots of the NoirCon crowd from throughout the day.

"Cruel Poetry" by Vicki Hendricks (Seprent's Tail, 2007)

Vicki Hendricks’ earlier novels excelled at capturing single protagonists caught in insatiable and increasingly tightening vices. The protagonists of Miami Purity, Iguana Love, Voluntary Madness and Sky Blues all wanted a euphoric kick to jumpstart their dull lives—and they got it tenfold. With open arms, they welcomed sex, thrills, danger, and murder. Hendricks’ fifth novel, the Edgar-nominated Cruel Poetry, stands amongst her most sophisticated and complex works to date. Hendricks has expanded her view to encompass three narrators whose lives, desires, and crimes are intertwined into a thick knot of noir that can’t be undone.

Renata is what she calls a “pleasure enabler.” Residing in the Tropic Moons Hotel on Miami Beach, Renata lives on a steady stream of sex. Some are lovers, some are clients. It seems to make little difference to Renata. Among her clients is Richard, a married poetry professor whose addiction to Renata is jeopardizing his family and career. Next door to Renata is Julie, a young aspiring writer who listens through the wall and writes about what she hears. She, too, develops an obsession with Renata, and will do anything to protect her, even murder. Soon this trio finds themselves dodging cops, private eyes, drug dealers, jealous lovers, and even hungry, man-eating gators.

The plot set-up may sound typical, but once the story is in motion, Hendricks steps away from the beaten path and goes into some very unusual directions. It would be criminal to spoil the twists that Hendricks has in store for readers, but those are even hardly the best parts of the book. As the title indicates, there’s a larger effect at work in Cruel Poetry (a title which, by the way, would befit any of Hendricks’ other novels). The real mystery is how long will they last before their decadence lead them to irreversible self-destruction. It’s not the path that’s so gripping as the people on the path. Hendricks has crafted her richest cast yet, and by expanding the narrative to include three narrators and about a half-dozen strong supporting characters she’s also created her most engrossing and dramatic narrative.

Renata is anything but your ordinary femme fatale. (In fact, I wouldn’t apply this tag to her at all, as she turns out to be the least deadly of the bunch.) Hendricks imbues Renata with an unusual and compelling psychological make-up. Unlike her many companions, Renata does not live for pleasure: she lives to give pleasure. The absence of this key drive (which was crucial to so many of Hendricks’ previous books) takes the character in many surprising directions, and shows how Hendricks continues to push the traditions of noir into new territories and puts her distinctive mark on the genre.

From the very start of Cruel Poetry, Renata tells both Julie and Richard, “I’m a bad influence. I don’t love anybody.” Throughout the novel, she repeats this sentiment in any number of variations: “I’m not worth it” and “I’ll hurt you. I don’t know how to love anybody, any one person.” Renata is graced with an uncanny self-knowledge that reminds of Gloria Grahame. In movies like The Big Heat and Human Desire, Gloria stands alone in her understanding of how the world works, the path she is on, and how badly she will probably end up. Julie and Richard suffer from a classic case of “noir blindness,” in which the truth is right in front of them the whole time, not that they care to pay attention to it. As Rival Schools sing in their song “Shot After Shot,” “Love doesn't know anything / Only believes when it believes / Our thoughts don't know anything.” Julie and Richard’s quest for love leads to oblivion and obliteration. They want control not companionship, and their fantasies are defined by prisons rather than pleasures. They each only see themselves and Renata: there is nothing beyond the two of them. (This should be a clear indication that their dreams could never be realized. Chalk it up again to “noir blindness” that this lack of any rational future doesn’t ring any warning bells for anyone except for Renata.)

There’s something tragic about Renata’s honesty—she never deceives anybody, and yet nearly every character in the book tries to manipulate her in one way or another: through love, sex, murder, blackmail, promises of grandeur that could never be fulfilled. This makes Renata’s devotion to her “intimates” all the more sincere and, in a way, pathological. In a world as corrupt and duplicitous as noir, Renata is a rare symbol of virtue, a perfect embodiment of that contradictory “Miami Purity” (to allude to Hendricks’ earlier novel).

