Cities of the Damned:
Literary Noir
in the Twenty-First Century
Charlotte Carter Jason Starr Charlie Stella Kevin Wignall Charlie Williams Allan Guthrie
Publisher's Weekly, praising the work of Jason Starr, calls him 'an heir of the bleakly noir mantle of Jim Thompson…a master at portraying New York as a city of the damned.' It is unquestionably Jim Thompson who is most often invoked when critics are looking for a shorthand way of capturing the perverse pleasures, edgy excitement and dark humour of twenty-first century noir. But the influences are, of course, far more diverse than this implies (Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, Charles Willeford, Charles Williams, Harry Whittington, George V. Higgins, Elmore Leonard…) and the contemporary voices more distinctive. The range of these voices is remarkable: since 2000 we’ve had, for example, John Williams’s Cardiff Dead (2000); the second and third novels in James Ellroy’s ‘Underworld USA’ series, The Cold Six Thousand (2001) and Police Gazette (2002); Charlotte Carter's Walking Bones (2002); Carol Anne Davis’s Kiss It Away (2003); Jason Starr’s Hard Feelings (2002), Tough Luck (2003) and Twisted City (2004); Charlie Stella's Eddie's World (2001), Jimmy Bench-Press (2002), Charlie Opera (2003) and Cheapskates (forthcoming in 2005); Ken Bruen’s fourth Jack Taylor novel, The Dramatist (2004); David Peace’s Nineteen Eighty Three (2004); Kevin Wignall's People Die (2001); Charlie Williams' Deadfolk (2004); Ray Banks' The Big Blind (2004); Allan Guthrie's Two-Way Split (2004) and Kiss Her Goodbye (2005) - and this is only a small sampling.
The vigour and diversity of recent literary noir are difficult to convey in a brief review section, but subsequent instalments of our '21st-century crime' feature will regularly offer reviews of contemporary noir - and we very much welcome recommendations from readers, as well, of course, as books for review. To begin with, reviews of half a dozen books by some of the best writers of literary noir to come on the scene in the last decade: from the US, Charlotte Carter's Walking Bones (2002), Jason Starr's Tough Luck (2003) and Charlie Stella's Charlie Opera (2003); from the UK, Kevin Wignall's People Die (2001), Charlie Williams' Deadfolk (2004) and Allan Guthrie's Kiss Her Goodbye (2005).
Charlotte Carter, Walking Bones (Serpent's Tail, 2002)
Lee Horsley
Charlotte Carter is perhaps best known for writing a detective series featuring Nanette Hayes, a hedonistic, independent, jazz-loving street saxophonist, in novels like Rhode Island Red (1997), Coq Au Vin (1999) and Drumsticks (2001). In addition, however, she has written a non-series, non-detective novel, Walking Bones, of which she says, ‘If nothing else, the Walking Bones characters are a messed up lot. Maybe they are my way of asking, “Is this dark enough for you?”’ When she started to get feedback on the novel and saw the word ‘noir’ a lot, she wanted, she said, ‘to say Hooray! Finally I'm noir. I haven't yet reached the mecca of being ‘transgressive’, but at least I'm noir.’
Carter’s female protagonist in Walking Bones, Nettie, is not a detective figure but a reworking of the stereotype of the femme fatale. Her subjectivity is at the centre of an often dreamlike narrative that explores her self-construction, and the contradictions of a character that is both potentially powerful and abjectly submissive. Having come to New York to be a fashion model, Nettie has outgrown the conventional dimensions of the role, and is now a ‘handsome and powerfully built woman of color standing nearly six feet tall. Irreversibly too big for the runway. Her descent commenced…She moved into darker and darker neighborhoods’. Her downward spiral halted (with the help of her black, gay friend Rufe), she reclaims the power to control the gaze, self-confident enough to intimidate others and to be labeled a bitch by other women. Her whole sense of self depends on projecting a figure that is looked at. But although Nettie has reinvented herself more than once, she is bound to her past in ways that don’t become fully apparent until the end of the novel.
