NoirCon 2012 will be taking Philadelphia by storm on November 8th – 11th, 2012 with such special guests as Lawrence Block, Otto Penzler, Robert Olen Butler, and Charles Benoit, in addition to some of the best writers working today.
FOG!‘s own Andrez Bergen, who has also written The Tobacco Stained Mountain Goat and 100 Years of Vicissitude, has contributed a very cool item to to benefit Project H.O.M.E, a charity dedicated to helping the homeless.
Andrez has provided a $ 100 DONATION CHALLENGE TO NAME AND DESCRIBE A SUPPORTING CHARACTER IN THE NOVEL THE MERCURY DRINKERS – man/woman, personality, idiosyncrasies, dress-sense, you name it! Anything goes! That’s right, get immortalized and help the homeless all in one fell swoop!
This novel is called The Mercury Drinkers. It’s shaping up to be a mystery/crime/procedural in the vein of Chandler/Hammett, obviously placed in an “alien” landscape as far as possible from 1930s/40s San Francisco or Los Angeles. Having lived in Tokyo since 2001, I have a fairly good grasp of the place and its people – although the narrator is an Australian journalist, who stumbles across the controversy (and resultant cover-up) that relates to the industrial mercury poisoning of a Japanese fishing village in the 1950s and ’60s. This, in itself, is based on the events that happened in Minamata in Japan, though of course from a fictionalized standpoint in the novel – which will be a dialogue-based noir/hardboiled story, complete with yakuza, geisha, guns, and the influences of directors like Akira Kurosawa, Seijun Suzuki, and Shunya Itō.
For more details of NoirCon, visit their official site and if you haven’t yet, check out Andrez’s new book, 100 Years of Vicissitude, will be available this fall.
