Richard Godwin's Blog, page 2

Quick Fire At The Slaughterhouse: Interview With Paul D. Brazill

Paul Brazill, Brit Grit, hard boiled, Noir, attuned, vernacular, tough and entertaining, these are some of the words that come to mind when you think of him. He has had a busy year so far, with new releases. Guns Of Brixton and Big City Blues are classic examples of his writing. Paul met me at The Slaughterhouse, where we talked about the importance of the city in his fictions and Brit Grit.

You’ve had a productive year so far with new releases, tell us about your hardboiled classic Guns Of Brixton.

Guns Of Brixton is published by Caffeine Nights. It’s my idea of a sweary, violent Ealing Comedy. It involves London gangsters, a killer priest and the search for a missing briefcase. The writer Robert Cowan described it as ‘part knuckle-duster, part seaside postcard’ which seems to sum it up.

Big City Blues oozes your trademark style. How important is the city to you in your fictions?

Big City Blues is another Brit Grit novella. It’s published by Near To The Knuckle. It takes place in London, New York, and Madrid. Three vibrant and distinctive cities. I like to write about places – and people- with a lot of personality. It’s unlikely that I’d set a story in Sevenoaks.

Here’s the blurb: London Detective Sergeant Ronnie Burke and Polish cop Jola Lach are on the trail of a serial killer, and New York private eye Solitaire is sent to Spain to track down a missing rich kid. See how their lives intertwine in Big City Blues. British coppers, an American private eye, London gangsters, international spies, and a serial killer known as The Black Crow all collide violently and hilariously in Big City Blues, another fast-moving and funny Brit Grit novella from Paul D. Brazill.

How much of a punch do you think hardcore Brit Grit fiction packs as opposed to the traditional US fiction out there and how different are they?

The Americans can write about the more high-octane stuff more freely and convincingly, I think, because they have guns and it’s a more bombastic country. I think the best of the British and US stuff has a sense of the ridiculous and absurd about it and maybe some of the US stuff is more sincere. Although I have no idea of that’s true or not.

What else is on the cards for you this year?

I have another book coming out form Near To The Knuckle- who have published 3 of my books this year: Too Many Crooks, A Case Of Noir, and Big City Blues. This new one is a flash fiction collection. I hope to have at least one more book finished this year, too.

Bio: Paul D. Brazill’s books include Big City Blues, Guns Of Brixton, Too Many Crooks, A Case Of Noir, The Last Laugh and Kill Me Quick! He was born in England and lives in Poland. His writing has been translated into Italian, Finnish, German and Slovene. He has had writing published in various magazines and anthologies, including three editions of The Mammoth Books of Best British Crime.

Paul, thank you for a classic interview.

Links:

Get a copy of ‘Big City Blues’ at Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com

Find Paul D. Brazill at his website, on Twitter  and Facebook

Quick Fire At The Slaughterhouse: Interview with Michael Perkins

Michael Perkins is a poet and a novelist. Subversive, iconoclastic, profound, erotic, are all terms that may be applied to his diverse and superbly paced fictions. Among his published titles are Dark Matter, and Ceremonies Of The Flesh, and I recommend them both unreservedly. Michael met me at The Slaughterhouse, where we talked about the need for a writer to challenge society, and alternative fictional paradigms.

 

 

Your fictions may be described as inhabiting that body of literature known as transgressive. How do you see your novels, and to what extent is transgression necessary for a writer to challenge prevailing social hypocrisies control programmes?

“Transgression” is a co-opted word stolen by advertising and pop culture some time ago. It’s no longer literary, and literature has been my obsession since I first read Nightwood at 16. That book remains transgressive. So does Evil Companions. (I am not comparing the two books as literary artifacts; that would be absurd. I am speaking now of motivation. )

In the Sixties, every night television held up a mirror: our best and brightest were dumping napalm on children. It is the artist’s duty to express a society’s pain. I sat down at my typewriter and reportted for duty,Transgression? The violation of. commandments? That was for those who care about such things. They wanted to clean the temple of our civilization. Our species.

I wanted, like blind Samson, to tear it down. I wanted to set its heart on fire. And I wouldn’t piss down its throat.

Is it necessary for a writer to subvert society, to ‘Epater la bourgeoisie’, as the French decadent poets of the 19th Century, exhorted writers to do, and do you think the best fictions offer alternative paradigms to those we are presented with?

Those writers who are in the subversive business know that it is counter- productive to attack what’s left of the middle class. They buy our books. They also provide us with the raw material for our dreams,the surprise and shock we never–being delicate creatures–would have thought of. No; we must treasure our readers. Who else would be so foolish as to open their minds and spread their legs for us? We wish to be dangerous, but will settle for scandalous.

Your novel Dark Matter deals with family abuse, rebellion and alternate lifestyles, sects, and the occult. What are you spiritual views and to what extent do you think religion is part of a social propaganda?

The priests have always kept us enslaved. It is their job to keep us away from the truly spiritual. My spiritual views? Gnostic, Taoist–along those lines. I believe that I have a

soul,and most do not. I believe that everything is alive, and that the writer’s work is always spiritual. I believe that literature is either hard work at low pay, or a calling to which you must devote your life.

As for Dark Matter, I simply wrote what I saw. Most of DM’s characters are portraits of real people,doing things I saw happen. This novel, like Evil Companions, was conceived in anger, and given birth by c-section.

Ted Hughes wrote, in his poem Theology,

“No, the serpent did not

Seduce Eve to the apple.

All that’s simply

Corruption of the facts.

Adam ate the apple.

Eve ate Adam.

The serpent ate Eve.

This is the dark intestine.

The serpent, meanwhile,

Sleeps his meal off in Paradise –

Smiling to hear

God’s querulous calling.”

What are your views on his statement?

Women are smarter than men by a long shot, perhaps because they are schooled by reptiles when still in nappies. The only thing a man can do is to take a stick when he goes among women — not for them, but for their serpents.

Michael, thank you for a great interview.

Reading at Dr. Generosity’s Pub, NYC, late 1970’s

“Dark Matter” links:

Amazon US and UK

AbeBooks US and UK

Barnes & Noble

Waterstones

Goodreads

Little, Brown

“Ceremonies of the Flesh” links:

Amazon US and UK

AbeBooks US and UK

Author links:

Website

Waterstones author page

Amazon author pages US and UK

Little, Brown

Quick Fire At The Slaughterhouse: Interview With Lee Matthew Goldberg

Lee Matthew Goldberg is the author of Slow Down, a neo-Noir thriller about the effect of speed in the modern age. His fiction has appeared in numerous magazines and he co-founded the monthly reading series called the Guerrilla Lit Reading Series. Now he has a new one coming out, The Mentor. Lee met me at The Slaughterhouse where we talked about obsession and dark fiction.

Tell us about The Mentor.

I’m very excited for THE MENTOR to come out on June 13th. It’s a thriller about a book editor that’s contacted by his favorite professor who’s been working on a novel for a decade. The editor is very excited to read it, but soon finds it not only horribly written but also depraved and disturbing. When he decides not to publish it, things spiral out of control as his mentor refuses to accept that news. When the editor reads more of the manuscript, he starts to see parallels of this cold case from when they were at college together and a girl he briefly dated went missing.

How does obsession feature in your writing and to what extent do you think we are all obsessed and why?