The core of the narrative is a dangerously aberrant sado-masochistic relationship between Nettie and a wealthy white middle-aged man called Albert Press – as Carter describes him in interview, ‘a quirky, profoundly troubled white man who is a kind of wash on a familiar character in fiction: the innocent Anglo who unwittingly sets all kinds of tragedies in motion’. His deeply ambiguous attraction for Nettie is made explicit: ‘But this man was not like any of those other partners. This was a man who had elicited in her murder and degradation and unbelievable tenderness’ (96). The initial violent meeting with Press takes place in the small sphere of a New York bar that appears to be unaligned in terms of either race or class. The encounter with Albert, however, transforms it into a racially charged place, and the sequence of events there (a coarse proposition, a glass smashed in Press’s face by Nettie) begins both a strange affair and a diagnosis of guilt that is a painful exploration of racialized patterns of dominance and submission.
The more open-ended form of the crime novel, as opposed to the detective novel, enables Carter to place at the heart of her narrative the indeterminacy of guilt and the contradictions of black female identity produced by the institution of slavery. It also helps to make Walking Bones a novel that seriously addresses racial issues but that also ranges more widely, breaking free from many of the clichéd ways of writing a ‘black’ version of a ‘white’ genre. Carter says in interview: 'Funny. I've probably said a hundred thousand times that it's tragic, sick, dumb, grotesque, etc., that black writers in the U.S. can't seem to get published unless they write about race. So, given the chance to publish a small, arty kind of novel, I wrote about race. But not entirely. Also on the platter, the platter being Walking Bones, are alcohol, masochism, jealousy, fate, the city of New York, and race in the city of New York.'
Interviews with Carter online at: ‘Charlotte Carter’s Walking Bones’, www.serpentstail.com; Bob Cornwell, ‘Sophisticated Lady’, www.twbooks.co.uk.
Copyright © 2005 by Lee Horsley
Jason Starr, Tough Luck (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, 2003)
Allan Guthrie (originally published online by Allan Guthrie's Noir Originals)
More than most authors, Jason Starr uses the workplace as a setting to fuel tensions. It’s no surprise that Tough Luck opens in Vincent’s Fish Market, a fish shop, with likeable Mickey Prada, an innocent kid with moderate ambitions and an ailing father to support, serving Angelo Santoro, who Mickey’s friend Chris suspects is a wise-guy.
When Angelo starts asking Mickey to place bets with for him we can be forgiven for imagining we have the makings of a caper novel. But very quickly we realise that Mickey’s situation is too dangerous for that.
Jason Starr enjoys playing with his readers. Protagonists of previous novels start out as likeable enough guys, but throughout the course of the book they turn into psychopaths, by which point you’ve grown fond enough of them to still care what happens to them. The typical Jason Starr protagonist is amoral. He doesn’t manifest any overt psychological abnormalities if his life is running smoothly, but when problems arise, as they surely will, he has a tendency to revert to his primal state of psychopathology.
With Mickey, Jason Starr has taken a slightly different approach. Mickey’s no psychopath. He’s an innocent. What makes me say that?
Well, he’s a virgin, for a start. Chris likes to keep reminding him of the fact. Chris pulls a stunt on him one drunken night with a hooker, which is extremely cruel.
He’s suggestible. Having been told "Your friend Angelo’s a wise-guy", Mickey sees "a Mafia way about him…half-smiling and walking with a strut." And he likes to please: "he couldn’t think of a way to say no."
He lacks confidence and self-esteem. This is reinforced by many of those around him, from his exploitative boss, Harry ("just a fuckin’ asshole and he treats us like we the shit that comes outta it") to his friends (or more accurately, the gang he hangs out with), who refer to him as "loser", "sucker" and, in the case of Filippo: "so fuckin’ stupid."
When Mickey meets Rhonda, the girl of his dreams, it’s no surprise that he’s pessimistic about the outcome. Having plucked up the courage to invite her to dinner, instead of being delighted that she accepts, he starts imagining "sitting across from her at the restaurant on Friday with nothing to say. It would probably be the worst night of his life." Later, he continues in the same vein, "Mickey knew he didn’t have to worry about feeling embarrassed around her tonight because of the way he was dressed or smelled; he had no chance with her, anyway."
Mickey has dreams, though. He wants to go to college and become an accountant. He’s been saving for a while now, despite the drain on his resources caused by looking after his Alzheimer-afflicted father.
You have to feel sorry for him when he’s forced to dip into his savings. And you have to understand when he’s offered a role in a robbery. And when things go wrong, as they inevitably have to, you have to wonder how events could have turned out any differently.
