You read it here first: When it comes to all things classically
hard-boiled, Portland is the Left Coast's capital of noir.
San Francisco, eat your vegan heart out. Get back on the freeway,
L.A. Seattle? Please, have another latte on us, dot-comrades.
Sure, the metropoli of Cali have an age-old claim on cred
when it comes to the fantasy-land criminality at the core
of one of America's most robust literary traditions. La-La
Land has Chandler and Ellroy, The Big Sleep and L.A.
Confidential. San Fran boasts the sainted Hammett, Sam
Spade and The Maltese Falcon. With all due respect
to those bigger, badder cities, neither can touch PDX's
preservation of classic architecture, mist-shrouded menace
and the gritty je ne sais quoi of the city's oldest
precincts.
In such rainy, perpetually shadowed climes, it's hardly
a surprise to find tight-wound, ink-stained ex-cops, full-on
black crime fiction zealots and eager cybernauts dedicated
to two-fisted tales. A few of all of the above, below.
Back
In Black | Talkin' Internet Murder
Blues | Cop Land
Back
in Black
BY
DAVID WALKER
Donald Goines was holed up in Detroit trying to finish
his latest novel, Kenyatta's Last Hit, on the typewriter
when the end came. Goines, a former pimp, dope dealer, junkie
and ex-con, turned to writing while doing time in prison.
He skillfully translated his hard-boiled experiences on
the street into equally hard-boiled street literature. As
he added the final touches to what would be his 15th novel
in a dozen years, Goines was shot through the back of the
head with a shot gun. As if foreshadowing his own fate,
Goines' final novel killed off his best known character,
Kenyatta, the ghetto avenger: "The bullet struck Kenyatta
in the back of the head, sending pieces of his shattered
skull flying against Clement's oak desk." Given the violent
brutality of Goines' books, such as Black Gangster, Crime
Partners and Dope Fiend, his demise seemed morbidly
poetic.
The still-unsolved murder of Donald Goines in 1974 seemed
to bring an end to the blood-splattered tradition of brutal
street fiction that entranced fans and inspired modern-day
filmmaking. After Goines' death, black crime fiction seemed
to fade into obscurity. The art of the written word, and
the lurid tales spun by former street-hustlers-turned-authors,
have been replaced by gangsta rap. Filmmakers like Quentin
Tarantino have taken the beautifully profane words and gut-churning
violence of the genre and placed it on the screen for an
audience that has no idea where it came from. Glance over
the bookshelves of even the most well-stocked book stores,
and it would seem that the black crime novel was doomed
to die at the typewriter with Goines. Doomed, that is, until
now.
Author Gary Phillips has brought black crime fiction back
with a vengeance. Phillips' latest crime novel, The Jook,
breathes new life into a genre long thought to be extinct.
Phillips' earlier work was in the world of the popular black
mystery, which includes authors Walter Mosley (Devil
in a Blue Dress) and Valerie Wilson Wesley (Where
Evil Sleeps). This world of African-American private
detectives, populated by Phillips' Ivan Monk and Mosley's
Easy Rawlins, is something completely different from the
grimy world of black crime fiction--a place few authors
have dared to venture in the past two decades. The Jook
exists in a reality where the good guys are bad and the
bad guys are even worse. It is the world of Iceberg Slim's
Trick Baby and Donald Goines' Daddy Cool,
where con men and professional killers are the heroes we
cheer on to victory. The Jook captures that special
ghetto-noir world in all its seedy, depraved glory. Set
in present-day Los Angeles, The Jook follows pro-footballer
Zelmont Raines on his journey to regain a little of his
past glory. Like so many other sports heroes, Raines has
fallen from grace. "Three years ago I'd been bounced from
the Falcons for failing my random drug test," explains Raines.
"And now I was shoveling out buckets of money to lawyers
fighting a charge of statutory sodomy rape." Our hero, like
all those around him, exists in a morally ambiguous world,
where the line separating right and wrong does not exist.
Like the colorful characters that populate the worlds of
Donald Westlake and Jim Thompson, Phillips has filled The
Jook with a cast of unforgettable and morally reprehensible
characters. Corrupt sports commissioners, religious zealots,
ruthless gangsters, vampish femme fatales, crooked doctors
and morally depleted athletes thrive in a cesspool of betrayal
and underhanded dealings.