Obsession plays a huge part in the novel. I think we all have obsessions that drive us, so on one hand, they can be looked at as positive things. Anyone who is successful has to be a little obsessed with what they do to propel them forward day after day. For the mentor William, his novel has become his obsession, since he’s worked on it for a decade. The idea that you can spend so much time and focus on something without seeing it payoff is hard to grasp. For the editor Kyle, his career also becomes his obsession. After landing a huge payout for his first author, he’s so eager for his next success that it begins to affect his relationship with his girlfriend. Lastly, even though he hates William’s book, he becomes obsessed with finishing it to see if the true crime aspects mirror the cold case and whether or not William is implicated in the girl’s disappearance.

Is psychologically dark fiction more about fears than hopes?

Fear definitely consumes the characters of The Mentor. Fear of one’s life coming up short, both literally and figuratively, also fears of success and failure, and fear of the truth and secrets being revealed. Psychologically dark fiction allows for more of an intimate look at characters where the readers can get in their heads through POV more. In terms of hopes, it winds up being the other side of the coin to fear. They hope they can achieve their dreams, quell their obsessions, and ultimately survive. The fear is that they will fail on all accounts.

What else is in the cards for you this year?

It definitely will be a busy year! I have a tour coming up throughout the US for The Mentor and then it will be published in France and Slovakia in the fall. The film is also is development and we have some great talented people attached so far. I’ve also finished a few other books and have been writing screenplays and TV pilots as well. I always like to keep as busy as possible.

Lee, thank you for a perceptive interview.

Links:

The Mentor can be had at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk , Indiebound, and Barnes & Noble

Find Lee at his website and on Facebook, Twitter, and Goodreads

Quick Fire At The Slaughterhouse: Interview With Luke Rhinehart

Luke Rhinehart is the author of the ground-breaking cult classic The Dice Man, a novel that defies genres and classification, that is at once comedy and iconoclasm. He has continued to enjoy a career whose vicissitudes exemplify the ongoing need for classification driven by the publishing industry. He has a new novel out, Invasion, which I describe as incisive, iconoclastic, humane and utterly compelling. Luke met me at The Slaughterhouse for a second round of questions and we talked about Dice and Invasion.

How would you write The Dice Man today?

We wouldn’t, of course, write THE DICE MAN today. We are now many different selves, and very few of them existed back in the late 1960s and 1970 when THE DICE MAN was written. Our present selves want to write other books. And the society that we want to communicate with has changed too, although mostly for the worst. And finally, the book written back then still seems to find readers today, being published in three times as many countries in the last decade as it was in the decade of the ’70s.

Our not considering writing the book again today does not mean that we don’t find serious flaws in the book. As writers, we have dozens of revisions that we think would make it a better book. But we’re also aware that we could be wrong: that the initial burst of creativity that lead to THE DICE MAN published in 1971 might have produced something that no amount of careful editing would particularly improve upon. It is a flawed book, but who is wise enough to eliminate the flaws without also eliminating some of the virtues?

We have revised two of our other novels. We revised LONG VOYAGE BACK in the nineties for a new edition and have revised ADVENTURES OF WIM into WHIM. But we have mostly concluded that any improvements made in either book were not significant to anyone but us.

Tell us about INVASION and how it reflects modern day America.

My novel THE DICE MAN and now INVASION focus in different ways on why modern human beings are less happy than “progress” would seem to indicate they should be.

THE DICE MAN dramatized and satirized the misery of humans caused by their feeling they had to have a single self and be consistent. Luke the Diceman showed some of the ways to free oneself from the grip of self, ruts, and consistency. The novel focused on individuals.

INVASION satirizes modern Western capitalist society and dramatizes some of the ways the society as a whole is sick, which, of course, makes most of its members sick. When super-intelligent aliens come to the planet they see that the way the dominant species has arranged things (modern civilization) tends to make life for most human beings and most other life on the planet more and more miserable. The phrase “most human beings and most other life on the planet” is key, because the top ten percent or so of the humans in the richest developed nations benefit from the civilization and are mostly quite happy with it. For them progress is wonderful. But for most of the planet, industrial and technological progress is more often a disaster. The aliens, called FFs in the novel, have not come to conquer a planet nor as scientists simply to observe. They make intra-universe trips in order to find new forms of life to play with. They have come to play.

In fact the FFs see human civilization as having taken a wrong turn in becoming so ambitious, serious and purposeful. They see the playfulness of children and of young animals of all species as healthy, and the seriousness and purposiveness soon drubbed into them by their society as unhealthy.

Many of those humans alienated from their society find the FFs delightful, and many join “For-the-Helluvit” movements throughout the world to raise a middle finger to the various establishments they feel oppressing them. However, when the FFs begin hacking NSA sites, banks, corporations and the military, the U.S. government is not amused. In leaking more secret material than a thousand Wikileaks or Edward Snowdens the FFs are seen as terrorists and attacked as such. The novel climaxes in the middle of a million people protest march and dance-in, beerfest, sleep-in event in New York’s Central Park.

I finished INVASION more than a year and a half ago but see now that it foreshadows the successful anti-establishment political campaigns of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders and the anti-establishment Brexit vote in the U.K. Many citizens in advanced civilizations have become disillusioned with their lives and their societies, although few can articulate exactly what they are rebelling against. I hope INVASION will give a few people some ideas about what is wrong with our great modern progress.

You often refer to we rather than I. Is it your experience, as for example it was for the playwright Samuel Beckett’s, that identity as a continuum is illusory, perhaps a social construct arguably aimed at social engineering, and that we are a series of ‘I’s’? And how do the Gurdjieff, Ouspensky teachings reflect in your writing and outlook as a Revolutionary Artist?

Identity as a continuum is indeed illusory, a social construct which makes social engineering easier. We could say, and I often do, that a human being is a series of ‘I’s, but that too is a simplification. There is a flow of consciousness in which thoughts, sensations, ‘decisions,’ flow singly and in clusters and some of those flowing thoughts seem to be trying to organize the flow, but those thoughts too are simply part of the seemingly random flow. In my book “Our Autobiographies” where normally an autobiographer would use ‘I’ we use ‘we,’ as a way of acknowledging that all humans are multiple and no single self ever dominates a single day, much less a lifetime. We are not consistent, and how wonderful that is. Robots can be consistent; humans are random. They are like electrons suddenly ‘deciding’ to go off in an entirely new direction. Decisions happen. There is no decider, only the illusion of a decider.

We read widely in Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (as well as other sufis, Zen Buddhists, Taoists and ‘thinkers’ like Alan Watts and Ram Dass) in the years both before and after writing THE DICE MAN. All influenced us. One of Gurdjieff’s techniques was to force his followers to do things they’d never done before—clearly related to what happens with dicing. But what other aspects of his thought has seeped into our work none of us can tell.

How Universal are your characters?

The word ‘universal’ doesn’t mean much to me, so let me try to use different categories to classify characters in fiction.

Most fiction dramatizes the lives of ‘normal’ human beings, and this may be what is meant by ‘universal’. Several of my books are in this sense traditional fiction: WHITE WIND, BLACK RIDER (originally published as MATARI), LONG VOYAGE BACK, SEARCH FOR THE DICE MAN, and NAKED BEFORE THE WORD. In these four books the characters are all normal human beings. Although a few characters may be heroic, all are typically flawed.

But I think in THE DICE MAN, WHIM, JESUS INVADES GEORGE, and my new novel INVASION I am doing something different. Luke in THE DICE MAN is not a normal human; by the end of the novel he has become archetypal: a character no longer normally human.

And the same is true of the character of Whim in WHIM. He is not a normal human being, but rather an archetypal innocent, totally unlike any of the other humans in the book, who are baffled by him.