Julie and Richard—along with their predecessors in Miami Purity, Iguana Love and Sky Blues—are dreamers. They may also be delusional, self-centered, and unrealistic. Ok, yes, they’re all of those things, but they’re also driven by very normal desires of fulfillment, excitement, and companionship (sometimes love, sometimes just sex). Renata, on the other hand, is not a dreamer. She lives permanently in the now. Her talent for pleasure can be partially explained by this focused concentration on each individual moment, living it to the fullest without fear of consequence. She’s a pragmatist, and therefore the only one of her bunch capable of dealing with the problems that they put forth upon her. A dead body? She knows what to do. Pissed off drug dealers wanting more money? No problem. No money to give them? Even less of a problem. It’s no wonder that Julie and Richard are dependent on Renata. Though they both long to take her away and care for her like a lost child, more often than not they are the ones in need of Renata’s parenting. And as someone professionally skilled in both comfort and discipline, Renata can play the parts of both mother and father.

Renata’s absence of dreams, however, is a double-edged sword There’s a nihilistic impulse to her actions, an admission that her choices are ultimately meaningless and that tomorrow isn’t worth living for—only today is. We also see this same desire for oblivion in the skydiving of Sky Blues and the scuba diving of Iguana Love. In those previous books, the characters achieved it through complete sublimation into sensation—the ripping wind of a freefall, the liquid touch of the water. Cruel Poetry is Hendricks’ most bodily narrative yet. She’s never shied away from eroticism in her work, but in Cruel Poetry there’s something unusually intense about physical contact, even when they have their clothes on. (Renata’s are usually off, but Julie is rather reluctant to act on her feelings and jump out of her pants.)

Hendricks has been compared with James M. Cain, particularly his novel The Postman Always Rings Twice with its doomed trajectory from desire to death. At first glance, Renata’s declaration, “We’ll figure something out. We’re together in this,” reminds of the iconic line from Double Indemnity: “Straight down the line.” A closer examination, however, shows the dialogue to be quite different. Hendricks is able to innovatively rework noir traditions into something very much her own. There’s something selfish and self-destructive about the lovers of Double Indemnity: if one is going down, so is the other. On the contrary, there is something decidedly selfless about Renata. She’s right that she doesn’t love anyone, but she’s one of the most faithful and giving characters I’ve encountered in noir. She doesn’t bring down those around her; she holds them up while they try to drag her down. Her strength, acumen, and insight into human weakness (even her own), is to be admired. With Renata, Hendricks has crafted an original and haunting character that defies stereotype and breaks the mould.

Cruel Poetry unfolds in a rapturous haze of pleasure and paranoia. This sordid Miami noir is infectious, delirious, and totally gripping.

"Sky Blues" by Vicki Hendricks (Minotaur, 2002)

Vicki Hendricks' novels are best expressed as the counterpoint between Florida’s wildlife and Florida’s wild life. Sky Blues, her fourth novel, continues to explore some of the recurring motifs that distinguished her earlier novels: the exoticism of nature and the euphoria of extreme sports (Iguana Love), lovers on the run (Voluntary Madness), and characters with a near-nihilistic sexual appetite (Miami Purity). Hendricks’ novels are as recognizable for their themes as they are for her style, which is deeply invested in her characters’ foxtrot of ecstasy and paranoia. She intuitively captures their increasing dependence on sensation and rapture, and its overwhelming and all-consuming effect on their lives. They walk a doomed path from the start, but Hendricks fills it with thrilling distractions and exciting detours. As Destiny Donne, the protagonist of Sky Blues, says, “It’s the fear of death that makes life so acute—charged and meaningful. It’s not a comfortable feeling, but I want to keep it.” For Hendricks’ characters, death (metaphoric or literal) is inevitable, but they have a hell of a time living it up along the way.

Destiny Donne is a vet in Pahokee, Florida for the local nature preserve. She administers treatment to lions and giraffes but, like the animals she oversees, she is caged off from the outside world. Life is boring, the locals are dull, and the men aren’t attractive. And then skydiving instructor Tom Jenks walked through her office door with a lion cub under his arm. A handsome man and an injured animal—the two things she’s always wanted. “This guy’s a six-foot blond in a long-sleeved cotton shirt and nice soft-fitting jeans. He’s got a chiseled face, a jaw so smooth, I want to stroke it.”

