And it’s a really generous one from Spinetingler Magazine. Needless to say, I hoisted a glass or two to the gentlemen over there last night.
One of the books that I’ve been looking forward to reading the most this year was Pike by Benjamin Whitmer. It seems that the PM Press folks are running a bit behind schedule with getting their books out on time this year (all speculation btw nothing confirmed) so when the release date of July 1st came and went I did something that I’ve never done before, I ordered an e copy from the publisher, easily downloading a .pdf file within minutes. The main reason I mention this is so you know up front, at least for now, the availability of this book. Because you are going to want to read it.
Over at his blog Benjamin Whitmer said that crime fiction is “supposed to be scary”. He also says that noir isn’t “supposed to be the police procedurals and wisecracking detective serials that dominate the crime shelves” and that they should be something different:
“This is nightmare, hunker-down-in-your-soul, how-deep-can-you-dig, release-the-fucking-bats territory.”
Benjamin Whitmer makes these tenants Bible truth in his debut novel Pike. With this novel Whitmer announces his presence with a kick to the teeth and he is the real deal.
In one of Allen Ginsberg’s more crazily virtuosic letters to his sometime soul mate, Jack Kerouac, Ginsberg included an apology of sorts. “I was too intent on self-fulfillment, and rather crude about it, with all my harlequinade and conscious manipulation of your pity,” he wrote. He also looked back on his life as an artist and described it witheringly: “Art has been for me, when I did not deceive myself, a meager compensation for what I desire.” And he acknowledged being worn, enervated and world-weary. “I am sick of this damned life!” he complained.
The year was 1945. Ginsberg was a precociously ancient 19-year-old. He would grow friskier, more pragmatic and less self-dramatizing during the course of his long correspondence with Kerouac, but one thing never changed: Ginsberg’s insistence on keeping the friendship alive. It lasted until Kerouac disappeared into an alcoholic haze and died in 1969, despite Ginsberg’s best efforts to save him.
Many of the two men’s letters went to separate university archives, Kerouac’s to Columbia, and Ginsberg’s to the University of Texas. And there they sat for decades, not without good reason. These letters can be as long-winded, rambling, visionary and impenetrable as each man’s writing style would suggest. But they can also be sharp, lucid, funny, tender, intimate, gossipy, jubilant and absolutely honest about the two aspiring authors’ gigantic ambitions.
And if their correspondence sounds one loud cautionary note, it’s a warning to be careful of what you wish for. The free-spirited energy of their early communications can be seen slowly ossifying into the discourse of eminences too busy being famous to be friends. As Kerouac predicted to their mutual friend and mentor, Lawrence Ferlinghetti: “Someday ‘The Letters of Allen Ginsberg to Jack Kerouac’ will make America cry.”
Now in Slovenia the structure was that if you wanted to go abroad as a researcher you had to submit an invitation, and if the invitation was a serious one, then it was pretty automatic that you got the money. So, for example, a typical scene consisted of one of my friends coming to me and saying he wanted to go abroad. I say, ‘fine, where do you want to go?’ He says ‘Chicago’. I say ‘let’s see what I have for Chicago’. At some stage I think I have picked up notepaper from the University of Chicago’s German Department, and I think I have some from Northwestern also. ‘So, OK, here is the option, which would you prefer?’ He chooses one, and then I ask what kind of colloquium he would like to be invited to? So we faked it all, whatever was needed, all the data – and of course we always invented the colloquium. I mean, I simply said ‘on behalf of’ and I faked the name so that none of my friends would be offended if it all came out. At some point I remember once that there truly was a colloquium, but I said, no, this is not ethical and so I invented another one. I said I cannot stand writing the truth, it must be a lie. So although it would have been easier to tell the truth, I invented the colloquium. I am a workaholic: I do my work, but I have this terrible desire to fake things at this level; to fake institutional things. I think that everything to do with institutions should be faked. I don’t know what this is, I never analyze myself. I hate the very idea of analyzing myself.
About a year ago my editor at PM Press asked me to write up a Hollywood pitch for Pike. She had a bead on an independent crime movie director who was looking for new material. He’s a pretty well known guy, and somebody whose movies I like quite a bit, so I drank some wine with my wife and we banged something out.
One of the things I learned in the process was that you’ve got to cast everyone in the book. For most of my characters that was pretty difficult, but for the lead character, Douglas Pike, it was a no-brainer: “Mel Gibson, with a beard, hopped up on cocaine, booze, and self-hatred, with strict instructions to tap into his inner Nazi.”