And I think one of the major sources of the comedy in both these two novels is the contrast between these strange, inhuman characters, Luke and Whim, with many of the people they come in contact with, who are bewildered, angered, or frustrated by having to deal with them.

JESUS INVADES GEORGE and my new novel INVASION fall into something of a third category. The humans in these two novels are normal ‘universal’ characters; but they have to deal with beings who are not normal humans: in JESUS INVADES GEORGE it is the spirit of Jesus invading the soul of George Bush, forcing the President to accommodate himself to a radically Christ-ian way of looking at things that is totally different from George’s own conventional Christianity. He has to react to the archetypal figure of Jesus, who is the driving force of the novel. And again the humor often arises from normal humans having to deal with this archetypal force.

In INVASION, the humans are all ‘normal’, but they are forced to deal with non-human super-intelligent aliens, whose mode of being is totally different from that of normal humans. Most thus end up being baffled by or terrified of these aliens.

Thus, four of my eight novels are conventional fiction using only ‘normal’ human beings as characters.

But my other four, THE DICE MAN, WHIM, JESUS INVADES GEORGE, and INVASION all involve the comedy of normal humans having to deal with characters, either human as in the case of Luke and Whim, or non-human as in the case of Jesus and the FFs in INVASION. In each case the human characters are forced to face the fact that compared to the archetypal characters, their lives are comically limited and unsatisfactory. I see now that in all four novels I am using archetypal characters to force normal humans (and my readers) to question the way they are leading their lives. I see normal human lives as circumscribed and unhappy and use my archetypal characters to show that there can be other modes of living that may be much more free-flowing, creative and satisfactory.

You can guess which group of four novels I am most happy with and proud of.

Luke thank you for a great and informative interview.

Links:

INVASION can be found via the publisher, Titan Books, and at all good bookstores. Here are a few: Amazon.com paperback and Kindle; Amazon.co.uk paperback and Kindle; Book Depsitory; and Kobo.

Read a brief description of and praise for INVASION here.

THE DICE MAN can be found at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, Waterstones, and Book Depository among many other bookstores.

Find Luke at his website, Amazon.com author page, and on Facebook.

Quick Fire At The Slaughterhouse: Interview With William Joyce

William Joyce has had an intensive literary career whose vicissitudes exemplify the shallow fickleness of the industry. This is a writer who knew Norman Mailer, and who wrote a first novel, First Born Of An Ass, that baffled the reviewers, not hard given their restricted reader’s skills, and he carried on. That is what writers do especially those who challenge society. William met me at The Slaughterhouse, where we talked about his place in the American legacy and the tethering of literature by social conditioning.

What is your enduring relationship as a writer with the American legacy?

Enduring?? I don’t have enough money for next month’s rent so my relationship with the American legacy is the least of my concerns. I’m hoping to ENDURE without sleeping on the street.

But since you mentioned it, which “America” are you talking about? There’s the U.S. “America” which has misappropriated the name and there’s the continent America named after America Vespucci, an Italian cartographer.

If you’re talking about the U.S., as soon as I die–shortly– the academics will build a statue to me, and put me in the Pantheon of Buster Keaton, W.C. Fields, and Charlie Chaplin. As long as they erect an emaciated statue, I’ll be happy.

But if you’re talking about the continent America, I identify just as much with Eduardo Galeano as W.C. Fields or Henry Miller. That would also be true with another dozen Latin American and West Indian writers like Aime Cesaire, Vallejo, Rulfo, Asturias, and Jose Donoso.

To what extent do you think America and Europe now are tethered by social conditioning and a failure to appreciate breakthrough literature, if you think of the effect Henry Miller had on the literary establishment, and how much was your novel First Born an anarchic assault on those limiting sensibilities?

Well, I think the difference between now and then is that Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer had eloquent defenders. There was in Europe and the U.S. in 1935, or 1960, an aristocracy of critics who had the confidence to take on any book, no matter how low-life, and articulate its vitality. These connosseurs of what is best in the written word do not exist now.

First Born of an Ass had no such defenders. In 1989 when it came out, there were book reviewers who applauded the novel but no one who really took its measure. It was “breakthrough” in the sense that it used apparent losers to define a way of life in a particular setting, the steel mill towns of Western Pennsylvania.

What also made it breakthrough was that like Tropic it disparaged the entire the entire set of bourgeoise values. Art, thrift, cleanliness, progress, education, respectability all are washed down the drain.

All of these “Breakthrough” books have another thing in common–The Body. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man, Tropic of Cancer, and First Born of an Ass never get far away from the body. If Tropic could be said to be one large stomach, First Born is nothing but one sprawling intestine. It is the world viewed from the digestive apparatus.

This is the last thing the Modern World of isms and sects wants to hear. The Bible, the Koran, the Talmud, deny the body. It is always suspect. With its unpredictability, it needs to be reigned in, harnessed, covered up. All of literary censorship is predicated upon this. If the body can be denied, it can be used as a tool to perpetuate profits and a slice of propaganda.

The most important thing about Breakthrough Writing is that a lot of the time it is funny. And once you have people laughing, they’re going to look around and see the absurdity of their own situation. Then, they kick off their high-heels, or loosen their neckties, become slightly human. Now the writing is a threat.

A long time ago, there were men, and occasionally women, who saw all this and in a leisurely fashion wrote about the joy and insights they got from such unpredictable material. No such arbiters exist today and it is one of the reasons humans are becoming junkies at an unprecedented rate. What we have in place of excellence is the voice of the Mob. And there is hardly anything they don’t know.

Do you think that Art and literature are being increasingly repressed by social engineering and the rise of the far right and its Christianising tendencies in the US and what is the antidote?

Repression? Social Engineering?? Whatever is going on it has made people dumb. In all the countries people are so dumb it’s a wonder they’re alive.

In 1966, Roberto Rosselini, the pioneer Italian film director, said in an interview that Europe was headed toward an infantile society. We’re there now. Billions of people just waiting to be fed, no sign of life anywhere.

Look, if an educated man has the choice of eating a pizza or reading a good book, he’ll take the pizza. The pizza has taste right away whereas the good book takes work. You have to bring something to the book–desire, a sense of adventure, a willingness to explore; the reader has to have energy. Ahhh, but with the pizza you need only open your mouth. Bingo! Everything is taken care of. All you need is dollars or euros and You’re set. And dollars or euros is all that most people have. Desire was flushed long ago into the gearboxes of nasty machines.

The problem is that the wheat for the dough in the pizza is full of GMOs. The tomato sauce is loaded up with a chemical preservative to give it longer shelf life. The cheese comes from a cow that had its ass shot full of hormones to promote quicker growth of the befuddled animal.

The body doesn’t know what to do with all these chemicals. all this sludge. So the pizza just sits in the guy’s gut in various stages of putrefaction while the body tries to arrive at a verdict. When the autopsy was done on John Wayne, they found 36 pounds of feces. The great defender of law and order and he’s dragging around all this shit while 50 million people across the Earth scream, “That John Wayne, he’s my hero, he doesn’t take shit from anybody.” Well, he just happens to take a lot of shit from the whole food network which is supposed to keep him alive but in fact is responsible only to a group of shareholders.

The guy who just gobbled the pizza doesn’t care about all this. The next morning he wakes feeling pregnant when he liked to feel nice and light. He tries to relieve this bloatedness by yelling at the wife and kids but they’re bloated too and yell right back. It’s called The Great American Family. Everybody hoping to make A Stupendous Crap in the hoity-toity-ha-ha-ka-ka Craperia Room so they can go out and buy more pizzas. Papa then goes to work–usually in some office building– where anger is not permitted. At lunch in the company cafeteria, someone blames all the problems on the Commie government, a second guy says, No, it’s the Jewish bankers. A third party blames all the problems on the Armenian faggots, they’re the ones who’ve taken over the schools. The conversation has inflamed the original pizza guy. It’s tapped his adrenal gland and he rushes off to the Rest Room where if you were ever caught just resting, security would haul you off for serious questioning.

