Thomas Roche's BOILED HARD

War Child is Sudanese rapper Emmanuel Jal’s memoir of being a child soldier during the civil war in his native country, and his “rehabilitation” afterwards — a process almost as difficult and horrifying as being at war. It’s an at-times horrifying read, but in the end it’s an inspiring biography. Perhaps more importantly, it’s a great portrayal of the awful ways war affects children and young adults.

War Child is not for someone inclined to freak out at explicit descriptions of violence and misery, or famine-level poverty, hatred (at times racial hatred) and frustration. Jal has lived through a lot and here he does not shy away from describing any of it, from the blood and guts to the racial tension and hatred.

Here’s the story: Jal was a child soldier with the SPLA (antigovernment rebels, at the time predominantly Christian/Animist) in Sudan and witnessed the rape and murder of members of his family. After the war, he moved to Kenya with the assistance of international aid organizations and strangers. Despite the kindness of those strangers, he had a rough time getting “rehabilitated,” finding his behavior was affected in all sorts of ways by his past; he had a tendency toward violence, an automatic impulse to steal when he could, an inability to concentrate. I imagine that from the perspective of anyone who’s ever worked with the children of trauma or immigrant populations, this book would be invaluable. It’s also just an amazingly human story. The author’s style is stilted and clearly colloquial at times, which means you’ll be learning many terms from the languages of Sudan (often terms that are cobbled together from several languages, or have an unclear meaning). That, and the book’s snapshot of village life in Sudan even outside of the context of war, add up to a book that is absolutely not to be missed.

Also, the last fifth or so of the book has a lot to do with Jal’s music career; indie artists are advised to check it out. Because he could not get play from Nairobi radio stations, against all odds Jal and his friends got a grant and released his album and one of his friends’, self-produced, self-promoted, basically no help from any music industry sources until Peter Gabriel gave him a vote of confidence at Africa Calling. At one point Jal describes giving well-attended concerts in London and then sleeping on park benches. Good to know it’s not just the U.S. where the corporate music promoters are brain-dead sleazebags who wouldn’t know good music if it bit them on the ass.

Jal is a Christian (raised a Christian, became an atheist during the war, then was “saved”) and I am most emphatically not (though I was raised Roman Catholic). Jal’s faith is critical to his rescue from despair, but he doesn’t especially preach. Descriptions of his music necessarily carry some expression of Christian joy, particularly his early work which was more explicitly Christian — before he started writing about his war experiences. If you can’t handle that, you probably won’t like the last part of the book. I think one of the strongest messages Jal presents is how he learned to not be prejudiced against Muslims, after a lifetime of hating them with all his heart (the war in Sudan was for all intents and purposes a war against Islamic and Christian/Animist populations, though its roots go deep into oil). So avoiding his faith would have been thoroughly disingenuous, and I’m glad he’s been honest about it here. It also means that if you are Christian, there will be a lot for you to like about the last part of the book, which ends on a serious up note and an inspiring sense of hope despite the fact that there is some harrowing reading preceding it.

Lawrence Block has had a varied and at times wacky career, displaying some odd twists and turns and a habit of always writing with almost terrifying professionalism. Even on those rare occasions when Block is not especially good, he still functions on such a professional level that his lieast interesting books are still compulsively readable. The relatively few less-interesting books of his that I’ve read seem a little like running Lou Reed through AutoTune…except, as you probably know, there is no AutoTune in writing crime novels. Block manages it anyway.

Some of Block’s more formulaic crime novels are less inspired than his earlier, more hard-boiled work, and it’s really not my cup of tea. But in my experience even the coziest of his novels never deviate from a simple and almost reflexive level of readability. They’re so piquant and yet so standardized that I’d think there was some sort of deception involved, if I didn’t know better. And I know better because I’ve read the colossally bland later entries in Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch series, in which it becomes clear that either a) Connelly is using a ghostwriter, or b) he’s phoning it in with almost insulting disinterest in the craft. Block never seemed like that, even when he was cranking out stuff that he must have gotten paid $50 for. He always pounded it out with a vengeance that shows an almost creepy competence with the storytelling process.

Viewed in that context, A Diet of Treacle, first published in 1961 as Pads Are For Passion under Block’s soft-porn pseudonym Sheldon Lord, is one freaky book, man, like, crazy. It’s one of those odd twists and turns that Block’s career took: a straight-up exploitation novel of the type that’s perhaps the purest distilled form of the divine trash that inspired Hard Case Crime’s branded look.

A Diet of Treacle is part of that genre that circulates as postcards hipsters snicker at in funky tchotchke shops in the Mission or on Christopher Street, not the sorts of things a sane person actually reads. Believe me, I’ve tried! But if you, like me, can pore in rapturous horror over the execrable prose, tight sweaters and John Waters melodramas in the novels of Ed Wood Jr. and get baked crispy to Reefer Madness, then the exploitation genre that birthed A Diet of Treacle is for you.