Mickey Prada is a nice guy, an innocent in a disingenuous world. He doesn’t deserve all that grief. That’s why Tough Luck is so compelling.
Copyright © 2003 Allan Guthrie
Click here for Lee Horsley's review of Jason Starr's first novel, Cold Caller (1997).
Charlie Stella, Charlie Opera (Carroll & Graf, 2003)
Lee Horsley
'"Jesus Christ," Cuccia said through his wired jaw. "What the hell is going on in this shit city?"' The shit city is Las Vegas, and the hell that has broken loose is a carnivalesque procession of DEA agents, vengeful wiseguys, cheating wives, hookers, hitmen, clueless henchmen and assorted other rogues and grotesques. There is a manic energy to Charlie Stella's writing. Heir to much that's best in the hard-boiled tradition - often compared to George V. Higgins and Elmore Leonard - Stella has a gift for tough humour, quick-fire dialogue and comic plotting. Using rapidly shifting points of view, Charlie Opera involves the reader with a motley crew of sharply delineated characters as they descend on Las Vegas, pursuing, surveilling, beating up, shooting and narrowly escaping one another.
At the centre of these spiraling narrative confusions is Charlie Pellecchia ('Charlie Opera'), a retired New York window cleaner who unwittingly finds himself mixed up with mobsters. When Nicky Cuccia, nephew of the underboss of the Vignieri crime family, grabs the ass of a broad who happens to be Charlie's wife, Charlie breaks his jaw, and the consequences, as Nicky sees it, are unavoidable: '"I want him fucked up and then I want him dead. I want to be there when it happens."' The absurd complications besetting this simple plan are the substance of Charlie Opera. The cross-purposes, unfortunate coincidences and complexities of the plot are a comic version of the operas Charlie loves. A barmaid called Samantha, the new girlfriend that Charlie meets in the course of his adventures, enquires into his favourite operas:
"Are there any about a bartender who meets a guy who was just dumped by his wife?"
"The one where the mob's chasing him?"
"But the mob leaves him alone because of a DEA agent."
"I don't know about that DEA agent. He could turn out to be one of the bad guys."
Samantha rolled her eyes. "Work with me, Charlie. I was hoping for a happy ending."
On his website, Charlie Stella quotes his mother's views of Charlie Opera: whilst protesting against the cursing and the "dirty stuff", she also admits to an anxious involvement with his high-spirited plot that most of his other readers will undoubtedly share: "It was good, sonny. I couldn’t wait to finish it."
Copyright © 2005 Lee Horsley
Kevin Wignall, People Die (Simon & Schuster, 2001)
Lee Horsley
Kevin Wignall's People Die begins with a tableau that could have come out of Charlie Opera - 'heartless killer, hapless victim, the girl between'. In Wignall's novel, however, the perspective is that of the hitman, and, although there is humour, it is always subordinate to his more serious themes - confined in this scene, for example, to the moment when the man 'almost comically' springs away from the girl 'as if trying to suggest the two of them were just sharing the bed.' This is, throughout, a narrative of strange bedfellows, uneasy meetings, awkward questions and missing answers. When the hitman has, with two accurate shots, killed the man in the bed, he stands silently, transfixed by the girl, who rises from the bed as if oblivious to his presence, 'as if the two of them were in different dimensions, ghosts to each other.' The scene conveys a paradoxical combination of power and powerlessness: she is naked and defenseless; he holds a gun but feels powerless to ask her what is inside the wrapped object she holds tightly against her chest, 'because of the air of total privacy that surrounded her.'
This opening encounter encapsulates the novel's compelling mixture of reticence and aggression, and of psychological subtlety and mounting tension. Kevin Wignall didn't set out to write genre fiction: 'What I write,' he says, 'is generally placed in the thriller/crime/ mystery category but this was never my intention in writing the books. My main themes are death and isolation and I believe it's simply good grace to make the reader want to turn the page.' People Die succeeds on both counts, as of course does much of the best literary noir written during the past half century. His portrait of JJ, the thoughtful, articulate hitman, is an extraordinary balancing act, and he does indeed beguile his readers not just into turning the pages but into a warm attachment to his characters. Marilyn Stasio, praising Wignall's work in The New York Times Book Review (5 May 2002), nicely captures the pleasures of his sparse, carefully judged style - a 'guarded style', allowing us to 'savor JJ's growing discomfort as he struggles to figure out how many of these openhearted Americans know his dark secrets and what they intend to do about him. Even more delicacy goes into the author's task of winning us over to JJ's quest for redemption, which he does by finding both the brutal language for JJ's killing arts and the soulful music of his wish for just one night of untroubled sleep.'