A modest bowel movement and the pizza guy feels a bit lighter. “Maybe it is those Armenian faggots” he says to the mirror as he washes his hands.

There’s always been Social Engineering going on. In 1850 Alexander Herzen said about Russia that 52 adults were waiting for the infant to plop out of the womb. If your own life’s a failure, you can always give advice. But humans prepare for this social engineering by eating a lot of ballast. That way they’re passive and can be molded this way or that way. They don’t want freedom which is what the artist represents; they want to be weighted down… with pizzas, with slogans, any kind of crap will do. Pursuing freedom takes too much work, too much vigilance. Better to be half comatose and relaxed–cool it, chill out–than all flighty, flapping one’s wings toward a distant chimera.

Whether it’s the social engineering in 1491 from Uncle Ephraim or the technological variety now, there’s always a constant. There’s something that’s inherent in humans that’s always looking for a shortcut to happiness. In 1492, Isabella and Ferdinand were looking for a shortcut to the Spice Islands so they sent explorers west in wooden ships. No spices but Indians who had lots of gold and silver. In 1849, More gold at Sutter’s Mill in California and this discovery made half the world insane at so much riches in one tiny locale. 75 years later it was liquid gold and people went mad at the thought of a model-A Ford that could power them right up to heaven. Led Zepplin has a lot to say about this. Now it’s a host of technological devices that are supposed to make people feel Connected but just a glance around and you see that people are totally disconnected. They can’t see and they can’t hear. They just poke and pray and wait for the next pizza.

So I don’t think it’s a matter of repression. Humans have been gutted by seven centuries of looking for a shortcut when paradise was often right next to them, within them. Very few have ever been willing to serve that 10 to 15 years apprenticeship that would have taught them contentment and often ecstasy. They’d rather buy a pill by that name.

What is called art or literature is nothing more than a record of an individual’s participation in the comedy called life. Language has been so reduced in its resonance that words are now taken literally. Comedians in the U.S. no longer enter college campuses because they say students take everything literally. That means desire is gone. The body has retreated into a shell. Dead at 18, waiting for the teacher to get them down the road to the next Holiday Inn. The far right or far left or Christian evangelists are just examples of polemicized mobs who take everything literally. Who are ready to kill if they don’t get their daily umbilical transfer of pizza. All the groups, when they see that pizza, smoking from the oven, scream, “AWESOME!”

The antidote??? Hide.

How would you introduce your work to a new readership?

Well, there’s a direct tie-in with your previous questions.

Given the quagmire the Earth is in now and the fact that most countries are police states run by corporations, if I wanted readers I’d have to find rebels, people fed up. This has already happened. How did you and I meet? Through Les Edgerton. And who is Les Edgerton?

Well, he’s more than a rebel. He’s put his body on the line. He’s done time. He’s worked the streets which means he knows what it takes to get a job done. And he’s not going to be fooled by rhetoric–he’s not living out of his head. He’s also done the hard reading; he can decipher the difference between art and the con job called Prize Winners. He’s not going to be fooled by the Noir crowd, nor any genre for that matter.

The funny thing is that before I met Edgerton I dreamed of meeting Edgerton. I knew I needed someone like Edgerton, someone who as a child had rooted for the Bad Guys in movies. I knew 10 years ago I couldn’t get along with straight people.

Straight people don’t get it. They don’t get anything. They have no idea of Charlie Mingus or Miles Davis. Their parents’ idea of a good time on Saturday night was to watch Lawrence Welk on the teevee and they’ve followed suit. Straight people don’t have that little hitch in their giddyup, that savvy on what it takes to get the day started. They’re content to poke at some machine.

In the old days, there were publishers who had this sixth sense of how to get a book rolling. Barney Rosset of the old Grove Press had it. So did the guy who ran Workman’s Press in the ’70s. Carl Weissner had it Germany and if it hadn’t been for him, Bukowski would still be working for the post office, even in his grave.

But publishers like that no longer exist. That means the writer is going to have to have the street savvy to do it himself but he’s also going to have to find allies. Find his Edgertons–hustlers, conmen, out-of-work actors and actresses, people with sense and taste and a sense of humor.

For example, in 1989, when my poetry book For Women Who Moan came out, I hired two saucy hookers to go into a bar at Happy Hour time. Later, I’d walk in smiling.

“You look like you’re in a good mood,” the bartender would say.

“Yeah, my book just came out.”

“Oh, what book is that?”

So I show him the book.

“How much?”

“No charge. It’s your tip.”

“Thanks, my girlfriend’s birthday is coming up. I think she’ll like this.”

“But maybe you could show your new book to those two ladies at the end of the bar?”

The two ladies thank him and start to read–out loud, together, just as we rehearsed it. Already a few guys have meandered in and they hear this strange poem about orgasms just as their sipping their first beer. They knock down that beer tan rapido and order another. Now the place is starting to fill up. A loud argument starts up at the bar. The ladies are debating which of them has the best Moan–just as we rehearsed it.

Well, even in 1989, U.S. men had a hard time getting laid. And now, no sooner do they get off work than they hear two attractive women waxing eloquently on the female orgasm. Potential buyers are creaming their drawers at the sound of it all. Men are soon packed three-deep around the women. One, then two whisper in the women’s ears for their phone number.

“Maybe you could buy me a copy of this book,” the men are advised.

Of course the guys are going to buy the ladies a copy of For Women Who Moan. A half hour later a new crop of suckers stroll into Happy Hour at Childe Harold’s Bar and Restaurant at Dupont Circle in D.C.

Happy Hour indeed! Me and the ladies are out of there with ten books sold in an hour and a half. I leave a ten-dollar tip for the bartender and I meet the ladies down the street at the corner. I have White Out with me and I spread it through the dedications and resell the books at the next bar.

Many nights I arrive home so high I fall asleep in bed with my clothes on. I wake in the morning to ten and twenty-dollar bills all over the bed. In eight months I make more money from a poetry book than even Walt Whitman did in his best years. Poet & Writers, the trade magazine, sends out a reporter. D.C. hookers report that business has never been better.

But if you’re an enterprising author working the streets, you’d better be prepared for accidents and prepared for how to take advantage of them.

Example. One day I’m in a supermarket at the checkout line and a huge Black man pushes me aside, yelling, “Make way, make way, I have to cook for the vice president.”

I’m so dumb I’m asking myself, “Which corporation is he talking about?” Then I remember that I do live in Washington, D.C.

“Hey!” I yell at the cook, “You rudely pushed me out of the way. Maybe the Vice President would like a copy of my latest book?”

He hands me ten dollars and I inscribe For Women Who Moan to “Dan Quayle who is ready to lead our noble nation into battle.”

Two weeks later I see the cook in the same supermarket.

“Hey, what did the VP think of my poems?”

“He never got them. Mrs. Quayle got a hold of the book and won’t give it up. When I left she was reading it to somebody over the phone.”

I could have sold him another copy but I thought, “The hell with it. Let the VP and his wife fight over the Moan book.”

A month later there’s that cook again.

“Hey Cook! Did the VP ever get my book?”

“Naw, Mrs. Quayle lent it to the First Lady.”