Update: The director liked the pitch well enough that he requested a copy of the book, but, as of yet, he hasn’t read it. He’s on a pretty grueling directorial schedule, I hear. Which, as I told my editor, is just how I want it. As long as he doesn’t read it, he can’t reject it, and I get to brag on ever barstool in town that my first novel’s being considered for a Hollywood film.
About a month ago I was sent the press release for Pike and noticed a striking blurb from Charles Yu that I had no idea was coming. It pretty much made my day, and I meant to post it when it happened, but you know how things go.
Whitmer’s writing is swift, brutal, precise poetry, formed into the shape of people– breathing, hateful, murderous, vulnerable people that I care about deeply now. His characters are broken to begin with, and yet he breaks them open again and again, each time revealing a darker, thicker black sludge inside, and yet, this is also a story about innocence and trying to protect what tiny amount there is. There isn’t a trace of sentimentality in here, but whatever tiny embers of warmth that are to be found in this devastated landscape (a landscape so bleak it approaches, at time, allegory, and yet remains disturbingly visceral), those embers are completely earned and the meager heat thrown off by them all the more valuable because of it. I feel covered in blood.
Moby Dick‘s probably my favorite book. I waffle sometimes, bringing in The Confidence Man, or Blood Meridian, but when it comes down to what purely gets my juices flowing, what I keep re-reading, what makes my blood pump, it’s Moby Dick.
And, so, imagine my excitement when I saw this: One Drawing for Every Page of Moby Dick. They’re wonderful in a way that these projects aren’t always. Surprising, interrogatory, and irreverent in a way I think Melville would have approved. I can’t pick a favorite — they’re all wonderful — but here’s one I just really liked:
Page 005 : …this, the invisible police officer of the Fates, who has the constant surveillance of me, and secretly dogs me, and influences me in some unaccountable way…
And this:
Page 035 : What deadly voids and unbidden infidelities in the lines that seem to gnaw upon all Faith, and refuse resurrections to the beings who have placelessly perished without a grave.
Winterbottom is the first to film Thompson straight. The film version of The Grifterssoft pedalled heavily on the incest motif running through the book. Both versions of The Getaway cut out the ending, where the hero and heroine are forced into the realisation that they will soon be forced to eat each other – literally eat each other.
Interviewed here, Winterbottom seems to be making out that the scene was a kind of commentary on the character’s mental illness. This misses the point. If you read a lot of Thompson’s work you soon come to realize that it’s the author himself who was stone crazy. A taut stylist. An ace plotter. A fellow with real insight into low life, much of it from personal experience. All of that, and completely fucking bananas to go with it. This is an excerpt from King Blood, Thompson’s last published novel:
“‘Wish I had me a nickel for every puss I cut off,’ he went on, carefully reinscribing the circle with his knife. ‘An ol’ Indian trick, y’know, an’ us Kings are probably more Indian than white. Funny thing is the woman don’t hardly feel it – you don’t feel nothin’ do you?- till a long time afterward. That’s maybe because it’s mostly muscle, you know, an’ stretchy: got more give to it than a mile o’ cat gut. Why I seen a fella stretch a gal’s puss clean over her head, an’ then let it snap shut around her neck. Man, oh, man, what a sight to see!’ His body shook with laughter. ‘That gal was flingin’ herself around like a chicken with its head off: strangled to death by her own tokus.’”
At least Winterbottom never got hold of that. It was written towards the end of Thompson’s life, when he was immured in late period alcoholism and undergoing a more or less constant progression of cerebral seizures. Eventually, he decided to starve himself to death, and went ahead and did just that. Thus he avoided the fate of his grandfather, father, and son, who all died in psychiatric institutions.
But horrible things come shambling out in all his work. The hero of Savage Night – a terminally tubercular degenerate assassin – encounters a man who tells him a long, involved and plot-bending account of a farm he happens to own, a vagina farm, where he raises acres of vaginas. This is in the middle of an otherwise fairly conventional fifties noir thriller. And this character’s name is “Jim Thompson.”
I actually haven’t read King Blood either, but both should be on their way to my local library right now. I’m not buying the insanity argument, though I’ll reserve judgment. I’ve read the quote from King Blood before, and I’ve always seen it given as evidence that Thompson had jumped the shark in trying to up the ante on his hardboiled worldview. It also seems to me likely enough that Thompson was self-consciously satirizing said worldview — especially given what sounds like a fairly obvious put-on about Jim Thompson’s reputation in Savage Night (a notoriously lurid degenerate crime writer who’s raising a vagina farm?) — but I’ll let you know when I start reading.
