Showtime!

I have been leaving a trail of Hillbilly Noir breadcrumbs hoping to whet your appetite for more.

The Shadowy Figure that is Maurice Tani.

I thoroughly enjoyed the opening night of the Maurice Tani show at Café Royale: Postcards from 77 El Deora.

I have always been a fan of the old noir detective genre, and have collected some vintage pulp for their cover art. My favorite collection of pulp fiction covers has to be run of covers for the Travis McGee novels, books by John D. MacDonald.

Someone has pulled together an impressive Flickr set of John D. MacDonald book covers—click on over and you'll see what I mean.

In my kitchen I have some old Mike Hammer paperbacks, on display for nothing if for their wonderfully gritty and over the top titles, such as Attack of the Eager Nymphs or Nice Fillies Finish Last.

Tani captures the spirit of the pulp fiction novel beautifully, both is artwork and words, and it was a joy to experience the nearly entire collection at Café Royale. If you have an evening to spare, need to work in an Internet café, need an excuse to gather some friends for a beer and conversation, I heartily recommend gathering at Post at Leavenworth while the show is still on.

Better yet, bring a pulp novel to enjoy while you're there.

If you can't make it to the show, you can experience some of the fun on the 77 site and the page of past posters.

And for more musical "Oblique Americana," catch their next show this Saturday, October 13 at the Lost 23 Club in Brisbane. Good venue with easy parking too.

Consider this poster for the first show way back when. Tani knew what he was getting into. I couldn't wait to go along for the ride.


The poor sap just laid there as the warm blood pooled up around him like sweet raspberry syrup. Gerald Lloyd Kookson III looked up at her one last time before his eyes rolled back in his head and he bid this cruel world a bitter farewell. She didn't notice. Her attention was on the real sucker in the room. The one holding the smoking revolver and the weighty realization that he had just been had -and this was only the beginning.... She pulled the crumpled scrap of bloody paper from her dead husband's clenched fist and handed it to me. It was an address in Palm Springs. If there was a bad part of that town, I knew this had to be it...

77 El Deora.


And, of course, all credit for words and artwork to Maurice Tani, 77 El Deora.