Immediately I started having grandiose fantasies. I imagined the President of the United States plucking For Women Who Moan off the bedside table and wondering, “Have I ever known a woman who moaned?”

Then I imagined getting a call from the First Lady and it wasn’t about the quality of my poems. The Moan poem had started her hormones galloping again. I was filled with dread. What if she actually did call and I had to perform on the First Lady or watch my poetry career go down the drain? It was remote. It was absurd. But stranger things had happened to me. How would my tool, John Henry, react when he saw all that white pubic hair and heard those Secret Service men pacing outside the door of the motel room???? And what if she did Moan and the Secret Service men, thinking she was being strangled, came crashing through the door, guns blazing?? I laughed it off as silly thought; still, every time the phone rang, my stomach tightened. Finally, after a week when I didn’t hear from her I figured I was off the hook. Maybe she got George to quit thinking about bombing Iraq for an hour and he gave her a tumble. Stranger things had happened.

What I wasn’t prepared for was a knock at the door a few days later. A little guy in a white shirt and a necktie said he was from Baker & Taylor and could he talk with me. Baker & Taylor I knew to be the largest book distributor in the U.S. This rep said Baker & Taylor had received calls from bookstores requesting the Moan book and did I have a few hundred copies I could turn over to them. I asked him if anybody important had called the bookstores. Yes, he said. Who? He said he couldn’t tell me.

We did some paperwork then and it revealed I wouldn’t make much. Bookstores would get 40%, B & T 15% which would leave me with one dollar profit on each book. I paid the publisher $3.50 a book. I told him it was no deal.

In retrospect, I made a mistake. I would have had nationwide distribution and it wouldn’t have affected my street sales. My ego was just too inflamed with my independence. But what stories I got every week. So, as far as readers now, it’s just a matter of matching the right book to the right locale… and being careful of elderly ladies who have power.

Thank you William for a great interview.

Links:

The Savage Joy of Guillermo O’Joyce

Les Edgerton’s review of ‘First Born of an Ass’ by William Joyce

Guillermo O’Joyce’s review of ‘The Rapist’ by Les Edgerton

Dana Yost’s “Re-blogging: Give this author your attention”

William Joyce biography

Quick Fire At The Slaughterhouse: Interview With Christina Hoag

Christina Hoag is a thriller writer, her short fiction, creative nonfiction and poetry have been published in 25 literary journals with two of her short stories published in anthologies. Christina worked as a reporter and editor for the Miami Herald and The Associated Press. She has a new novel out, Skin Of Tattoos. Christina met me at The Slaughterhouse where we talked about her new release and her literacy influences.

Tell us about your latest novel.

It’s called “Skin of Tattoos.” It’s sort of genre-defying – a noir-crime thriller written in a literary style. The setting is the gang underworld of Los Angeles, the U.S. capital of gangs, and the main character, Mags, is a gang member. We meet him as he comes out of prison wanting, as most parolees do, to go straight and never return “behind the wall.” To do that, he has to get away from his gang, the Cyco Lokos, but the “clica” has undergone some changes since he’s been locked up, namely his rival Rico, who set him up on the charge that got him imprisoned, is now the “shotcaller” or leader. It’s a story of revenge and rivalry, but there are also other layers: Mags’s quest for his father’s approval, the hardships faced by a poor immigrant family, as well as the larger picture of the socioeconomic factors that drive gangs in our society in general.

Who are your literary influences?

Probably my favourite all time author is Graham Greene. Many of his books are about the concept of being a foreigner, an outsider/observer, which I relate to on a personal level since I’ve lived in many countries both as a child and as an adult. That influence comes through in my novel “Skin of Tattoos,” where the protagonist Mags was born in El Salvador but left with his family fleeing the civil war when he was a child so he doesn’t really feel Salvadoran, doesn’t remember anything about the place, yet that is his identity. He’s an outsider to El Salvador, yet as an immigrant an outsider to mainstream American society, as well. He finds his home in a gang with others from similar backgrounds.

As a reader, I love immersing myself in foreign cultures and settings because you always learn something new. As a writer, Greene’s work made me see how key setting can be. It can almost become almost like another character with a personality all of its own.

Having lived in Central and South America, I’m also partial to Latin American authors. One of my favourite books is “The Goat’s Party” by Peruvian Nobel prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa. This book is a fictionalization of the 1961 plot to assassinate the Rafael Trujillo, the dictator who ruled the Dominican Republic for 31 years. I found it fascinating, like a window into an unseen world in the way it fleshed out historical events with the motivations and emotions of the real people. It has certainly influenced one of the novels I’m working on now, “The Revolutionaries,” which deals with the 2002 coup attempt in Venezuela that I lived through and covered as a journalist.

How important is the family in your fictions?

In both my current novels, “Skin of Tattoos” and my YA romantic thriller “Girl on the Brink,” the protagonist’s family is key to fleshing out the characters and their motivations. It may have to do with both characters’ young ages – Mags in SOT is 20, Chloe in GotB is 17, and our immediate families tend to be much more important to our worlds when we are young, before we go on to form our own families. In the YA novel, the plot sort of revolves around Chloe’s family situation. The impending divorce of her parents is a main reason why Chloe is so drawn to Kieran, the antagonist, and her mother’s pill addiction keeps her distant from her, thus allowing this doomed relationship to flourish. In SOT, Mags has tons of family strife stemming his resentment of his over achieving older brother (I made him second-child, same sex deliberately so he’d have that sibling rivalry), he’s desperate for his dad’s approval and his mother’s attention, and he’s very protective of his younger sisters so that also forms motivations for his actions when they are threatened. Family strife makes for some good emotional strings to tie up neatly at the end, too. However, in the two novels I’m finishing now, both with older adults as protagonists, I’ve struggled with how much of their family of origin to bring into play because it doesn’t seem to matter as much as their marriages, both of which are in dire straits and form context for the plot as it unfolds.

What else is on the cards for you this year?

For the rest of the year, I’ll be busy promoting “Skin of Tattoos” and “Girl on the Brink.” Marketing is fun, but time-consuming and I’m already itching to get back to my two unfinished novels: a detective mystery and a political thriller I mentioned (which I’ve been working on since 2005 so my goal is to finish this one this year by hook or by crook!) Both of them are about 80 percent there, I’d say, so I’m eager to finish. I also have a sequel of “Skin of Tattoos” on the drawing board. I have a chunk of it written but a lot to go, so this one will be on for next year.

Thank you Christina for an informative interview.

Links:

‘Skin of Tattoos’ can be had at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk (paperback and Kindle)

Find Christina at her website, her Amazon author page, on Facebook, and on Twitter as @ChristinaHoag

Quick Fire At The Slaughterhouse: Interview With S.J.I. Holliday

Susi Holliday is a crime novelist. She has worked as a statistician in the pharmaceutical industry. Her first novel, Black Wood was published in 2015 and her second, Willow Walk, is out now. Susi met me at The Slaughterhouse where we talked about her new release and her literary influences.

Tell us about your latest novel.

My latest novel is called Willow Walk. It’s set in Banktoun – the same fictional small Scottish town as in my first book, Black Wood. It has some recurring characters, but it’s not a series as such. I’d describe it as psychological suspense, with a bit of police procedural thrown in. The main character in this one is Marie Bloomfield. All’s going swimmingly for her, until she gets a pile of letters from someone from a long time ago, someone who shouldn’t be able to contact her since she moved away and changed her identity. It’s a creepy tale of obsession and the bonds that you just can’t break. It contains some disturbing stuff – a freaky fairground, dodgy (no-longer-legal) highs and a party to end all parties. It’s very dark, but it was fun to write.