For the moment, at least, Destiny isn’t so deluded about who her charmer is. Her initial observation is, “A shame. So drop-dead gorgeous and a goddamned animal abuser.” On their first date, she remarks, “No matter how corny or superficial the action, just the physical presence of his walking behind me gives me pleasure I haven’t much allowed myself. It’s a short road from there to trouble. I feel it.” From the start, Destiny recognizes where their relationship is headed and the violence and manipulation that Tom is capable of—so why does she stick around to the bitter, disastrous end? It’s a rhetorical question that runs throughout the history of noir: how and why does a character devise their own downfall? What forces lead Destiny from a droll existence as a vet to someone who is diving out of airplanes, dodging murder attempts from a jealous ex-wife, and making her own plans for cold-blooded murder—all in the name of a blond stud who fulfills her sexual appetite and turns her simple life into a treacherous train wreck? Walking this path alongside Destiny is the reader’s prerogative, and making it believable and compelling is the author’s responsibility.

It comes no surprise that Hendricks’ delivers credible, sympathetic noir tragedy in spades with Sky Blues. She nails the inner-life of Destiny, the exponential cravings for sex and danger that obscure her judgment and threatens her life while, at the same time, giving it more meaning than she’s ever known before. Much like the scuba diving in Iguana Love, Hendricks renders the skydiving sequence in such precise mechanical detail and explicit sensation of which only a veteran of the sport would be capable. If you’ve any doubt of this first-hand experience, just turn to the back flap of the dust jacket and view Hendricks’ photo, freefalling and screaming in delight at the camera. Her bio reveals that she has “over 450 dives to her credit.”

Like the scuba diving in Iguana Love, skydiving in Sky Blues offers more than just sport for the characters. It also offers a very regulated community, at once insular but also accepting. “They’re an extreme mixture of ages and types….Anyone can fit in here.” Later, Destiny notes that, “I’ve noticed how unusually nice and considerate skydivers are, and I think it’s because they’re always prepared to die. When life is perceived as short, pettiness is useless and unnecessary. Everybody is connected in spirit.” Skydiving is also a microcosm for the cycle of life and death; but, unlike her real life, skydiving is defined by strict rules, procedures, and natural law. Even when Destiny thinks Tom’s ex-wife is trying to kill her, she can still remark, “Gravity is much more predictable than this woman I’ve never met. I feel safe at the DZ.” Skydiving offers a safe, predictable way to experience life and death: if she follows the protocol, nothing bad will happen. Both diving and sex are described by contrasting purely physical sensation with nihilism. Destiny compares her first sexual encounter with Tom to electricity going through her brain, while her first dive is described as, “It’s a clean, bright blankness, a feeling I never imagined, maybe like death.”

It’s a credit to Hendricks’ clarity as a writer that she can take noir to such a philosophical level without dragging down the pace or compromising the emotional resonance of the characters. Destiny is like many of Hendricks’ cursed protagonists: they all want very normal things, but are incapable of attaining them in any normal fashion. That’s what makes them so compelling, so sympathetic, and so tragic. As Destiny reveals, “I’ve never lived so free of loneliness—with a love of life I never knew existed, despite the threats. I just have to keep my discipline.” For Destiny—just as for Sherri (Miami Purity), Ramona (Iguana Love) and the love triangle of Renata-Jules-and-Richard (Cruel Poetry)—desperation carries her to the extremities of living. And we can thank Hendricks for taking us along for the wild ride.

Sky Blues is another neo-noir winner from Vicki Hendricks. It is available as an eBook from Top Suspense Group.

"Iguana Love" by Vicki Hendricks (Serpent's Tail, 1999)

After making her stunning debut with Miami Purity, Vicki Hendricks returned with another jolt of sultry Miami neo-noir, Iguana Love. Originally published by Serpent’s Tail in 1999, Iguana Love follows Ramona Romano, a part-time nurse fed up with her passionless, dead-end marriage and who decides to follow her desires. She kicks her husband out, takes up scuba diving, and begins a series of love affairs. As often happens in the noir universe, Ramona’s drive for self-control soon spins her life completely beyond her control, and she becomes increasingly consumed by sex, danger, and bad, bad men.

