Barry Gifford's Wild At Heart, The Story of Sailor and Lula

[Jay]

Barry Gifford founded Black Lizard Books in the mid-80s, which reprinted major noir writers of the post-war period. He applied the term noir to these pulp paperback novels, after the French term for crime films centering not on the crime itself but on the love and/or money that motivated it. A good writer fascinated readers with a protagonist’s anxiety, revenge, possessive desire, betrayal, or entrapment in obsessive behavior patterns.
The author characterized _Wild At Heart: The Story of Sailor and Lula_ as a “violent satire.” Clearly, as editor, publisher, and writer, he knew as much as anyone about classic American crime yarns. _Wild At Heart_ has suspense, pursuit, vengeance, murder, suicide, a femme fatale, a couple on the run, and descriptions of wild places, dangerous roads, “quickie” motels, and stunning sunsets. They reveal that “this whole world is wild at heart and weird on top.”

This fits a characterization of any good pulp, noir, hard boiled, or country noir (or gothic) crime yarn. Sailor opines, “Anythin’ interestin’ in the world come out of somebody’s weird thoughts.”
Gifford makes Sailor and Lula perfectly endearing, as pulp crime post-WWII newsstand paperbacks do not.. They go places everybody knows even if they have never watched Van Halen, Kid Chocolate, The Holy Roller Rebel Raiders, The Datin’ Game or The Bleach Boys.

That is why the wild at heart lovers pay attention to them, and retell what happened to such weird performers as time went by. Joe Don Looney leaves pro football for study with a Zen mystic. Evil Knievel’s motorcycle daring leaves him with eleven plates in his body. Marcell Proust’s whole life story came back to him after he ate a cookie. Sailor and Lula pick up a hitchhiker on his way to Alaska with six Huskie pups he’s feeding on calves’ liver. But not for long; he stinks.

This is not satire; although it might count as burlesque. But it is for sure a fun way of making what, previous to Gifford, revealed to the urban working class the precarious and grim awareness of their cage into which their “fourth class ticket” had locked them.
Sailor and Lula meet after he has finished his 10-year sentence for manslaughter and armed robbery. Sailor realizes his 10-year son never knew him, and he could not establish a father-son love with the boy. . “You been doin’ fine without me, Peanut. There ain’t no need to make life tougher‘n it has to be.”

It seems looking closely at life’s choices, or lack of choices, is a kind of wildness in itself, simply because most people are not open to it. It’s too weird, a kind of everyday, thus beautiful resignation one can to live with, and should not judge . It is the opposite of that which possesses the heroes of Chandler, Horace McCoy, Charles Williams, Dorothy Hughes, Gil Brewer, Lionel White, Cornell Woolrich, or Benjamin Appel.