Kevin Wignall's 2004 novel, For the Dogs, has at its centre another sympathetically created contract killer. I have not as yet had a chance to read it, but other reviewers have praised it for much the same qualities that make People Die so remarkable - as Jana Kraus, for example, writes, 'a gritty novel about fate, tragic loss and retribution', For the Dogs is also about 'reconciliation, renewal and forgiveness', and ' a terrific read anyway you look at it.' (http://mostlyfiction.com/spy-thriller/wignall.htm)
Copyright © 2005 Lee Horsley
Charlie Williams, Deadfolk (Serpent's Tail, 2004)
Ray Banks (originally published online by Allan Guthrie's Noir Originals)
"Mangel's like the underside of a boulder, all damp and crawlin' with woodlice. No one'd ever know it were there, less they took the trouble to lift the boulder. But no one ever lifts the boulder, Blake. Too heavy ennit. So the lice runs round and round in the dark and damp."
Charlie Williams was worried about Jason Starr after reading Fake I.D. If the author is somehow culpable for his characters' actions, then we should be running for the hills when it comes to Williams. Especially if he has a power tool to hand.
Royston Blake, Blakey to his friends, is the head doorman of Hoppers Wine Bar And Bistro, a place that sticks out like a sore thumb in Mangel, thanks to the new out-of-town ownership. Blake is a small town hardcase, the kind with a monkey wrench in his leathers and a Ford Capri 2.8i outside, the kind of guy people look up to. That is until word goes round that Royston Blake's lost his bottle. Now Blakey can't have that, so it's not long before he's proving his nerve in the worst way possible, leading to death, destruction, a chainsaw called Susan and the mysterious "doofer". Throw in a botched insurance burn job from two years earlier, and you've got yourself a whole load of Deadfolk waiting to happen.
Deadfolk is being described as "Guy Ritchie meets Jim Thompson", which is kind of lazy considering the talent on display here. But if we're talking the Ritchie of Lock, Stock and the Thompson of Pop 1280, then you're close. Both works revolve around a single, claustrophobic world. The world in Deadfolk is Mangel, a microcosm of everything cultureless and grimy in Britain. At once a cartoon and horribly realistic, Mangel is a dying backwater town, stripped of its industry and its pride. Populated by men who turn into angry drunks and women with low standards, the area's a last liquid cough in a moribund country.
However the book is more than pastiche. The plot is pure gonzo noir, faking rights and taking lefts, jumping back and slapping the reader in the face. It's certainly a breathless read. The violence is often shocking, vicious and, especially towards the end of the book, defiantly turned up to eleven. It might smack of sadism were it not for the fact that Williams writes with genuine finesse and a streak of black humour a mile wide.
This is exemplified in Deadfolk's narrator, Royston Blake. If you've chanced across This Is Mangel, then you'll know what's in store. Told in a vernacular that sounds like a West Country Daniel Woodrell, the writing is constantly colourful, often unique. When a character laughs, his shoulders go "up and down like a pair of humping cows", the description of Blake trying to urinate with an erection is a killer and he's constantly aware of people "flobbing" when they talk. Blake's an odd character, certainly not the brightest button in the box, nor is he a saint. Just another lonely doorman with bad luck and even worse friends. He's a perfect noir anti-hero, prone to violence and self-justification, sympathetic in his naivety and desperation, yet you still wouldn't want to meet him down a dark alley.
Deadfolk doesn't read like a debut. Williams' pedigree in the small presses has done wonders here, resulting in tough, terse writing and not one superfluous sentence. And for all the humour involved, the book isn't throwaway reading material. It grows deeper and funnier with repeated reading. Of course, it may be a little gory for the cosy crowd but the rest of us can delight in a book that reads like a pissed-up bar brawl: quick, bloody, vicious and frequently hilarious.
Here's hoping that Williams lifts up that boulder again real soon.
