Happens to me every time a semi-big event looms on the horizon, such as the Noir at the Bar gig held in downtown Nacogdoches, Texas last weekend.

Like the slow, cranking climb up the first steep incline of a rollercoaster, the tension and anticipation build in the days before showtime, tightening the gut and the brainpan as the cars get pulled up, up, up towards the summit, stretching the seconds into the endless and elongated drip, drip, drip of the fabled Chinese water torture.

You dread leaving home but can’t wait to arrive. You’re glad to get there but immediately want to channel Groucho — “Hello, I must be going.”  You pray to the ancient gods of your storytelling ancestors that you don’t bollix the reading of your own words, that your tongue has enough silver to serve up your printed jewels with some rhythm and grace, with a pause or three for effect and in the calm, clear voice of a preacher, a card cheat, a flim-flam man or an axe murderer.

Because you’re selling something you hope the audience and your fellow authors will buy — your words, your stories, a gaudy and gussied up version of yourself and the blood-spattered passage you’ve chosen to share with them. In my case, the showmanship comes in the form of your ol’ pal, Honest Jim, friend of the cowboy noir for the cartel era aficionado — and his cruder, drunker and less-medicated cousin, the Reverend Jim, braying the gospel of hard-boiled crime thriller goodness found in the Gospel of Ed Earl Burch.

Ah, that rascal, Ed Earl. Nobody’s angel but nobody’s fool, he’s the battered but dogged main character of all five of my hard-boiled crime thrillers, a defrocked Dallas homicide detective forced to wander the peephole wilderness of a private investigator for nearly two decades. Until some West Texas lawmen decide to give him a badge again — the gold shield of a district attorney’s investigator in a fictitious jurisdiction, Cuervo County, centered on the town of Faver, another figment of my imagination, a county seat named for Milton Faver, a pioneering cattle baron of the Big Bend Country, a very real and very colorful hard case.

Turns out all that fussin’ and frettin’ was ill-spent nervous energy. Although I gave myself a C for a too hurried performance, I’m told I was witty and rudely charming with a semi-profane delivery that only offended the criminally humorless.

This is utterly unsurprising since I was among friends both old and new, including the ever-gracious Joe R. Lansdale, champion mojo storyteller of Hap n’ Leonard fame and countless other genre-bashing best sellers and classic tales of gore and semi-rural shock and wonder. Met some new friends and fine writers in Seth Humble and Mark Finn. And rubbed elbows with fellow crime writer Harry Hunsicker of Dallas, an old chum with a bullet-proof silver pompadour.

Of course, the founder of this feast is James King, owner of the Nacogdoches T-Shirt Company and antique/gee-gaw/ancient vinyl record emporium, who took a damn good gig first held last year and raised it to new heights in its second incarnation. A Great American, he was aided by our mutual spiritual advisor, Sweet Johnny Wesner, the impresario of seven Noir at the Bar events in Dallas, most of which included me and Handsome Harry as participants. An added bonus: seeing my old virtual friend, Carol Countryman, a fine writer in her own right, for the first time in the real since the 1990s.

Those of you cursed with an overly curious nature may wonder what manner of Ed Earl misadventure I served up at this event. Well, pilgrim, it was a passage from the latest hard-boiled classic, The Fatal Saving Grace. 

Ed Earl and his impromptu partner, Bobby Quintero, are on the trail of the last scumbag still on the loose, wanted in the killing of a woman who once gave our hero a roll in the hay. More accurately, the carnality took place in the bed of her Airstream, which soon after became the scene of her murder.

The trail takes them to a bar on the south side of Presidio, where the body of a cartel hitman is sprawled face-up on the floor, his cock severed and stuffed in his mouth and his ears slashed off. The vic is surrounded by cops and evidence techs doing the grim work that speaks to an old murder cop like Burch.

Give a listen:

To an old murder cop like Burch, there was a soothing reverence and ritual to this process, be it the flash of the evidence tech’s camera, the careful hunt for a wallet, the lifting of a jacket or shirt with a pencil to get a better look at a wound or the slow, silent stare of a cop clocking all the details while trying to commune with the dead to get a vibe about how they got that way.

Cops might exchange crude remarks, quips about the horrible things one human could do to another. Black humor was a shield against that horror, an insultation as comfortably lethal as asbestos wrapped around a steam pipe.

Good for now. A saving grace. Later? A slow death with your innards gnawed away. Made some cops eat their gun. A saving grace turned fatal.

There was also a rough-edged respect paid the dead, even a stone-cold killer like Santiago Cruz. Unless his master, Valentina Garza, wanted to give him a full-blown Catholic funeral mass, this was as close to a requiem as he was going to get. At the hands of strangers who hated him and his kind.

Sure, his homies would spill some tequila on the ground, get drunk and toast him on his way to Hell, but it wouldn’t be the cold, solemn rite these cops were giving him.

Want more? Click HERE to pick up a copy of The Fatal Saving Grace.