Noir at the Bar, Tuesday 7/27 at 7PM

A new night out is starting to catch on in crime fiction circles. Noir At The Bar, an evening of drinks and readings by some of the darkest authors, started in Philadelphia with alums like Dennis Tafoya and Duane Swierczynski and moved to St. Louis with the likes of Ice Harvest author Scott Phillips. Now it’s time to move the party to the live music capitol of the world with three great authors and do it Austin style.

Kicking off the night will be Harry Hunsicker, sort of a Jekyll and Hyde of the hard-boiled set. His critically acclaimed series of Dallas based mysteries feature stand-up PI Lee Henry Oswald (he prefers Hank). While edgy and tough, Hank doesn’t stray too far from Chandler’s tarnished knight. However his short noir stories have the grease and grit of Texas outlaw country music and are sometimes twisted into something unholy. When his Murdaland Volume Two story, “Vivian and Bobby Ray” can’t get more deranged, he hits you with the final sentence.

Jesse Sublett is our local boy made good by writing about the bad. As bass player for one of the first Austin new wave bands, The Skunks, he used his background in a series of books featuring Martin Fender, a musician that survives between gigs as a skip tracer. His darkest book happens to be his memoir, Never The Same Again, that covers growing up in Central Texas, the rock n’ roll life, being a suspect in his girlfriend’s murder, and facing a rare form of cancer. He writes in a matter-of-fact, hard-boiled manner that conveys emotion and avoids the self-indulgence of most memoirs.

Our headliner, Tony O’Neil writes with a fierce don’t-give-a-damn attitude that actually has a lot of craft to it. His latest book, Sick City, is a love/hate valentine to Hollywood, the one that people actually live in. It follows two junkies that hook up in rehab and try to sell a canister of film with Sharon Tate in an orgy with several other celebs. These are our heroes and they take you head first into a society of Hollywood dregs that was eventually paved over and gentrified by the hypocritical and trendy whitewash of young money. Sick City is like taking an early Ramones album and turning it into a buddy story.

So come to the Continental Club Gallery (1315 S. Congress) at 7PM on July 27th. Tony and Jesse will be playing some of their music as well as well as reading and if you can’t get enough dark thrills, Harry will be at Opal Divine’s the next day at 7PM for our Hard Word book club discussion of Still River. Come meet great authors, listen to groovy tunes, hear about, sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll noir style, and maybe even start a new Austin happening.

— Scott Montgomery