Off the Rails

Been at loose ends with my writing lately. You know what I mean? Lots of different ideas floating around, and not sure which direction to go. The new novel sort of went off the rails somewhere, and I’ve been busy trying to figure out how to get the engine back on the tracks. Ideas for shorter works keep cluttering up my thought processes as well, tempting me to leave the novel alone for awhile and placate the short story muse.
This is what happens when you actually have TIME to write, for a change-- you get scattered.
There’s also that persistent question of what you really wanna SAY this time out. I mean, the story itself is one thing, but what’s it really ABOUT, on a deeper level? In The Bastard Hand, I exorcised a lot of demons regarding how I feel about faith and religion, etc… in my second novel, City of Heretics, I addressed how I felt about getting old, feeling that weird disconnect from humanity, feeling the world had somehow moved on when I wasn’t paying attention. So what’s the new one about? I have no idea, yet.
I suspect it’ll come to me, while I’m writing it.
For someone who is half in love with chaos, I find I really need a plan, a regiment, to actually get anything done. And the circumstances of my day job afford me a good opportunity-- every year, I’m laid off for a period of about three or four months. So here’s my new plan:
During those months off the day job, I concentrate on a novel. Focus. Get it done, at least the first draft, anyway. And the months in which I’m working the day job, write short stories (if the idea is fully formed, I can pop off a short story in one-to-three sittings).
So that’s the plan. Stop being so damn scattered and stick to it.
Okay, I feel better now.

About Charles Willeford

A really terrific site about Willeford, perhaps the most subversive of all writers of paperback originals. Willeford is, in my opinion, one of the most significant three or four writers in the genre.

Charles Willeford

Pete Risley's Essential Noir

Just recently had the honor of making the acquaintance of Pete Risley, the author of RABID CHILD, one of the most talked about debut novels of 2010, published by New Pulp Press. You wonder what books inspired his twisted mind? Here ya go...
http://www.newpulppress.com/titles/rabid_child/

Pete says:
"I always enjoy reading lists like this, but I think they tend to get most interesting once the list-makers get past the great ‘canonical’ works that almost everyone in the category has been influenced by, and point out their own less-predictable favorites. Therefore, I'll cheat a little bit and skip Hammett, Chandler, etc, so I can maybe provide an entire list of interesting picks – though I guess some I’ve settled on are pretty standard choices after all. Others, though, are not."