Noir protagonists stand on the precipice of self-knowledge. They are only partially aware of what they are doing, only semi-conscious of their self-destruction. Noir blindness is like an element right out of Greek Tragedy: it’s something the characters can’t help but do to themselves. Ramona doesn’t know how right she is when she says to her husband at the start of the novel, “I’m the problem…It’s all inside of me.” Much of Iguana Love is structured around Ramona actualizing what is “inside” of her, and making those proverbial dreams come true. She exchanges a boring sex life with Gary for an increasingly complicated power struggle between four hunks of sea-diving beefcake: Dennis, her sweet natured diving partner; Rory, her personal trainer; and her two diving instructors, Charlie and Enzo. Dennis, Rory, and Charlie are more than willing to give Ramona what she wants. Only Enzo plays hard to get: he stands her up; leaves violent, drunken, jealous phone messages; and teases without satisfying her. Naturally, Enzo is the only object of her desire.

Hendricks has a gift for thoroughly describing physical details without falling into the trap of tedious exposition. Her phrases have the precision of a technical drawing, the redolence of a photograph, and an emotion connection that can come only from experience. Hendricks lives in Florida and is an experienced diver, and her first-hand knowledge shines through in Iguana Love. She writes about shopping for diving paraphernalia with an addict’s anticipation and exuberance; and diving expeditions are as sensual as they are suspenseful, fully aware as she is about the dangers and pleasures of the sport. The particularities of Florida’s environment and activities are distinguishing, recurring facets of Hendricks novels and stories. There’s an unusually unerring and evocative sense of place to her work, an authenticity that only adds to the reader’s engagement and identification with the narrative.

Despite what you might think on first glance, Iguana Love isn’t such an obvious or salacious title. The character of the iguana plays a haunting role in the novel. One of Ramona’s friends once had an iguana that would perch on her owner’s shoulders like a mink. When one serendipitously falls into Ramona’s life, she decides to capture it and tame it. Their relationship is fraught with violence, trepidation, obsession and neglect. Animals have a special, privileged, and meaningful place in Hendricks’ world. Their significance is at once literal and metaphoric: they’re objects of repressed affections for characters that have no other outlets, as well as symbols of the natural world, of danger, instinct and sensuality.

Towards the end of Iguana Love, narrator Ramona Romano reflects that, “Life was fucked. Love was fucked.” She could have very easily made that same observation at the start of the novel, but coming at the end of her long adventure it means something different. She’s had so many opportunities to take different paths along the way. “I thought, fuck, if I did have a dick, maybe I wouldn’t be where I was right now. I could choose my own kind of trouble.” Would things have turned out better if she had taken an alternate route, made different choices? As a reminder of the prescience she showed at the start of the novel, Ramona ultimately decides: “My life was completely fucked and there wasn’t anything I could do about it by then.” The true noir protagonist never has any real choice—circumstance, compulsion, and character decides everything for them. Call it fate or call it luck—who knows, maybe it is a little bit of both. Either way, like many noir protagonists before her, Ramona must fight a battle on two fronts: against the world around her, and the world inside her.

Iguana Love has a lot to offer readers. There’s the thrill and adventure of underwater exploration; the sympathetic but doomed ambitions of a desperate protagonist; a great cast of supporting characters; erotic scenes that should make any reader blush but still manage to show creative restraint (as well as a refreshing sense of humor); and an action-packed finale in the open waters of the Bahamas. Iguana Love is real deal neo-noir at its innovative and original best.

Iguana Love is available as an ebook from Top Suspense Group. Be sure to visit Vicki Hendricks’ blog to keep up-to-date with her projects.

Here are some of my favorite quotes from the novel:

“It was obvious that even the simplest bond produced an injury.”

“Rules were fucked.”

“I knew what she was feeling, wanting to be free and not wanting to.”

“Something in me didn’t care, and my brain couldn’t change it.”

“I tried to give up all my wild notions, but it didn’t work. I had seawater on the brain. Divers to explore. Enzo. Flowing freedom. Without a lobotomy, I couldn’t change.”

"Florida Gothic Stories" by Vicki Hendricks (Kitsune Books, 2010)

No one does noir like Vicki Hendricks. She writes about Florida like Daniel Woodrell writes about the Ozarks. And like Woodrell, she’s practically created her own noir sub-genre, deeply rooted in the cultural history and environmental specificities of her locations. Florida’s flora, fauna, and sport, however, are more than just colorful backdrops. Hendricks repeatedly uses animals (iguanas, dolphins, gators) and nature (ocean, swamps, jungle) as metaphoric counterpoints to her characters, their desires, and their dilemmas. The Florida habitat is an organic place for Hendricks to locate recurring themes such as sex and danger, instinct and adaptation, purity and corruption. Not surprisingly, these are also some of the dominant themes of noir.