Perhaps more importantly, Treacle is one of the best examples of the weird and small sub-subgenre of “Beatsploitation,” which featured novels with Beat Generation themes. Trashy publishers were trying to feed off the same craze that spawned Gilligan’s chin-beard on The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. Beatsploitation books are actually hard to get your hands on. That’s because the amazingly weird covers make them collector’s items.

Viewed as a trashy “exploitation vacation” from Block’s far more intense works (Mona/Grifter’s Game, The Girl With the Long Green Heart) and Hard Case Crime’s many high-quality sucker punches, A Diet of Treacle is an infuriating and annoying book. It can be cheesy at times…in fact, it is cheesy, most of the time. But it refuses to be the piece of crap that other exploitation novels often turn out to be. It’s packed with camp, and it holds a fascinating place in history. I mean…a beatsploitation drug-hysteria novel written by the great Lawrence Block? Like…whoa. For what it’s worth, this book is best read with On the Road kept in your recent memory.

Anyway, Treacle concerns a nice-ish kid and a not-so-nice-ish Korean War vet getting lost on the road to Crazyville, man, and getting mixed up with one bad man who’s, like, out there, man, I mean like BEAT, you dig? Horse, man. The big H. Like, CRAZY. That’s about as authentic as it feels. There’s no real complex crime story, but at no point does the action slow down; it’s Block through and through, a fast-moving and breezy despite its dorky overblown exploitation elements. And there are plenty of those; it’s fairly silly, actually. But it never bogs down like a hell of a lot of crime novels. It’s an easy read, satisfying enough, and a transporting and inspired glimpse of an imagined seedy underworld that never existed outside of trashy novels.

If you’re interested in counterculture history, there are a lot of interesting references here. For instance, “Mexican Brown,” in modern times a type of heroin, is referred to as a crappy kind of marijuana. That seems like it was probably just an error on Block’s part — but who knows? I couldn’t find a reference for the slang term having ever applied to marijuana…but it’s moments like that — glimpses of historical underground and criminal mysteries — that absolutely make a book like this for me.

Overall, the portrayal of the drug culture from the era of the book is fascinating as a pop-culture artifact. However, the depth and accuracy seem to be  pretty weak. The big moral turnaround of the book is when a girl gets high on tea and suddenly goes nuts, having public sex with her druggie boyfriend in front of everyone at a downtown beat party, man. Like crazy. It’s fairly silly. It’s more than a little hysterical. But it’s never really bad enough to be funny, which works both for and against it.

That said, A Diet of Treacle is only maybe the twelfth exploitation novel I’ve ever read all the way through, some of the others being Junky and Queer by William S. Burroughs, Killer in Drag and Death of a Transvestite/Let Me Die In Drag by the aforementioned Wood, and S is for Stud, rumored to be by Jim Thompson. (Incidentally, that total doesn’t include straight-up porn novels; if it did, the number would easily be well into the triple digits, which is a little scary when I think about it as a virtual pile of sleaze.)

I honestly have no idea if Block rewrote this thing for the Hard Case Crime publication, to make it match his level of expected competence now that he’s had a career to learn his craft. If he did, I can’t blame him. The results are pretty enjoyable, if not exactly good.

If Block didn’t rewrite Treacle before allowing it to be reprinted, and this is how it came blasting outta his brain near the start of his career, for low pay and probably without much editing?

That, then, is absolutely terrifying.The guy just cranked this stuff out when he was twenty-three? That makes me wanna lay on the floor and twitch. It may not be good, but it’s some of the most competent not-good around.

Public domain Federal government photo from Wikipedia.

In an article from the 23rd, the Christian Science Monitor‘s Randy Dotinga interviews Hard Case Crime’s Charles Ardai about the role of women in James M. Cain’s work, and The Cocktail Waitress, the unpublished Cain novel Ardai discovered in the papers of Cain’s agent. Hard Case Crime, recently relaunched in partnership with UK publisher Titan, will be publishing The Cocktail Waitress in Fall, 2012, says a Titan Books press release.

Now, the world of vintage noir fiction is a relatively small universe of complete obsessives; the fact that I’m completely flipping out over having a new Cain novel discovered seems like it should be more or less irrelevant to the mopes out there who aren’t all that sure if he’s the guy who wrote The Maltese Falcon or The Big Sleep, or if maybe he’s the guy Humphrey Bogart played in the movie where he clicked two balls together.