1. Paul Cain (George Sims), FAST ONE, 1934. Gambling, gangsters and a ‘dipso’ moll in Los Angeles. Episodic and written in a clipped, fast-paced style Chandler called “ultra-hardboiled.”
2. James M. Cain, SERENADE, 1937. Down-and-out American tough-guy opera singer in Mexico gets his groove back when he meets hard but sweet Indian-Latina trollop, but a star-crossed fate awaits them. Driven by a dubious concept of homosexual attraction and its effect on the male singing voice.
3. John B. Sanford, THE OLD MAN’S PLACE, 1935. Yankee farmer’s son returns home from the Great War with two criminal companions, all of them set to get stupid-drunk, trash the place and raise hell just for the hell of it. The entrance of a naïve girl onto the scene brings more trouble still. A harsh, nihilistic work by a writer just then about to turn radical left. Underrated. Reprinted as a ‘50’s paperback with new title THE HARD GUYS.
4. Horace McCoy, KISS TOMORROW GOODBYE, 1948. From prison break to gangster crime spree, a vicious, sexually-twisted sociopath leaves scorched earth behind. Standard-setter for much noir fiction that followed.
5. Mickey Spillane, ONE LONELY NIGHT, 1951. With Cold War paranoia still reaching for its height, Mike Hammer takes on the international Communist conspiracy. Culminates in a scene of spiced-up bloody carnage that's as absurd as it is effective. Then comes the brutal surprise ending that literally out-McCarthys Joe McCarthy.
6. Chandler Brossard, WHO WALK IN DARKNESS, 1952. Dark intrigue among literary hipsters in Beat era Greenwich Village. Roman a clef, that is, based on real people, including Anatole Broyard and William Gaddis.
7. John Clellon Holmes, GO, 1952. Young Allen Ginsberg as pathetic noirish mental case among NYC hipsters. Also has characters based on Kerouac, Neal Cassady, others from the circle.
8. William S. Burroughs, QUEER, written c. 1953, published 1985. Written immediately after his first novel JUNKIE. Starkly depicts self-revulsion and despair that led 'William Lee' to junk in the first place. A scene in which Lee creeps out acquaintances in a bar by doing a twisted Burroughsian 'routine,' which he continues composing in his head after they split and leave him in solitude, is key to the author's sensibility.
9. Jim Thompson SAVAGE NIGHT, 1953. A bizarre hit man hits it off with a still-stranger girl. Along with the slighter work A HELL OF A WOMAN, this novel displays Thompson's urge to represent the increasing derangement of his protagonists by exploding the narrative itself.
10. Elliot Chaze, BLACK WINGS HAS MY ANGEL, 1953. Irresistible attraction between tough, frustrated WWII vet and dangerous doll leads to wild road-tripping crime spree.
11. Harriet Daimler, DARLING, 1956. Arguably noir porn novel from Olympia Press, Paris. Young female artist in NYC seeks sexual fulfillment and/or revenge after being viciously raped. Very dirty.
12. Peter Rabe, KILL THE BOSS GOODBYE, 1956. Crime boss in fragile mental state cuts short his rest cure to thwart a takeover attempt. A cold and sharp study of personal disintegration under pressure.
13. Fletcher Flora, PARK AVENUE TRAMP, 1958. Beautiful, booze-addled trophy wife on the prowl for love/sex seduces a lonely, doomed lounge pianist. A very dark and moving love-but-not-love story.
14. John McPartland, THE KINGDOM OF JOHNNY COOL. 1959. Aspiring, very tough young Italian mobster in US on hit mission gets tripped up when smitten with unlikely girl. Compare with far sleazier THE PEDDLER by Richard Prather, as well as sleazier and crazier SAVAGE NIGHT by Thompson.
15. Vin Packer, THE DAMNATION OF ADAM BLESSING,1961. Variant on Ripleyesque user/trickster, whose weaknesses bring about a bizarre, unexpected meltdown.
16. Charles Perry, PORTRAIT OF A YOUNG MAN DROWNING, 1962. Grim story of Oedipal-complexed juvenile delinquent in Brooklyn drawn into gangster life, even as his psyche is crumbling. Compare with KILL THE BOSS GOODBYE.
17. Malcolm Braly, SHAKE HIM TILL HE RATTLES, 1963. Jazz musicians, shabby hipsters, cons and a sadistic cop in the North Beach district of San Francisco.
18. Schneck, Stephen. THE NIGHTCLERK. 1965. Effete, grossly fat clerk in hot-sheet hotel obsesses over the fantasy-fulfilling antics of his nymphomaniac hooker wife. Floridly-written black humor novel.
19. Curt Clark (Donald E. Westlake), ANARCHAOS, 1967. Science Fiction novel with noir atmosphere, set on lawless planet of gangsters.
20. Rudolph Wurlitzer, NOG, 1969. Oddly convincing tale of the deeply stoned journeyings of a young man who might once have had a truck and a rubber octopus, and who meets a girl, and then some other people. Maintains a noirish sense of detached dread, threatening to go full-tilt hallucinatory at any time, if indeed it hasn’t already.
21 (one more for the road). Jim Nisbet, DEATH PUPPET, 1989. Bored waitress in a small town has tryst with strangely enticing traveling salesman. Turns out she shouldn’t have…

Richard Widmark Noir

You can't get much more noir as an actor than Richard Widmark. Here's some of his best:

Kiss of Death
1947-Henry Hathaway
One of the top five or ten greatest noirs ever made.
Victor Mature is an ex-con who turned state’s evidence so he can have a life with new wife Ann Gray. Brian Donlevy is the cop who helps him. And Richard Widmark… well, Widmark (in his first major role) is the psychotic Tommy Udo, who learns of Mature’s betrayal and sets his sites on him.
Widmark’s portrayal of Udo set a new standard for movie baddies. He’s scary as hell. Kiss of Death is a masterpiece.

Street with No Name
1948
Widmark again, in his follow-up to Kiss of Death, again playing the scary-as-hell psycho. Nobody could do it quite as well.
An FBI agent goes undercover to nab a murderer and joins the gang of neurotic criminal Widmark, who is “building an organization along scientific lines”.

Night & the City
1950-Jules Dassin
Essential noir, with a first-rate cast, shot on location in London. The brilliant Widmark is an ambitious but none-too-bright hustler who finds himself running for his life when his plans to swindle a nightclub owner go awry. Also starring the gorgeous Gene Tierney, and Herbert Lom.

Pickup on South Street
1953-Sam Fuller
Doesn’t get much better than this one. Widmark is a master pickpocket who finds himself in possession of some microfilm that some Commie secret agents will stop at nothing to get back.

