Noir fiction for the modern reader.

We interrupt this highbrow blog to bring you the following important announcement:

My noir novel, The Take, will be released soon. I know, I know, that’s what I said a year ago. But I was just kidding then. Now when I say it, I really mean it. It really will be released soon.

It’s a novel of human desperation, set in a world where only the cop cars are black and white. Everything else swirls in a kind of gray soup, without any way of knowing who can be trusted or what awaits around the next corner.

When I get a firm date from the publisher, I’ll post it here.

We now return you to our regular programming.

Writing this post has, for me, been a long time coming. Twenty years to be exact. And I’m still not doing it justice.

But here goes anyway.

The other day, I was browsing around my friendly neighborhood Barnes & Noble and I came across a trade paperback copy of Homeboy by Seth Morgan. I was stunned, yet thrilled, to see it still in print.

I met Seth back around 1990, when we were both living in New Orleans. I was playing piano in a rock & roll piano bar and he was about to do his first signing session for Homeboy. Oddly, the signing took place at a store called the Abstract Book Shop, about as far from B&N-world as you can possibly get. It was a funky little spot way out of the way in a semi-bad part of town. You could go in there and find The Daily Worker right next to writings by Jesse Helms. Even more oddly, the place was owned and operated by a federal appellate judge!

Anyway, that’s where I met him and he signed my hardcover copy, and included a little inscription. I told him what I did for a living and that I was just getting into writing. I had completed my first novel and Seth was kind enough to look it over. He was very encouraging and what’s more, he liked the fact that a Bourbon Street musician would pick up the pen. We became friends.

And that’s when I learned of his dark side.

Turns out Seth was a ne’er-do-well as a youth. Raised in a wealthy New York family who expected him to toe the elitist line, he attended, and was expelled from, many of the best private schools on the East Coast and in Europe. He wound up in San Francisco, living off his trust fund. This was the swingin’ sixties, so…enter drugs. He eventually graduated from a ne’er-do-well to a real badass.

He acquired a serious jones which not even his trust fund could support, so he turned to crime. He confessed to me that he’d committed over 400 armed robberies to feed his insatiable habit. During this period, he fell in with Janis Joplin, becoming her “boyfriend”. Together, they marauded through the blazing world of Bay Area booze and drugs right on up to her death from an overdose in 1970.

Back on the armed robbery front, he finally got caught and was sentenced to hard time at Vacaville State Penitentiary in California. It was during this period that he took up writing.

In 1978, he won the PEN American Prisoners’ Writing Contest, jumpstarting his writing career. In the late 1980s, he came to New Orleans to write Homeboy, which consumed nearly two years of his life. New Orleans was his city of choice because he felt if he could resist the temptations of drugs and alcohol there, he could resist them anywhere. Once his novel was completed, he got himself an agent and before you could say, “Closed to submissions”, it was picked up by Random House.

His harsh, neon style of writing electrified the literary world at the time. Reviews uniformly gushed with praise. The publisher couldn’t take out enough ads. The New York Times loved him. He appeared on all the morning television shows. They were calling him the next Steinbeck. At 41, this former trust fund baby / drug addict / ex-con’s career was soaring.

The novel was released worldwide, so he went to Europe for signings. While in London, his father came to see him. For Seth, this was to be his long-awaited day of redemption, the day on which his dad puts a hand on his shoulder and says, “Good job, son.”

Instead, his father was cold and critical, crushing Seth’s hopes for ever pleasing him.

He returned to New Orleans and resumed his drug ways, snorting cocaine and consorting with lowlifes. I became the only friend he had in the straight world. He still came to hear me play, and we still talked about writing, but he was clearly more sullen than I’d ever known him to be.

Then one day, I went over to the Abstract Book Shop, where I’d become friends with the owner/federal appellate judge. He told me that Seth had been killed at around four o’clock that morning in a motorcycle accident. He had a girl with him who was also killed, and that cocaine had been found on both their bodies.

I immediately went to his house on Camp Street, an old-line New Orleans two-story job, right out of the early 20th century. My goal was to rescue whatever artifacts of his I could. But I learned I wasn’t the first one there.

