STAYING IN OUT OF THE RAIN
No extra tours set for this month, but if you want to hear Don offer a few opinions on noir and hard-boiled fiction while staying dry at the same time, come on down to the Mechanics Institute in Post Street on January 24th for “San Francisco Noir: Past to Present.” Peter Maravelis, editor of the Akashic Press anthologies San Francisco Noir and the upcoming San Francisco Noir 2: The Classics, will moderate a discussion featuring Peter Plate, Craig Clevenger, Eddie “The Czar of Noir” Muller, Don and Joe Gores — not a bad line-up, so let’s hope no one gets jumped and blackjacked by a flu bug before the date. Free to Institute members, $10 for the general public.
“KNIVES IN THE DARK”
Don got invited to sit in on the Mechanics Institute noir fest because Maravelis decided to reprint his neo-Black Mask story “Knives in the Dark” from the Dennis McMillan anthology Measures of Poison in San Francisco Noir: The Classics — good news for anyone who wants to read that one and didn’t want to shell out the original $30 cover price on the trade edition (much less the tags being asked on the out-of-print market these days). Don will read a couple of scenes from that story, concentrating on Frisco settings — after the panel he’ll take anyone who is interested a block over from the Mechanics Institute to show them the location of the bootlegger tunnels that feature at the end of the story.
WHILE OVER IN FRANCE
Fabrice Tortey is taking pre-orders on the new critical and biographical anthology about Robert E. Howard, Echoes de Cimmérie — of course, it would help if you read French to get the full value out of the text, but Howard completists will want it regardless, and there are lots of photos and illustrations lined up for the English-only types. Don provided a ruminative essay on Howard at one hundred years, “The Feast Is Over” — now “La Fęte est finie” — to intro the section of new criticism devoted to the creator of Conan.