But I’m off my nut, as usual. It turns out the discovery of an unpublished novel from the author of Double Indemnity, The Postman Always Rings Twice, and Mildred Pierce warrants fandangos from the mainstream. There’s been coverage of The Cocktail Waitress everywhere: The Guardian, USA Today, Media Bistro, Publisher’s Weekly, and points further afield like The Violent World of Parker, which said “What would we do without Hard Case Crime? Wither away and die, I suspect. (It then embedded a YouTube video of Sonic Youth’s “Mildred Pierce,” which pleased the cockles of my aging punk soul, spanking me back to a time when I drove up to Berkeley to see that estimable band, and discovered opening for them these guys from Seattle no one gave a fuck about.)

Oh and BTW, speaking of obsessives, here’s one of the Q’s from the CSM, and one of Ardai’s A’s:

Q: How are you figuring out which revisions to keep and which ones to take out?

A: There are some parts that are easier. For the rest, I’m going to be spending some time in the archive rooms at the Library of Congress going through correspondence, and I’ll go through all the primary source evidence I’ve got to determine what his intent would have been. I’ll be doing the work of a responsible editor to shape it into the best story it could be.

Oh, also, opening for the next Ardai novel:

Q: The book has multiple revisions of the ending. How will you figure out which one to keep?

A: There’s a good deal of variety, but the core events are the same in them. The last line does not change, nor should it.

…which is exactly the kind of teaser yours truly loses sleep over, obsessive as I am over Cain endings. Me, I’m not so good on what my psychiatrist likes to call the, like, the Delayed Gratification. I’d even venture so far as to suggest that Mr. Ardai might wish to reinforce the locks on the Hard Case offices, especially given the inspiration that could be drawn from a HCC novel I recently perused in my copious leisure time. That could be drawn, mind you. Could be. If one were, like, of criminal nature.

Ardai’s original email to the faithful says the acquisition was made “After more than 9 years of detective work and negotiation.” The great blog Pulp Serenade actually went so far as to track down and excerpt Cain’s comments about The Cocktail Waitress from a 1976 issue of Film Comment. The next day The Guardian quoted the same passage, proving either that information wants to be free or that, oh, maybe the world of vintage noir fiction is a relatively small universe of complete obsessives.

I’m on record as thinking that when it comes to writing, Cain is an absolute genius beyond all meaning of the word. He’s so damn good that the (in my opinion) not-quite-home-run Grand Guignol ending of Double Indemnity, the novel, doesn’t faze me one bit, especially since the brilliant novel’s dying lapse in brilliance was so beautifully remedied in the un-fucking-believably good screenplay by Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler.

This is one of the absolute best screenplays ever written, without question, and for various reasons one of the weirdest documents in literary or cinematic history. It was rendered in a feat of truly inspired screenwriting accomplished by two masters against all odds when they weren’t busy plotting to kill each other. As I wrote of the screenplay’s closing moments, “This is classic America, A-list noir, the soul of the nation laid open and bloody with a tire iron.”

By the way, did you know James M. Cain attacked Ernest Hemingway’s writing in print, in response to comparisons of him with Papa? I remember him being particularly nasty in a letter reprinted in an ancient reprint of an editorial I dug up at the UCSC library umpteen years ago. One of the reasons Cain hated Hemingway, as I recall? The H-man used too many four letter words. Hell’s bells, could Elmore fucking Leonard make this shit up?

The excitement over this acquisition just goes to prove a fact that I’ve been thinking about alot, lately, particularly since someone just spent forty-five minutes interrogating me about the use of the “rude” word “douchebag” in the opening lines of The Panama Laugh. It’s the “relatively small universes” of “complete obsessives” that determine WTF the “mainstream” mopes think, when they finally come around and stop trying to burn us at the stake.

What I mean to say is that the people who determine the future direction of culture and thought are not in fact the Walter Huffs, who can be driven to murder by the promise of plenty cheddar and the love of a dame with an ankle bracelet.

No, the people who matter are the ones who are, to paraphrase Chandler, walk the mean streets but are not themselves mean.

The ones who build a better world — not one where misery doesn’t happen, but where it means something — aren’t the ones who think that cash and some dreamy fantasy of bullshit love will finally free them from the rot that grows from within.

The people I care about are the ones who walk the mean streets because they give a flying fuck what the hell that rot means…and what it means when the moon blazes bright overhead and then you and the chick with the anklet go and toss yourselves in. Or Edward G. Robinson fires up a match and lights a guy’s smoke and says, “You’re finished, Neff.”

I ran across this piece on the new George Pelecanos novel The Cut, reviewed by Jason Kuiper of the Omaha World-Herald. Pelecanos was one of the writers for The Wire, and also one of the show’s producers. He’s well known as a writer of dark, hard-boiled and gritty crime fiction, and as anyone who knows me is well aware…these are a few of my favorite things.

This new book begins a new series about a guy who retrieves things. I’ve never read any of Pelecanos’s books, but it definitely sounds like this new one is worth trying. Kuiper seems to like it. It sounds pretty bad-ass…with at least one tangible nod to John D. MacDonald, always a good sign. Here’s Kuiper:

Spero Lucas finds things. For a fee.