The place had been ransacked. His scumbag drug buddies had beaten me to it. I looked around the house for something, anything meaningful that could be saved. I saw his desktop computer sitting out in the open. Grabbing it and a few 5 1/4″ floppies splayed around it, along with his passport, I headed home.

I slipped the disks into my computer and discovered the first few chapters of his second novel, Mambo Mephiste, which he had described to me as a “great big Mardi Gras novel”. In the last few weeks of his life, this book was his only source of excitement. He was clearly committed to turning out a masterpiece. It was written in the same riveting, acrobatic style as Homeboy, and I wept, knowing it would never be completed. This would be the book that would have marked him as the real deal, not just a one-hit wonder.

I drove back to the Abstract, where I turned over Seth’s computer and the disks to the judge. He said he would see that they got to Seth’s family.

I kept his passport.

Seth Morgan could have been a literary giant, as they all predicted. He had it in him. But his demons would not turn loose of his tortured soul.

Finally, I have a moment to brag about this. On May 17, I married the most beautiful girl in the world on the beach in Key West, my adopted hometown. We had our honeymoon in Key West and in the Caribbean. Then, after a hectic week or two of digging out from under a pile of mail and email, we traveled to Salt Lake City, where I met her family. After another hectic week of making the rounds, we’re back home and I’m able at last to post this tremendous news. I’m just thrilled to death.

ps–she wants to be a writer, too. I’ve read one of her short stories and, just between you and me, she’s got it!

A few years ago, I wrote a rock & roll novel called Cadillac’s Comin’. Today, it went up on Kindle. It’s a hard tale of a rockabilly one-hit wonder who recorded for Sun Records back in the 1950s. For the uninitiated, Sun was a small company, but became the iconic label of that era, responsible for many of the great early rock & roll hits.

The book has the requisite sex, drugs, and rock & roll throughout, but the second half of the novel, which takes place in the 1980s, is noirish, so I feel it’s appropriate to talk about it in this space.

As I mention in a bio I wrote somewhere, thirty years of playing music isn’t exactly the best training for becoming an author. Thirty years of writing would be more like it. But playing music was what I did, so that’s what I had to work with. I say this because when I first sat down to write many years ago, the temptation was strong to “write what I know”, in other words, a rock & roll novel. Oh, was I tempted. Characters popped into my head from all sides, plots swirled around me…how could I resist?

But I had to resist, you know?  Because I didn’t want to shoot my wad with one music novel. I wanted to write a lot of books, and I knew that rock & roll was not exactly a beckoning genre for successful novelists. So after a couple of missteps, I got into crime.

After I’d written a couple of crime/noir novels, I had convinced myself that I could actually write, so I finally gave release to those rock & roll demons inside my head. Cadillac’s Comin’ was the result. Of course, no agent or publisher would touch it, so after a few years of languishing on my hard drive, it resurfaced and got my attention once more. I tightened it up, polished it, and today I put it up on Kindle.

For those of you who have considered self-publishing on Kindle, I strongly recommend you read every word of Joe Konrath’s blogs for the last six months before you take the step. He has…well, just read the blogs and you’ll see what I mean. Once you do, and IF you decide to go ahead with it, be ready to step into The Formatting Swamp of Doom. You’ll need to go over your novel line by line–I mean it–and in some spots, word by word in order to format it correctly for Kindle.

If you make it to the other side of the swamp, set your price, throw it up there and hope for the best. Of course, you’ll need to promote it heavily, which will occupy virtually every waking moment of your foreseeable future. So good luck!

Now here’s a brief synopsis of Cadillac’s Comin’.

***

It is June, 1958.  Elvis Presley has gone into the army, while Jerry Lee Lewis has just returned from a career-shattering trip to England with his 13-year-old wife.  Rock & roll music is under attack from all sides and is in real danger of disappearing, as its two most dynamic artists are effectively removed from the picture.  Sun Records, an independent Memphis label responsible for many of the seminal rock & roll hits, has chosen piano rocker Ike Thacker, native of Greenville, Mississippi, from its impressive stable of artists to assume the mantle of the “King of Rock & Roll”.

Ike is one of the most powerful performers on the American scene, combining an explosive stage presence with his natural talent for writing big songs.  This one-two punch makes him the prime candidate for the top rock & roll artist in the world, and he makes up to five thousand dollars a night, a fortune by 1958 standards.