Copyright © 2004 Ray Banks
Allan Guthrie, Kiss Her Goodbye (Hard Case Crime, 2005)
One of the great pleasures of running a website is getting to know (in virtual space) people you wouldn't otherwise have a chance to meet. If you're very lucky, you may also get a sneak preview of their work before it makes its way to a wider audience. In March 2003, when I read Allan Guthrie's first novel, Two-Way Split, it had been a CWA Debut Dagger short-listed novel, but had yet to find a publisher. Reading it as a Word document on my laptop, I was unable to take my eyes from my computer screen, riveted by this stripped down, breathless, all-at-one-sitting read - a tough, fast-moving, funny novel with the kind of energy that's so compelling in a lot of the best mid-century American noir. It seemed inconceivable that it wouldn't soon find a publisher, and now, a couple of years down the line, both this debut novel and a second novel, Kiss Her Goodbye, are out (or nearly out) in the US, Al Guthrie has been signed by a UK publisher, and another novel is on the way.
Kiss Her Goodbye, due for publication in March 2005 with Hard Case Crime, is an even more impressive novel than Two-Way Split. The laconic style carries the reader along at a great pace, taking a narrative that in other hands could have been sentimental and keeping it hard as nails. The simplicity of the novel's family-centred plot gives ample room for the development of characters - and they are very vivid, the whole of the central cast, tough and funny, as in the first novel, but also moving and vulnerable in ways that make the reader anxious for their safety.
As in Wignall's People Die, we are invited to share the emotions and inner struggles of a protagonist whose job is to hurt people. The affectless prose of the first sentence ('The day he found out his daughter was dead, Joe Hope was at Cooper’s flat watching horse racing on Channel 4') conveys both the trauma at the heart of the novel and the numbing normality of Joe's working relationship with Cooper, the Edinburgh loan-shark for whom he is an enforcer ('Joe hit the boy’s ankle, kneecap, elbow in quick succession. Quick double-handers. Not too much power. Probably didn’t break more than a couple of bones.'). Other characters are of course introduced - a soon-to-be-murdered wife, an innocent called Adam, a hooker who wields a mean baseball bat - but in Al Guthrie's tightly structured narrative we see clearly from the first page the conflicting forces in the life of a man whose familiar world has required toughness but has not entirely prepared him for the guilt, suspicion, grief, pain and violence that now await him.
Highly praised by (among others) Ian Rankin, Ed Gorman, Bill Pronzini and Jason Starr, Al Guthrie is rapidly coming to be seen as one of Britain's most exciting new crime writers. As Russell D. McLean writes in his Crime Scene review, 'what makes Guthrie’s work unique in a culture obsessed by criminal conspiracy and killers with grand-guignol motives is that everything in the book is personal…Kiss Her Goodbye is tough-as-nails, Scots noir. Deftly characterised, with witty dialogue and a mean plot, Guthrie’s excellent second novel is lean, keen and pure hardboiled heaven."
Copyright © 2005 by Lee Horsley
Notes on contributors:
RAY BANKS has been a double-glazing salesman, croupier, student and varying degrees of disgruntled office monkey. All of which, mixed with a heady cocktail of booze and hatred, brought The Big Blind to the page. He is also the creator of Manchester PI Callum Innes, who has appeared in Handheld Crime, Hardluck Stories, Plots With Guns and Thrilling Detective. At the moment, Ray is wrestling with the first Innes book, Dead Man's Hand and eagerly awaiting publication of The Big Blind by PointBlank Press this autumn. And sometimes, just sometimes, he's been known to write third-person past tense.
ALLAN GUTHRIE was born in Orkney, but has lived in Edinburgh for most of his adult life. He is married to Donna. He has published several short stories in a variety of magazines and anthologies. His CWA Debut Dagger shortlisted novel, TWO-WAY SPLIT, was published by PointBlank in June '04. His second novel, KISS HER GOODBYE, will be published on March 7th, 2005, by Hard Case Crime. Allan is webmaster/editor of Noir Originals and commissioning editor for both Pulp Originals and PointBlank Press.
Ken Bruen, Allan Guthrie, Jason Starr and J. D. Rhoades; moderated by Duane Swierczynski
appearing Thursday, March 24, 2005, 6:30 p.m.
at MBTB's Night of Noir
http://www.murderbooks.com/noir.php
