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.”

The rest.

Having read that scene now, I can say that it doesn’t read crazy to me at all. It reads to me like a savvy — not to mention very funny — skewering of what Thompson considered his own hackwork, and those who consume it.

Here’s the opening:

He was a writer, only he didn’t call himself that. He called himself a hockey peddler. “You notice that smell,” he said, “I just got through a dumping a load of crap in New York, and I ain’t had time to get it fumigated.” All I could smell was the whiz he’d been drinking. He went on talking, not at all grammatically, like you might expect a writer to, and he was funny as hell.

He said he had a farm up in Vermont, and all he grew on it was the more interesting portions of the female anatomy. And he never laughed or cracked a smile, and the way he told it about it he almost he almost made you believe it. “I fertilize them with wild goat manure,” he said. “The goats are tame to begin with, but they soon go wild. The stench, you know. I feed them on the finest grade grain alcohol, and they have their own private cesspool to bathe in. But nothing does any good. You should see them at night when they stand on their heads howling.”

I grinned, wondering why I didn’t give it to him. “I didn’t know goats howled,” I said.

“They do it if they’re wild enough,” he said.

“Is that all you grow,” I said. “You don’t have bodies on any of — those things?”

“Jesus Christ!”  He turned on me like I’d called him a dirty name. “Ain’t I got tough enough as it is? Even butts and breasts are becoming a drag on the market. About all there’s any demand for is you know what.”

Since the death of Larry Brown there have been at least a dozen novelists touted as the heir to Brown’s gritty throne. Needless to say, there have been few who’ve actually lived up to the promise. However, with Benjamin Whitmer’s stark debut, Pike, the Denver, Colorado based novelist easily rivals Brown’s most renowned novels. Recently I was lucky enough to contact the author to discuss Pike and other upcoming writing projects.

Keith Rawson: For those who aren’t familiar with Pike, what’s the novel about?

Benjamin Whitmer: I have some kind of moron mental block when it comes to describing the book. The best I can usually come up with is to tell people it’s about four characters. The first, Pike, is a reformed drug-dealer, murderer and mule who lives in a small town in Eastern Kentucky; the second, Derrick, is a Vietnam-haunted corrupt Cincinnati cop driven half insane by his own pacemaker; the third, Rory, is an aspiring boxer carrying more than his share of family horror; and the fourth, Wendy, is the teenage girl who all three men are trying to use to redeem their pasts.

The rest.

I’m going to start with what I hope isn’t a shocking confession in the world of crime fiction: I’m a bit of a gun nut. Though admitting that in some places seems tantamount to professing an interest in pedophilia — or, perhaps worse, being a cigarette smoker — I’m hoping that it won’t shock anyone in this community. I started shooting at the age of seven, blowing the guts out of old television sets at the county dump near our home in the Appalachian foothills. Though I don’t remember what make or model that rifle was — it was a semi-automatic .22 with a seven-round magazine — I clearly remember the sight picture and the feel of the trigger.

Then, when I was a little older in St. Lawrence County, New York, I graduated to handguns. We had a neighbor who taught me the basics of pistol handling in exchange for helping him with chores on his farm. He was a Vietnam veteran who’d turned hermit, and he taught me a couple of other things, too, as I recall. Once he gave me a long lecture on how he tried to always shit where the cows did so that they wouldn’t think he thought he was better than them, and that always stuck with me. And I seem to remember a porn stash that taught me a number of other important lessons.

The rest.

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But none of that got done tonight. Because I made the mistake of downloading CRIMEFACTORY #4 (it’s a .pdf, so you know).

It’s a mistake I highly recommend you also make.

If you’ve got the extra money, do your civic duty and make a donation to West Denver Copwatch.

They’re looking at a busy year.

Update: It goes without saying that thanks to Denver Safety Manager Ron Perea, there’s no chance in hell of any discipline worthy of the name being visited on the perpetrators here. And, of course, that Independent Monitor Richard Rosenthal and the Citizen Oversight Board are irrelevant.

Update II: Ron Perea has resigned.

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Also, and unrelated, maybe it’s just me, but I think this song by Kris Kristofferson is the greatest tribute song ever written.

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Update: You can watch 14 minutes or so of the documentary on YouTube.

Part one:

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Part two:

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Update II: Found the DVD. Looks like you can also find copies on ebay. Which means that my ammunition money is probably gonna be depleted this month.

Joseph Blotner: One thing that we sometimes seem to see with acquisitive people like the Snopeses is that after they have made the gains which they want very much to make, respectability seems to set in and start to work on them, too. Do you see any signs of that happening in that clan?

William Faulkner: No, only that the rapacious people, if they’re not careful, they are seduced away and decide that what they’ve got to have is respectability which destroys one, almost anybody. That is, nobody seems to be brave enough anymore to be a—an out-and-out blackguard or rascal, that sooner or later he’s got to be respectable, [audience laughter] and that finishes it.

Unidentified participant: Why aren’t there blackguards [then]?

William Faulkner: They ain’t brave and strong and tough like they used to be. [audience laughter]

Unidentified participant: [And] why not?

William Faulkner: It’s the—the curse of the times, maybe. It may be there’s a three or four color printing of advertisements have—have been too seductive, or a picture of a fine big car in two colors with a handsome young woman by it, so that you almost think the woman comes with the new car [audience laughter] when you make the starter payments. Money is—there’s so much pressure to conform, to—to be respectable.

Unidentified participant: More than in the Victorian?

William Faulkner: I think so, yes. In the Victorian, they tried to—to force you to be respectable to save your soul. Now, they compel you to be respectable to be rich.

Unidentified participant: Were these people blackguards to save their souls? I’m not quite sure I understand the connection.

William Faulkner: Well, I think that possibly the old Adam in man suggests to him to be a blackguard if he can get away with it, and when there’s a great deal of pressure to be respectable, if there is—is a great enough reward for the respectability, he will choose that in preference to the pleasure of being a scoundrel and a blackguard, that people don’t have enough verve and zest anymore, which is not the fault of man so much as the fault of the times that we live in to where he—there’s too much pressure against being an individualist, and—and a—a good first-rate scoundrel is an individualist. He don’t really belong to a gang. Once he’s got to join a gang, he becomes a second-rate scoundrel, but a first-rate scoundrel is like a first-rate artist. He’s an individualist, and the pressure’s all against being an individualist. You’ve got to belong to a group. It don’t matter much what group, but you’ve got to belong to it, or there’s no place for you in the—the culture or the economy. Maybe to belong to a gang you might escape the Atom bomb.

Unidentified participant: Are you saying that he has to be a—a scoundrel to be an individualist?

William Faulkner: No, sir. I say a scoundrel, to be a good one, must be an individualist. That only an individualist can be a first-rate scoundrel. Only an individualist can be a first-rate artist. He can’t belong to a group or a school and be a first-rate writer.

Frederick Gwynn: You could have some grudging admiration for Flem Snopes who pretty well sticks to his character.

William Faulkner: Well, until he was bitten by the bug to be respectable. Then he let me down. [audience laughter] I had an admiration for him until then.