Florida Gothic Stories collects 11 of Hendricks’ stories, and includes an Introduction by Megan Abbott and an Afterward by Michael Connelly. Hendricks opens with a bold and gutsy choice, “Stormy, Mon Amour,” that throws the reader headfirst and without warning into Hendricks’ dominion. The very first paragraph describes the birth of a child that was the result of a human and dolphin mating. Like I imagine one must do with sky diving, you just have to hold your breath and jump. And in the case of “Stormy, Mon Amour,” you’ll be glad you did. The story is about the forbidden love affair between a woman fed up with her scummy boyfriend and the dolphin she idealizes. But when you get right down to it, the relationship isn’t so different from any of the doomed romances from classic noir. Instead of the impetuous male falling for the femme fatale, it’s a desperate woman falling for the "dolphin fatale."

Hendricks has a gift for writing about the extremities of human desire in heartbreakingly sympathetic and understandable terms. However bizarre the stories may at first seem, the characters' decisions are motivated by very normal emotions. “Stormy, Mon Amour” is not about shock value or grotesquerie; instead, it's about a lonely dreamer who longs for freedom, love, and to take control of her life. Those are feelings that any of us can relate to.

Hendricks’ characters are on the fringe of society, but they dream of stability and affection—and sometimes just good sex. In pursuit of these dreams, however, they often go to such great lengths that they let fantasy overtake reality. Impulsive and illogical, their own desires are the designs for their downfall. In “Boozanne, Lemme Be,” a burglar sacrifices his steady existence living in unoccupied houses for the love of a reckless woman he meets at a bar. Alcoholic, obese, and domineering, “Boozanne” is anything but the stereotype of an ideal lover; but in her, Hendricks locates an intense physicality and lack of inhibitions that complements the burglar’s modesty. And therein lies his undoing: he finds exactly what he was looking for, only to realize that it’s not good for him (to say the least). Such irony befalls many of the characters in Florida Gothic Stories.

One of Hendricks’ recurring themes is the danger of turning a fantasy into reality. Two quotes from “Stormy, Mon Amour” best exemplify this:

“It’s all the life I need.”

“I have no idea how much muscle it’ll take. But I have no choice. I tell myself I can do it. I will do it. It’s right.”

This conflict plays out in a number of stories. In “M-F Dog,” a clever story with a comic twist, a waiter whose love life is as abysmal as his writing career buys a dog in hopes of improving his luck with the ladies. In “Cold-Blooded Lovers,” an adjunct professor fed up with his wife thinks he has found the perfect mate in his pet iguana; and just like Emil Jannings in Josef Von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel, he goes beyond reason in pursuit of an impossible relationship. And in “The Big O” – perhaps the best story in the collection – a runaway mother fleeing an abusive relationship lays low in a trailer park in hopes starting over; despite her every effort, she incessantly finds herself ensnared in yet another hopeless situation. “The Big O” best exemplifies Hendricks skill for devastating empathy and compulsively compelling characters. It’s impossible not to follow her protagonist every doomed step of the way.

There’s something to enjoy and admire in each of the tales in Florida Gothic Stories. “ReBecca” is a quick-witted and surprising story of twin sisters joined at the head, one of whom is head-over-heels in love with a pet store clerk but too timid to act, and the other who is brash enough to make the first move but who lacks an object for her affection. And the closing story, “Sweet Dreams,” is a tragedy with echoes of James M. Cain about two elderly women who plot to kill a hobo in hopes of collecting the insurance money. It’s a smart and fond homage to Double Indemnity, but there’s nothing cute about the protagonists’ misfortune.

Noir is about failure: learning to live with it, that is, if one is lucky enough to first live through it. Hendricks’ protagonists go through a lot of hell—much of it self-inflicted—but they’re tough and determined. And dreamers though they may be, they don’t give up on those dreams very easily.

Florida Gothic Stories is available in print from Kitsune Books, or as an eBook from Top Suspense Group.

Here are some of my favorite quotes from the stories:

“Our lives would be a fantasy come true, if we didn’t have to beware of the rest of the world.” (“Stormy, Mon Amour”)

“I thought I’d seen everything and survived it – and I was fucking sick of it.” (“Must Bite!”)