Who are your literary influences?

A bit of an eclectic mix… from Enid Blyton’s Famous Five, to everything by Stephen King and many things in between. Oh, and a bit of Jackie Collins thrown in. Nowadays I seem to be reading a lot of new writers, and I’m not reading as much horror any more – but horror is still something I like to pull into my writing as much as I can. If I’m scared writing it, then hopefully the reader will be scared reading it.

How important is the family in your fictions?

Very! All three of my books set in the small Scottish town of Banktoun feature families with some very dark secrets. In Black Wood, the main character, Jo, has been mostly brought up by her grandmother and she still owns the family home – a creepy cottage in the woods where bad things have happened, and keep happening. In Willow Walk, the relationship between the protagonist and the antagonist is key, as they are twins (female/male) and they have a very complex situation to deal with. In the third book, The Damselfly, a teenage girl is found dead in her bed, and the relationship between her and her mother and her siblings is a critical part of this book. I think all my families are pretty dysfunctional, but I also think that reflects real life. No one has the perfect family, but family bonds can be very strong.

What else is on the cards for you this year?

Finishing book 3, maybe writing a short story or two. Catching up on some reading, and then planning and writing book 4 – which is a standalone and very different from the Banktoun-set books. I’m very excited to be starting something fresh. I’ll be talking about my books at Bouchercon in New Orleans next month too. Can’t wait!

Thank you Susi for a great interview.

Links:

‘Willow Walk’ can be found at Amazon.co.uk (Kindle and paperback), Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, The Book Depository, the publisher, Black & White Publishing and more via Goodreads Online Stores dropdown menu.

Visit SJI Holliday at her website, her Amazon.co.uk author page, Twitter (@SJIHolliday), and Facebook.

Quick Fire At The Slaughterhouse: Interview With Paul D. Brazill

Paul Brazill writes unflichingly realistic gritty hardboiled fiction that mixes the laconic with astute cultural observation. Always entertaining, you can count on a great read. He has a new one out, and he describes it as a rampage across London. Paul met me at The Slaughterhouse where we talked about Cold London Blues and his experience writing as an exile.

Tell us about Cold London Blues.



Cold London Blues is the follow up to Guns Of Brixton, my previous book with Caffeine Nights Publishing.

Here’s the blurb: A killer priest is on the rampage across London and an egotistical Hollywood action movie star is out for revenge when his precious comic book collection is stolen. Meanwhile, gangster Marty Cook’s dreams of going legit swiftly turn pear shaped when one of his bouncers accidentally kills one of his salsa club’s regular customers. Razor sharp wisecracks, gaudy characters and even gaudier situations abound in Cold London Blues, a violent and pitch-black Brit Grit comedy of errors.

Tell us about your memories of London and how has Poland changed them?

There’s been a lot of booze under the bridge since I lived in London. However …

Flashbacks: walking down Abbey Road, across the famous Beatles zebra crossing, and seeing Dave Vanian – vampire- esque singer with The Damned – driving a hearse. Shortly after, I was in a warehouse which had a room full of sump oil and a shark floating in formaldehyde. … a drunken Bert Kwok playing air-piano in a Soho club … a tall man carrying a massive white cross down Kensington High Street … The Buena Vista Social Club in Hyde Park, the beer tent only sold Pimms or champagne … eating a chocolate covered scorpion … Astrid Gilberto at The Jazz Café and Ennio Morricone at the Barbican … a woman that was born in an orphanage and whose name on her birth certificate was just a number … Tracey Emin dancing to Stuck In The Middle with you at my friend’s memorial … and lots and lots of time travelling on the tube or on the bus … All seen through a shot glass darkly, of course.

How important is local culture and music to your writing?

The stuff I’ve written in the mythical Seatown- Kill Me Quick!, The Postman Cometh, Route 66 And All That, Who Killed Skippy? et al – are all very much based on growing up and living in the north east of England. There are lots of real people and situations in those yarns although they are viewed askew and through the haze of booze and a faulty memory.

What else is on the cards for you this year?

I’ve recently finished a follow up to Cold London Blues and Guns Of Brixton. It’s called A Rainy Night In Soho and hopefully it will see the light of day at some time.

I have a few books that I’d previously self-published are coming out via Renato Bratkovic’s Artizan publishing. The first – Exiles: An Outsider Anthology – is out now and includes a story from your good self. Here’s the blurb:

A powerful Noir short story collection edited by the Bukowski of Noir, Paul D. Brazill. Exiles features 26 outsiders-themed stories by some of the greatest crime and noir writers, K. A. Laity, Chris Rhatigan, Steven Porter, Patti Abbott, Ryan Sayles, Gareth Spark, Pamila Payne, Paul D. Brazill, Jason Michel, Carrie Clevenger, David Malcolm, Nick Sweeney, Sonia Kilvington, Rob Brunet, James A. Newman, Tess Makovesky, Chris Leek, McDroll, Renato Bratkovič, Walter Conley, Marietta Miles, Aidan Thorn, Benjamin Sobieck, Graham Wynd, Richard Godwin, Colin Graham, and an introduction by Heath Lowrance.

Thank you Paul for an informative interview.

Cold London Blues at Amazon US and UK.

Exiles: An Outsider Anthology at Amazon US and UK.

Paul D. Brazill is the author of The Last Laugh, Guns of Brixton, Cold London Blues, and Kill Me Quick! He was born in England and lives in Poland. His writing has been translated into Italian, Polish, German and Slovene. He has been published in various magazines and anthologies, including The Mammoth Books of Best British Crime. His blog is here.

Quick Fire At The Slaughterhouse: Interview With Gareth Spark

Gareth Spark writes dark fiction about the moors and rust belts of the North East where grudges are savoured and shotguns are cheap. His work has appeared at Near 2 The Knuckle and Out Of The Gutter among other journals, and his novella Marwick’s Reckoning was published this year. It is a hardboiled revenge story packed with mobsters. Gareth met me at The Slaughterhouse where we talked about his writing and genre.

Tell us about your writing and the genres you write.

To talk about my writing, I’d have to begin by talking about why I write, which is a difficult question to answer without resorting to the language of a Facebook post or that of one of the ‘inspirational’ books I deplore. My writing represents an attempt to impose some kind of dramatic order on the frantic tumult and confusion of contemporary life by paring it back to basics: anger, ambition, loyalty, revenge, love. I write about small lives, lives perhaps resembling my own, beset by adversities, both external and internal, whose conflicts are often resolved through acts of violence…. if they’re resolved at all. Beside that there’s this urge for self-expression I’m sure counts as the figurative ‘Big Bang’ of most Artist’s careers; the sense that this passing word demands record, one’s particular world, the places and people and times one loves, the present moment slipping into a past entirely irredeemable, as memory is as much a work of fiction as the best novel. Therefore, the act of writing, of creating a fictional world drawing from the stark particulars of one’s own, becomes kind of a salvation of days lost, of the epiphanies and despairs of a lifetime, of the lachrimae rerum. The attempt at such is perhaps an impossible task, or at least one resembling that of Sisyphus, a repeated effort or attempt with little hope of conclusion but, as Camus said, one must imagine Sisyphus happy, and the writer too, has to be happy in the continued ascent represented by every story, every novel, every poem.