The caper, a scheme to rip-off some gangsters for a cache
of loot, is practically irrelevant. The story is really
Zelmont Raines himself and how he views the world around
him. Painting simple yet strikingly vivid images, Phillips
hits the reader with imagery that remains long after the
page has been turned--an effect echoed by our hero smoking
crack: "The hit had arrived, and I was riding on top of
the engine car of the locomotive, the fumes coursing through
the corpuscles in my arms, my legs, and into my skull. My
ears started tingling. The buzz was on."
Phillips' narrative allows Raines to take us first-hand
into his twisted, decadent surroundings, drawing us into
a seedy world, where gangsters and professional athletes
rub elbows, and everyone is looking to get over on everyone
else. Phillips doesn't bother to give us rose-colored glasses
to view his protagonist; rather he thrusts Raines on the
reader to behold, warts and all. The result is a central
character that is a mix of charisma and contemptible behavior.
We never truly come to like our hero--he's a complete scumbag--but
we are intrigued by his acts of selfishness and the twisted
logic he uses to justify them. We become hypnotically transfixed
by the destructive trail Raines blazes for himself, wondering
when and how it will end--redemption or damnation?
The Jook earns its place among the classics of black
crime fiction, at the same time signaling what could be
a rebirth of ghetto noir. For those unfamiliar with the
particular genre, Phillips' novel is a great place to get
started. For those who know and love the gritty world of
ghetto fiction, The Jook makes for a great addition
to your library. And for authors like Robert Beck and Donald
Goines, The Jook stands as a testimony and homage
to the trail they helped blaze and the genre they defined.
--Portlander David Walker publishes and edits "BadAzz
MoFo," a pop-culture magazine specializing in film and African-American
culture. He is currently writing a book on blaxploitation
and the black image in film.
Talkin'
Internet Murder Blues
BY ZACH
DUNDAS
Let's play pretend: You face a lineup of guys, and someone
says, Pick the one that runs the hard-boiled crime fiction
magazine.
Odds are, no matter who else is in the selection, you wouldn't
pick David Firks.
Firks, the very picture of the friendly, polite, enthusiastic
fanboy, is the editor of Blue
Murder, a bimonthly online magazine devoted to the
art of the hard-boiled. With a heady concoction of old-school
toughness, cutting-edge prose style and icily elegant design,
the Portland mag has attracted a worldwide audience, generating
around 5,000 hits a day on the World Wide Web.
Sipping his Starbucks coffee in the Pearl District, Firks
explains the philosophy driving Blue Murder--a true
aficionado's ethos.
"What I tell writers in our guidelines is, noir is the
feeling of hope and despair," he says. "Hard-boiled is how
the protagonist deals with that feeling. Usually through
some sort of violent act, of course. When people read our
stories, I want them completely taken into another world
where the sun doesn't ever set on a nice day."
Since launching Blue Murder in 1997, Firks and his
partner, Troy DuFrene, have gathered just that sort of dark,
steeled prose. The worldwide underground of hard-boiled
fans and writers flocks to the magazine, which simultaneously
re-creates the atmosphere of classic '20s pulps like Black
Mask and provides a glossier forum for crime writing
than today's grainy, cheaply produced mass-circulation mystery
magazines.
Like most genre fiction, the field of American crime writing
is crowded with hopeful amateurs rich in enthusiasm but
often poor in inkslinging talent. Certainly, some of Blue
Murder's short tales bear the mark of the hack, but
others--whether by heavy-hitters like Andrew Vachss or relative
unknowns like Chicago cop Gina Gallo--distill noir to its
poisonous essence.
Firks says he honed his tastes as a kid, submerged in the
novels of Raymond Chandler and Ross MacDonald. His magazine
taps a like-minded, underserved audience hungry for crime
fiction's cheap thrills and more subtle nuances.
"There's a real sense of community in the world of hard-boiled
fans and writers," Firks says. "We've found that when you
take that niche market worldwide, that's a lot of people.