His going rate is 40 percent of whatever he’s asked to retrieve.

It’s his cut.

Lucas, a former Marine who is back home in Washington, D.C., after a deployment in Iraq, is the new series character by acclaimed writer George Pelecanos.

“The Cut” is Pelecanos’ 17th book. It’s his great return into grittier crime fiction after several novels that mainly focused on father-son relationships, with crimes in the background.

Not that such a focus was a bad thing. But with “The Cut,” crime is front and center — even though the relationships between Lucas and his deceased father and between a cop and the cop’s long-absent father loom over much of the novel.

With Lucas, Pelecanos has written a winning character, who is somewhat incomplete. He has room for growth and that will be part of the fun as this series unfolds.

Lucas works as an investigator for a defense attorney; he’s a private eye without the P.I. license.

A locked-up drug dealer, whose son Lucas had helped out of some legal trouble, sends word that he wants to hire Lucas to find $130,000 of missing “product.” Since Lucas likes to unwind at night by toking a little marijuana himself, he has no moral qualms about going to work for the dealer.

However, it doesn’t take long for Lucas to find trouble in the form of a dirty cop and some very bad men who put bullets in anyone who gets in their way.

[Link.]

Abdelilah Hamdouchi's The Final Bet, billed as the first Arabic police procedural translated into English.

Interesting piece in TheNational.ae, a United Arab Emirates newspaper, about the dearth of translators available to translate books from Arabic into English — whereas demand is rising. From what I can tell, there’s not really a thriving Arabic crime fiction scene, but it’s a UAE newspaper so that’s what they’re interested in.

Insofar as there is genuine interest on the English language side it is pretty obviously in response to Steig Larsson’s books being so successful. There was a scramble to secure English translation rights for Swedish crime writers after The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo hit the best-seller lists, and now I guess the English language publishing world is looking for the new fertile ground.

To my knowledge there is not a thriving Arabic language crime fiction scene, but there are a lot of Arabic speakers so there is unquestionably some. Soho Crime, over the years, has found noir fiction in places throughout the world that I never would have dreamed it existed. But in the Arabic world, the possibilities for noir fiction seem almost mind-bogglingly huge.

Yet so few books get translated from Arabic into English in the first place, partially because of there being relatively few translators — but ultimately I believe it’s because English language audiences are so unbelievably fickle and unpredictable in their reading tastes — and there is, of course, a resounding prejudice against Arabic-language anything in the English speaking world.

If English language publishing is genuinely interested in Arabic language crime fiction, it should view the Mediterranean Noir scene as a cautionary tale; there is a thriving subculture of Italian dark crime writers, and has been for years, yet the relatively large number of Italian Noir books translated into English at best seem to sell as much as your average midlist literary novel, not a best-seller. Anyway, here’s The National:

With Stieg Larsson and Jo Nesbo’s Scandinavian crime fiction continuing to sell millions, and Haruki Murakami’s forthcoming novel one of the publishing events of 2011, fiction translated into English has surely never been so popular. In Murakami’s case, the desire to get IQ84 into the eager hands of English readers as quickly as possible has been so great, the third instalment was translated by a completely different person from the previous two volumes.

An odd decision, but if nothing else it would seem to confirm that these are heady days for in-demand literary translators. Well, not quite. The Harvill Secker Young Translators’ Prize, now in its second year and due to announce a winner tomorrow, was set up specifically because a new generation of translators is finding it difficult to break through.

“It’s of course natural that publishers only want to commission very experienced translators, because it costs a lot of money and you want the best you can get,” says the founder of the prize, Briony Everroad. “But it means those starting out in translation find it almost impossible to stand out against that kind of competition.”

And Everroad should know – she publishes Nesbo during her day job as an editor at Harvill Secker. She founded the prize last year in the hope that it would redress the balance for those under 35. But what makes the prize unique amid the multitude of literary awards is that the entrants all have to translate the same piece into English. Last year, the original story was in Spanish. And intriguingly, this year the chosen language is Arabic.

[Link.]

My short story “Hell on Wheels,” which appeared in Maxim Jakubowski’s The Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction, will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4Xtra (the re-branded BBC Radio 7) on November 12th 2011 as part of their Pulp Fiction series. It will be broadcast online, but won’t be podcast — so if you want to hear it, you’ll need to listen then.

“Like the bastard offspring of a drug-spiked three-way between Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Clancy and Raymond Chandler, The Panama Laugh packs a gonzo attitude, a load of military-tech terminology, and a world-weary, wisecracking narrator into a hallucinatory, ultraviolent tour of the apocalypse.”

–Rebecca Stefoff, Innsmouth Free Press

Read the Review Here

Extra props to Rebecca Steffoff for plenty of clever observations about the novel’s origins. Thanks!

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