I would say also, that one writes the only story one can, and I’ve seen not a few of my contemporaries drawn down blind alleys trying to, as the American writer Sam Hawken put it the other day, “write somebody else’s book,” be that for reasons of commerce, lack of a clear insight into or sense of fidelity to their own vision, or simple mistaking of their vocation in the first place. Writing has to be a calling, a vocation, the explanation of and purpose of one’s life. It certainly has been for me, going on twenty years now, and if one is to accomplish anything worthwhile, especially these days when the flood of digital publishing has made books so disposable, one has to write with the entirety of one’s being, with every last drop of blood. I’m drawn to writing about places I know and love, and the way these places impact upon the lives lived in them, without my writing becoming some kind of reportage, or natural description. The country becomes a mirror of the characters, and vice versa, and I don’t mean in some iteration of the pathetic fallacy, but in the sense that a tough, wild place makes for a hardy culture and a tough people. I’m drawn to the Icelandic sagas for just that reason, and I would see my work as a continuance of that spirit, that gritty, northern, stoic sensibility. My stories have been called noir, and if we define noir as stories about people becoming undone by a weakness in their souls rather than just bad luck, I suppose I’d have to agree. I tend, in my personal beliefs towards a determinism that’s almost an old English resignation to fate, what happens would always have happened, the world would always have been thus, and it’s in the conduct of people faced with the vast mousetrap of the universe and the essential powerlessness of the average man or woman, and their courage or lack of it when facing that, which interests me. At the same time, that bleak vision is alleviated by moments of beauty and goodness, which I think people respond to in my work. Chiaroscuro is far more interesting than shadow alone, and contrast adds texture and depth to any portrait, including my portrait of a working class crumbing at the edges into an underclass, whose only respite from the crushing weight of a global monoculture that has stripped meaning and agency from their lives, is the feud. Brit Grit interests me as a kind of punk rock, destructive response to a banal culture dominated by the vulgar and corrupted by commerce. In my short stories, I depict the moment of crisis itself and the realization, perhaps, of its effects in the character’s minds at the last possible moment. In my longer fiction, where one can be expansive, I’m interested more in the entirety of a life, and the slow tightening of the noose. I attended a writing group, many years ago, and the talk veered, bizarrely, into a discussion of our favorite biblical passages (it was an eccentric group, to which I didn’t belong for more than a month) and I said the only passage that every meant a thing to me was Mark 14.37 “And he cometh, and findeth them sleeping, and saith unto Peter, Simon, sleepest thou? couldest not thou watch one hour?” The group leader asked me, “So, you’re moved by human frailty?” To which my only response was, “Yes.” You understand that, and you understand what I’m trying to do with my work.

Tell us about Half Past Nothing.

Half past nothing was my attempt at a fiction of Joycean epiphanies, stories that are more like the flash of countryside through a car window as one drives rather than the map….by which I mean I avoided the heavily plotted, structured fiction one normally associates with the generic or the pulp. I can’t say it was that successful. My subsequent short story collection, Snake Farm, was more of a reflection and a commentary on tropes associated with genres popular in the latter half of the 20th Century; the western, the noir pulp, the zombie story, the revenge thriller and, consequently, the stories obey the edicts of the creative writing class by having beginnings, middles and ends. If I write short fiction at all these days, it tends towards flash fiction. It’s possible to create something gnomic and powerful with 500 words. I hope.

Do you seek inspiration in alienation or the past?

The past certainly provides most of my inspiration, my own personal past as opposed to some kind of mythic history of the culture that, more than likely, only exists in retrospect. I have said before that the attempt to translate a personal experience of the world, by which I mean people, their actions and the effect of Nature upon both, into some kind of lasting Art, into some kind of testament that means something to people, something that may be perhaps vital rather than merely entertaining, has been the North Star by which I steer. The history of alienated individuals can be compelling, but 85% of the time, isn’t. That kind of literature, divorced from a wider social context (aside that of estrangement from that society), is, by definition, alien. To change the world or at least have the temerity to comment upon it, it’s important to be a part of that world. That’s not to say that I’m being massively naive…. this post-industrial, 1%-er technocracy that we grudgingly still refer to as the free world is a machine that could be designed for the purpose of alienating its inhabitants, but the literature dealing with that fact tends toward the Romantic, and Romanticism has had its day. The past is something emotionally tangible, it carries weight, and it’s that kind of weight one needs in the construction of a story, a narrative of some moral utility.

What else is on the cards for you this year?

I do have some new short stories on the horizon, published by some of my favourite fiction websites, as well as a few pieces of poetry, but mainly I’m working on a novel, THE novel, that’s devoured so much of the past four years of my life. It’s a multi-generational examination of this small corner of the word, and the conflict between a personal mythos and the larger narrative of history; it’s about a feud between two men that bleeds across the following 50 years, and the ultimate futility of hate. Mephistopheles promised Faust, as part of his infernal bargain, a book that contained everything….I would love for this to be a similar book.

Thank you Gareth for a great interview.

Links:

Gareth Spark’s Amazon page

Gareth on Facebook

Quick Fire At The Slaughterhouse: Interview With Chad Eagleton

Chad Eagleton is a crime writer and editor. He is also writing a biography of Shane Stevens. Stevens is a highly underrated and widely unknown author, whose works demonstrate a fluency and realism that make them stand out from the crowded world of crime fiction. By Reason Of Insanity, a gruelling study of madness and criminality, is Stevens’s most famous work, while Dead City is a classic piece of gritty fiction, and they’re arguably Noir, equally unorthodox, and convey a real sense of the criminal underworld. Stevens’s versatility coupled with his secrecy as an author has made him the subject of various inaccurate speculations over the years, and there is hardly any information about him. Chad is conducting meticulous biographical research into Stevens.

Chad met me at The Slaughterhouse where we talked about why Stevens’s works distinguish themselves, and the commentary his novels offer on the great American Dream.

How do you think the novels of Shane Stevens distinguish themselves from the body of crime fiction?

Couple of ways. I think Stevens’s work perfectly encapsulates a period of American History, the vanished street life of the early 1960s through the late 1970s. However, that’s not me saying that I think his work is of mere historical interest, like DeFoe’s Journal of the Plague Year let’s say. It’s far more than that.

When crime fiction is operating at its best, it should not only be confrontational but it should be social fiction that deals honestly with real world issues that are going on right here, right now, right outside your door. Unfortunately, I think crime fiction has gotten the Times Square treatment–clean it up so it looks good for the tourists and keep the riff-raff out of sight. The narrative we are usually fed passes through this white, middle and upper class filter. So we either get this violent, wish fulfillment junk that’s supposed to titillate us on our lunch break but is no more realistic than a comic book while being half as fun. Or our American Dream middle class fantasy is shown under attack from minorities or the poor or some greedy good-for-nothing that wants what we’ve worked so hard far. Stevens’s work was different though. It dealt truthfully with things like race, poverty, class, institutionalized violence. All the issues that are back at the forefront of our national dialogue after decades.

Stevens has quite a range of material in his fictions, from the incisive exploration of a psychopathic mind in By Reason Of Insanity to the hard boiled Dead City, from Go Down Dead to The Anvil Chorus, all of them real, all different. Given your previous comments about his novels, to what extent may they be read as a dark, anti-popularist commentary on the hollowness and corruption at the heart of the great American Dream?

That’s exactly what they are. I mean, Stephen King didn’t say Stevens wrote three of the finest novels about the dark side of the American dream for nothing. We’re told the world functions as a meritocracy, and it does not. We’re promised that success and financial security follow as a natural result of hard work, and they do not. The system is rigged to keep you down—has been for a long time. There is a hopeless desperation to poverty that so few in the United States can really understand unless they’ve been in the trenches—like Stevens.