Panic in the Streets
1950-Elia Kazan
Terrific movie. Widmark takes a turn as a good guy for a change, playing a doctor desperately trying to track down a murderous criminal who’s been unknowingly infected with a deadly disease. The criminal must be stopped before he spreads the plague throughout the entire city of New Orleans.
Also starring Jack Palance and Barbara Bel Geddes.

Patti Abbott's "Friday's Forgotten Books"

My piece on The Name of the Game is Death is up at Patti's great blog, right here:
pattinase.
Thanks again, Patti, for letting me ramble on about one of my favorite books.

Donna Moore's Essential Noir

Donna Moore is the author of Old Dogs, a rollicking fun heist novel, as well as 2007 Lefty Award winner Go to Helena Handbasket. She has short stories in various anthologies, including Damn Near Dead and A Hell of a Woman (both Busted Flush Press). Donna runs the always amusing and entertaining blog Big Beat From Badsville, which focuses on Scottish crime fiction. I'm honored to have her here.

Donna says:

"A scan of my bookshelves revealed these as the first
twenty-ahem-three to present themselves to me. A couple of them are
not crime fiction, but they're definitely noir. A couple of them might
not be someone else's definition of noir, but they're mine. I get all
excited when I read a book which tortures its protagonist in the way
that noir fiction does. I hug myself gleefully as the poor guy (or
gal) desperately tries to scrabble his way out of a dirty great hole
and when finally, it looks as though hope arrives in the form of a
shovel...well, the only use for that shovel is to beat the protagonist
about the head before chucking more dirt on top of him. Ah, I do love
a nice bit of happy noir, me."

And Donna's list:

KNOCKEMSTIFF - Donald Ray Pollock
HELL OF A WOMAN - Jim Thompson
THE BURNT ORANGE HERESY - Charles Willeford
I WAS DORA SUAREZ - Derek Raymond
SLAMMER - Allan Guthrie
IN A LONELY PLACE - Dorothy B Hughes
NIGHTMARE ALLEY - William Lindsay Gresham (and if you've only ever
seen the film, the book is so much darker)
THE DEATH OF SWEET MISTER - Daniel Woodrell
BURY ME DEEP - Megan Abbott
RILKE ON BLACK - Ken Bruen
DISTURBING THE PEACE - Richard Yates
TOBACCO ROAD - Erskine Caldwell
THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE - James M Cain
NIGHT OF THE HUNTER - Davis Grubb
SQUEEZE PLAY - James McKimmey
THE DISTANCE - Eddie Muller
TWISTED CITY - Jason Starr
LOSS - Tony Black
THE BOTTOMS - Joe Lansdale
CROOKED LITTLE VEIN - Warren Ellis
WILEY'S LAMENT - Lono Waiwaiole
FAST ONE - Paul Cain
BEAST OF BURDEN - Ray Banks

Al Leverone's Essential Noir

The more of these lists I see, the more I suspect my own list of essential noir novels is fairly pedestrian-- yeah, there are some writers who seem to have made everyone's list (Cain, Hammett, etc) but so far every writer and critic who has contributed has pleasantly surprised me. Al Leverone, author of the forthcoming thriller Final Vector, is no exception.

Al says:

"I'm a 51 year old writer living in New Hampshire with my wife Sue, three children, one adorable granddaughter and a cat who has used up eight lives. A three-time Derringer Award Finalist for excellence in short mystery fiction, my work has been featured in Needle: A Magazine of Noir, Shroud Magazine, Twisted Dreams, Mysterical-E, FlashShot, Crime and Suspense and Black Hound, among others, as well as the print anthologies TEN FOR TEN and NORTHERN HAUNTS. My debut thriller, FINAL VECTOR, is due for release by Medallion Press in February, 2011."

And his list:
1) The Maltese Falcon - Dashiell Hammett
2) Double Indemnity - James M. Cain
3) The Postman Always Rings Twice - James M. Cain
4) The Big Sleep - Raymond Chandler
5) The Black Dahlia - James Ellroy
6) L.A. Confidential - James Ellroy
7) Cape Fear - John D. MacDonald
8) The Score - Richard Stark
9) Money For Nothing - Donald Westlake
10) Eight Million Ways to Die - Lawrence Block
11) The Drowning Pool - Ross MacDonald
12) Dead Aim - Thomas Perry
13) Strega - Andrew Vachss
14) Persuader - Lee Child
15) Trunk Music - Michael Connelly
16) The Wheelman - Duane Swierczynski
17) The Cold Spot - Tom Piccirilli
18) The Coldest Mile - Tom Piccirilli
19) Small Crimes - Dave Zeltserman
20) A Bad Day for Sorry - Sophie Littlefield