Our audience is a lunchtime audience, people who read one
article at their desk while they eat or read it at home,
maybe printing out a story to read on the bus in the morning."
"The cop audience has been hugely supportive," DuFrene
adds. "We hear stuff all the time like, 'Oh, the Third Precinct
detectives have the stories stapled to the wall in the break
room.'"
Firks and DuFrene say they've parlayed Blue Murder's
free electronic distribution into a hard core of fans who
pay $20 a year for CD-ROM collections of back issues and
the right to enter the magazine's writing contests. They
report that the mag's breaking even right now (and paying
writers, something of an anomaly in online fiction), with
two electronic spin-offs and some hard-copy book projects
in the works for early 2000.
For all its national and international success, Blue
Murder is just starting to dent a Portland audience,
according to Firks.
"The hard-boiled audience is very loyal," he says. "Once
you win them over, they don't go away. It's funny--we're
so popular worldwide, yet Portland is just starting to come
around.
"And the thing is, Portland is really the perfect place
for noir. In the early days, I'd just go around and shoot
photos of old buildings, throw 'em on Photoshop, tweak 'em
a little and put 'em on the site. That's what we did for
illustrations, and it worked."
Cop
Land
BY
MICHAELA LOWTHIAN
The patrolmen who worked out of North, the street cops,
asked to be assigned there because the Avenue was where
the crime was, and they liked the work. They were the troublemakers,
hot dogs, bad boys, adrenaline junkies back from Vietnam....
Former Portland police officer and author Kent Anderson's
book Night Dogs is so brutal that it'll always have
limited appeal. First published in '96 and later picked
up by Bantam/Doubleday, Night Dogs has become something
of an underground phenomenon in the City of Roses. Dog-eared
copies get passed around in certain circles. Local lawyers,
police officers and Vietnam vets all call themselves fans
of the book. But reactions to it can be guarded. Jay Wheeler,
a used-book buyer at Powell's downtown, is among the diehard
fans. "A guy was selling books recently and Night Dogs
was one them, and I said, 'Hey, this is a great book,' and
the guy just kind of looked at me and didn't say anything."
The novel is based on Anderson's experiences wearing a
badge and as part of Special Forces in Vietnam, but the
storyline is set smack-dab in mid-'70s Portland. Part of
the dark charm for local readers is that it's full of thinly
disguised references to this city's people and places. The
central character is a cop named Hanson with severely suicidal
tendencies who works in Portland's North Precinct. Hanson's
memories of Vietnam lurk everywhere. You never know what
will set him off next. He's decent, but he's beyond troubled.
One thing is for sure: Hanson is a walking public-relations
nightmare for the bureau.
"I like the job. The adrenaline. I love it when some
fucker decides he's gonna fight. Oh boy, you know? Bounce
him off the hood of the patrol car a few times, kick his
legs out from under him, slam him down on the street and
handcuff him. Like, 'Whew, thanks, I needed that.' It's
a good thing I'm a cop, or I'd probably be in prison."
Besides raw descriptions of Hanson's frayed soul, the book
is full of passages that ring all kinds of 'I think I know
that place' bells. Following the winding path of fact and
fiction, you're taken on a tour of alleys and dead-ends,
past real and imagined landmarks of 1970s Portland. Sometimes
the names have been changed completely, sometimes just slightly.
The Palms Motor Hotel on Interstate Avenue, for example,
has become the Desert Palms Motel. Mount Hood is referred
to by its Indian name, Stormbreaker. Bar scenes are set
in the Top Hat, Soul Train or the Texas Playhouse. Calls
in to Hanson's patrol car come from North Portland streets:
Mason, Williams, Greely, Sacramento and Missouri.
Loren Christensen, a retired Portland police officer, worked
a different precinct than Anderson but didn't much like
him based on what he knew. Christensen is also a writer
(his most recent book is Gangbangers) and
edits the police-union newspaper, The Rap Sheet.
About Night Dogs he says, "It had its moments. It
took some liberties with the truth, particularly the part
when he lost his gun. It didn't really go down that way,
but it's fiction."
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Willamette Week | originally
published December 15,
1999
|
