Noir Con or bust

As if I don’t have enough going on crime fiction-wise at the moment, with my debut novel Ghost Money and the upcoming launch of Crime Factory’s all Australian crime antho, Hard Labour, I’ll be attending Noir Con in the city of brotherly love, Philadelphia, in early November.

Noir Con is a biennial three day festival of noir crime writing and culture. Philadelphia is a fitting host city, being the birth place of the influential noir writer David Goodis, author of Dark Passage, Street of No Return and Shoot the Piano Player, amongst many other novels.

The best way to get a feel for Noir Con is to check out the program, which you can find here along with an interview with the mastermind behind the event, Lou Boxer.

Among the writers attending I’m keen to see are Megan Abbott, Vicki Hendricks, Lawrence Block and Wallace Stroby. I’m also looking forward to checking out the authors I haven’t heard of, as well as meeting some of the people I’ve been communicating with for a while now on social media.

In the lead up to Noir Con I’ll be spending a week and a half in New York, a city I have never been too but always wanted to see.

I am going to be like the proverbial pig in shit.

There’ll also be a little election going on while I’ll be there. I looking forward to being in the US to see Obama kick Romney’s Presidential ambitions back into the last decade.

Anyway, as part of my preparations for the trip, it occurred to me it would be a great idea to feature some of the US writers I like on this site, particularly writers from around the New York area, where I’ll be visiting.

It’s a way of giving regular Pulp Curry readers a little taste of the crime writing scene in the US.

So, I asked a group of people whose work I dig whether they would be prepared to write me something to post on Pulp Curry. So far all of them have said yes. Most of the people I’ve asked, in fact probably all of them, aren’t well known in Australia crime fiction circles. But they are all people whose work I like and respect and who doing interesting things.

The first of these posts will appear next week.