Forum at Society Hill Playhouse sheds light on noir

Here's an invitation you can slip into your trench-coat pocket, right next to the flask of bourbon and the pack of Camels: Take a few days out for "a helluva good time looking into the bottomless, downward void that is Noir."

Fun? If you're a fan of film noir and its cousin, noir literature, you bet it is.

"It's a genre that is addictive," said Deen Kogan, who issued the invite with fellow fan Lou Boxer.

Kogan, cofounder and director of the Society Hill Playhouse, and Boxer, a Philadelphia-area physician, have teamed up again to organize NoirCon 2010, a gathering of some of the dark genre's brightest lights.

The four-day conference runs through Sunday at the playhouse.

Novelist and screenwriter George Pelecanos, whose TV writing credits include HBO's The Wire, Treme, and The Pacific, is coming for the conference, in part to honor Philadelphia noir writer David Goodis, who died in 1967.

"He's largely forgotten, except for the movies that were made from his books," Pelecanos said by phone from his home in Maryland.

Goodis' books include Dark Passage (1946), made into a movie in 1947 starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, and The Burglar (1953), filmed in 1957 with Dan Duryea and Jayne Mansfield.

"I feel like Goodis is one of the guys who truly earned the title of noir writer," Pelecanos said. "There's no artifice there. His books are dark. The Burglar is just harrowing because you know that this guy is going all the way [with his characters]. He doesn't know any other way to write."

"Noir is a legitimate art form," Pelecanos continued. "It's an American art form, like jazz, and because it's American, it's really hard for other cultures to create or approximate it."

Pelecanos will discuss Goodis' work at a session Friday afternoon and may read from Goodis' books.

What makes a noir writer? It's shadowy, but playwright Joan Schenkar, biographer of Patricia Highsmith (The Talented Miss Highsmith), provided a suitably atmospheric description in a phone interview from her home in New York.

The noir author is "someone who is compelled to walk always on the dark side of the street, looking for answers that are not there to questions that are barely formulable, articulating the very interesting American obsession with murder and with what murder does for you."

Schenkar will give the forum's keynote address at the non-noir time of 9:15 Saturday morning. She plans to talk about "Patricia Highsmith and books and the whole idea that America really has a noir culture."

Highsmith, author of The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), "is not called noir, but she is noir through and through," Schenkar said.

Noir flourished during the middle of the 20th century, but the genre has deep roots, say those who love it.

The works of Edgar Allan Poe, who spent part of his writing career in Philadelphia in the early 19th century, have "the classic noir markers," Schenkar said. "Claustrophobia, a preference for violence over sex, a feeling of being stalked."

Some have even suggested that noir goes back as far as Shakespeare, or maybe the Bible, said Edgar Award-winning novelist Megan Abbott, because noir is about "primal internal drives" such as lust and revenge. Noir "speaks to the things we don't want to reckon about ourselves," said Abbott, who will discuss a revisionist history of noir on a panel at the forum Saturday afternoon.

Noir bears some resemblance to the hard-boiled crime fiction of Raymond Chandler, but they aren't the same, Abbott said in a phone conversation from her home in New York.

"In the classic hard-boiled novels, like those of Chandler, there's a kind of order restored at the end. There's a detective we can cling to," said Abbott, who wrote a doctoral dissertation at New York University on hard-boiled fiction and film noir.

"In noir, the end is dark and nihilistic. We're all doomed."

Thursday through Sunday at the Society Hill Playhouse, 507 S. Eighth St.

Admission: $200 entire event, $100 daily.

Information: 215-923-0211; www.noircon.info EndText