You know, Shane was born in Hell’s Kitchen and grew up white in Harlem. I have some copies of some letters he wrote to his first agent that are just heart-breaking, asking if he knew of any jobs because he needed money for rent and was trying to keep his family together, asking if he he’d heard anything from the contest because he needed $1k to stay out of jail. So he got it. He understood that poverty affects all your decisions. Poverty strips you, the worker, of your bargaining ability. Poverty erodes self-esteem and degrades the acceptance of your peers. Poverty devastates your health. Poverty allows alcoholism, drug use, and abuse (both physical and sexual) to flourish—contributing to a mental disconnect from our species. This disconnect reinforces the terrible notion that the world functions only on the level of power and its exchange—one of the main re-occurring themes in every single one of Shane Stevens novels.

This rigged systems taints our ability for compassion. The biggest part of compassion comes from the ability to set aside your own experience and really understand what someone else has experienced. But when all that is being gamed, well, then poor is framed as a “choice”—which is bullshit because no one would ever choose to be poor. But you see, when poor is framed that way, then the poor can be scapegoated to distract you, and the criminal can be treated simply as the aberration that won’t do what he’s supposed and so ruins it for everyone.

It’s easy, I think to be sidetracked by the race issue with Stevens’s early books. Go Down Dead, Way Uptown In Another World, and Rat Pack all feature African-American characters and, at least partially, take place in Harlem. But race is, I think, meaningless to Stevens. Race is another distraction from class. A beautiful example of this occurs in Rat Pack when the gang breaks into the empty courthouse and finds a white repairman working alone. As the tension escalates, Stevens jumps between everyone’s different points of view and we see clearly how both the black youths and the white repairman are essentially in the same place, struggling to get by and feeling like they have no options, while thinking essentially the same thing about each other: you’ve got it so easy and it’s your fault I haven’t had that success and financial security I was promised.

I also have a copy of a letter Stevens wrote to Charles Harris that lays it all out clearly: “What’s happening is that this is a class struggle going on in this insane country. Of which white racism is a part. What counts is not skin color but life style: money, Charles, money. The question is how you live—that determines what side of the gun you’re on. Now the people of all colors who are poor are beginning to move and they’re moving against those who keep them down. Middle class America: with its false liberals, its private ownership of everything needed to live, its slave state mentality and racist theology…”

Much of the greatest writing is about divergence and transgression. In Peter Shaeffer’s play Equus, about a schizophrenic blinding horses, the disillusioned psychiatrist who is treating him, says, ‘passion is about getting your own spirit through your own suffering, that is what that boy has done here,’ as he rejects his training. Stevens writes a lot about the edge of normality and shows how norms are shaped by social lies and repression. How much do you think that as society is engineered towards a conformity to a norm that is addictive and deluded, writers have duty to challenge and subvert that ideology?

Society is engineered toward conformity because conformity is comforting. That’s how our monkey brain is wired. It’s scary and dangerous to be the monkey who leaves the forest floor and the troop to see what’s on the other side of the river. Unfortunately, conformity also makes it easier for us to be controlled. I mean, what’s one of the first things you learn in school? How to stand in line and follow the person in front of you, right? Or where you and everyone else goes when a bell rings. And conformity too is a beloved tool used to sell you junk you don’t need. All of which in turn plays into our resistance to change and our deep hunger for continuity. Deeply, deeply human stuff we’ve been dealing with and trying to figure out since we were capable of trying to figure anything out really, right? I mean, the entirety of Buddhist thought is about how to deal with our resistance to change and impermanence.

But none of that—conformity, resistance to change, blind need for continuity—is useful to our growth or progress as either a person or as a society. It’s like Eugene Debs said, “If it had not been for the discontent of a few fellows who had not been satisfied with their conditions, you would still be living in caves. Intelligent discontent is the mainspring of civilization. Progress is born of agitation. It is agitation or stagnation.”

So I absolutely believe challenging and subverting conformity are part of the writer’s duty. A lot of people say a writer’s job is to be a professional liar. No. Stories are how we convey knowledge, they’re how we make sense of tough things, and they’re how we confront what should be confronted. I think a writer’s job is to tell the truth and the truth is always confrontational. Even if the story you’re telling is wrapped in bright shell of fantasy and make-believe, you should be able to crack that bastard open and find the truth in the center. That’s what I think the old writing adage “write what you know” means. What you know is the truth about your world, about your society, about your government, and about being human.

You know, to bring it specifically back to Stevens, I’m reminded too of a brief mention Jo LeCoeur gives Stevens in her article on John William Corrington and his contribution to the English Department as LSU. She writes, “Beatnik-attired, Bread Loaf Fellow Shane Stevens was on stage in spring 1970, his reading calling for armed rebellion against the white power structure for sending Puerto Ricans, blacks, and hippies to die in Vietnam.”

Rat Pack and Way Uptown In Another World are both gritty street novels, but to what extent do you find poetry in Stevens’s voice and what do you think his legacy is in the ongoing canon of crime fiction?

I think there’s poetry in everything he’s written:

“People dumping everything out the windows and buildings just crumpling down where they is. Must be hundred million bricks out there all worn and useless. Like mostly everything round here. Couple kids playing in the garbage and watching out they don’t step on broke bottles. They think this just a game what little kids play till they is grow up. They don’t know that what they whole life is going be. Just garbage and broke bottles.” –Go Down Dead

“Ginny never really had a chance. The sick got her and the misery got her and then the dead got her. She didn’t know anybody much and she was scared of all the paper stuff and she was too proud to ask other people for help. She was a Southern girl who didn’t understand the strange and easy ways of the North and she never got used to the cold.” —Way Uptown In Another World

“I have been shot, stabbed, beaten, gassed, stomped, whipped, jailed and had acid thrown on me. I have smelled death, seen its shadow and heard its cry. Violence has been my natural playground, and I know a little about it. And about the darker side of violence too, the violence that is within oneself. It’s just beneath the surface, lurking there, waiting, always ready to smash and destroy. Within each of us is this terrible beast; its screamings are maddening and, sometimes, unbearable. Then the violence erupts. The results are always tragic.” —The White Niggers of the 70s

“The girl in my building is running scared.” —A Day Like Any Other Day in Junk City

“In the crashpad existence of most East Village writers, probably the only thing in common is the fierce determination to write, to shake, to move minds, whether it be on paper, film, stage or brick wall.” —The East Village

As far as his legacy? That’s hard to say. A lot of times, it’s hard to measure influence directly. But, probably and unfortunately, not much right now. Especially in the States where pretty much everything except for By Reason of Insanity is out of print. I think he’s mostly a footnote or simply that guy Stephen King mentioned in The Dark Half.

It would help, I think, if his work would get reprinted in the States. I don’t know when that’ll happen though. A while back I put Lee Goldberg in touch with Shane’s agent. Lee wanted to release Dead City as an eBook through his Brash Books imprint but the agent relayed a “pass”. Which is a damned shame, but what are you going to do? Stevens being mostly forgotten is the main reason I started researching the man and working on a biography in the first place.

Thank you Chad for an informative interview.

Bio:

Chad Eagleton is a Spinetingler Award nominee and a two-time Watery Grave Invitational finalist. He formerly served as a reader for Needle: A Magazine of Noir and as co-editor for the Beat To A Pulp webzine. His work is available in print, ebook, and online. Most recently, he completed Hoods, Hot Rods, and Hellcats, a 1950s-themed crime fiction anthology featuring an introduction from counterculture legend Mick Farren (Amazon US and UK). He has several new works forthcoming and is, in fact, still working on his Shane Stevens biography. In the meantime, join his fray at: dimestoreriot.com and find him on Twitter here.