“Life is cruel, babycakes – survival of the fittest….You gotta protect yourself – be cruel first.” (“Gators”)

“I knew her life without having to live it, casual cruelty and then the injury that changed her whole future. I could land in her place easy, trapped with a kid, no job, and a bastard of a husband that thought he was God.” (“Gators”)

“Hell, if it was my trash, I’d have just left it there too. That’s the way I was, always dragging my ass, till teeth were in it. I couldn’t say shit about anybody else. I fit right in.” (“The Big O”)

“I didn’t create the evil in the world, just one action in a lifetime of it.” (“Sinny and the Prince”)

"Miami Purity" by Vicki Hendricks (Busted Flush Press, 2007)

A first line says a lot about a novel. It can pull you into the story, introduce you to a character, and give you insight into the writer. The first line of Vicki Hendricks’ Miami Purity is one of those phrases that does all three, and so much more. “Hank was drunk and he slugged me – it wasn’t the first time – and I picked up the radio and caught him across the forehead with it.” From first word to last, Miami Purity is noir without mercy. Hendricks captures the throbbing emotions of her characters: angry, desperate, depraved, sleazy, passionate, and uncontrolled, they are like blood vessels ready to burst. Their vigor for life threatens their very existence, and like two drunken, sweaty dancers in a darkened bar, they rub right up against the edge of destruction, at once afraid of pushing through to the other side and unable to think of anything else.

The first line introduces Sherri Parlay as a woman who has not only taken a few hits in her time, but also dealt a few blows herself. One of those blows, in fact, sends Hank to the morgue and Sherri into an alcohol-infused daze. “I went on drinking and missing that son of a bitch like hell… He had a terrible mean streak, but we were good together – specially when we got our clothes off.” No one ever said love was easy, and Miami Purity never lets its characters forget it. Sobered up, Sherri takes a job at Miami Purity Dry Cleaners, owned by the hard-drinking, hard-boiled Brenda. Almost immediately, her life gets back on track, but not the track that Sherri intended. Instead, she’s fallen – hard – for Brenda’s son, Payne, and finds herself enmeshed in a perverse, Oepidal conflict that would knock Freud for a loop.

Originally published by Pantheon in 1995, Miami Purity was re-released in 2007 by Busted Flush Press with an introductory “poem” by Ken Bruen, who nails the book on the nose by dubbing it, “as black as the soul of a priest with malevolence on his mind, hollow prayers on his beads.” And the always-insightful Megan Abbott follows up the novel with an Afterword that traces Miami Purity’s hide-and-go-seek game with James Cain’s iconic The Postman Always Rings Twice. “We can savor Hendricks’ manipulation of noir conventions, bringing forward many of the genre’s compulsions, smashing some and recasting others, all with abandon.” With such clearly defined generic archetypes, there’s no safe strategy for either avoiding or embracing them – in fact, outright avoiding seems absolutely impossible. What Vicki Hendricks proves with Miami Purity is that these models, some of which were cast over eighty years ago, are far from dead. Nor are they hegemonic or unalterable. Self-sufficient, sexually assertive women are no longer limited to being a femme fatale, nor are men resigned to being their victims; instead, with the homme fatale on the loose, deadly is the male.

You can purchase a copy of Miami Purity directly from Busted Flush Press by visiting their website HERE, or drop by your local independent bookseller.

Still wanting more? Here are a few choice quotes from the book.

“Even feeling lousy I enjoyed watching those rosy bags of clothes sway and roll their way around the bend towards me. It was like a sideways Ferris wheel. It started quick, got up speed, and then jerked to a stop. Round and round in whatever direction the button pusher made it go. Like my life, I thought. I start to think I’m getting somewhere but find out I’m really on the same old flat track going round.”

“She put a hand on my upper arm. I think she meant it to be firm and warm, but her nails were long and felt a little like claws.”

“We can’t make it good. There’s no good. It was all in my imagination.”

“I look back out the window through streaks of wet grime. The sky is still gray, and water drips off the icy gutter. Let that red sun shine down on Miami, like always, and make the blue eyes sparkle with promises for somebody else. Ain’t no sunshine in Baltimore. The sky’s solid and cold, like a heart that’s stopped.”