Sam Phillips, Sun’s founder and president, sees an opportunity to push his company into the highest echelons of the record business, becoming, in trade parlance, a “major label”.  But first, the fledgling music called rock & roll must be firmly established with a hero, a leader at the top, who of course is under contract to Sun.  Sam’s got it all planned out:  Ike will do a starmaking tour, as his new record, Cadillac’s Comin’, shoots up the charts.  The record will become a smash hit, a movie deal will then be signed, and he’s even slated to make an appearance on the prestigious Ed Sullivan Show, following which he will be universally recognized as the king of rock & roll.  And of course, Sun will move into a controlling position in the music industry, selling millions of records in the process.  All very nice, but Ike proves difficult to control.

Set in Memphis in the turbulent early years of rock & roll, and later in New Orleans’ shadowy demimonde, Cadillac’s Comin’ is a valentine to the rockabilly pioneers of the 1950s, who operated in the dark, with no rules, no guidelines, no precedents, and virtually no adult supervision.  Against this chaotic backdrop, they nevertheless managed to solidify rock & roll’s place in American culture.

***

For those of you who have a Kindle, just download it. The price is a measly $2.99. If you don’t have a Kindle, you can go to Amazon.com, then Kindle, where you can download the Kindle app for free onto your computer. Then you can download the novel.

Yes, it can all be yours in mere moments! Buy it now!

When I was a kid, and that was a long, long time ago, I couldn’t get enough of TV. And I’m talking about being in Boston (from age 1-9) when the city only had two channels. My earliest memory of it is never even coming on the air until about 5:00 or so with Howdy Doody. Up till 5:00 there was only a test pattern, which I even watched on occasion, wondering if people in other cities got the same test pattern and if not, was theirs cooler than the one I was watching.

Anyway, within a couple of years, TV started airing in the morning as more and more programming came on line. I used to regard school as an intrusion on my TV time, and I would occasionally note the time in the classroom, telling myself, “Break The Bank is on right now, followed by Strike It Rich“. Actually, Strike It Rich was one of my favorites. Movie serial star Warren Hull (The Spider) was the MC, presiding over a trail of tears flowing from the contestants. They told their sad stories, then had a chance to answer questions for money.

I always liked the game shows, but I also liked baseball, certain variety shows, Saturday morning shows like Super Circus and Mighty Mouse, even some soap operas, and cop dramas. The cop dramas were invariably on late at night, however, like 8:30 and beyond, so my parents didn’t let me stay up that often. When I could, though, it was Dragnet, The Lineup, Man Against Crime, and later Peter Gunn, M Squad, and all the other great cop shows.

I especially liked Racket Squad, a low-key show from the early 1950s (now out on DVD) starring the great Reed Hadley, which focused on swindlers, embezzlers, and other practitioners of the confidence game. It showed how ordinary people can be easily taken in by clever con artists. I never forgot this, and after knowing a few grifters in my adulthood, I saw how some of these people found themselves in way over their heads as a result of their own poor choices. Many times they would get desperate and cross the line, and presto! Then you had noir.

These days, I don’t care for series cop shows at all. They all look alike. They all have the model-handsome hero, the pretty girl (or “strong woman”, to use their euphemism), the black guy (or girl), the Asian guy (or girl), the crusty-but-benign supervisor, the same camera work, same ol’, same ol’.  The closest I can come is Justified, an outstanding maverick of a show starring a smoldering Timothy Olyphant, and based on a short story by Elmore Leonard. Beyond that, I go for Mad Men, Dexter, and American Idol (I know, I know). I loved The Sopranos and Deadwood, but I’m afraid they’re gone forever. And that’s pretty much it, besides great movies on TCM.

Thing is, almost all these shows have, at one time or another, provided me with some kind of material for my writing. Maybe even a scrap of information or an unusual plot line that some writer sneaked past the producers, or just a sharp line or two…I’ve always managed to glean something from these shows every now and then. I’m even talking about the old ones, too, that I have on DVD.

How about you? Ever get any ideas from TV shows (not counting CSI or Law And Order)?

Patti Abbott posed an interesting question today. She asked if it made a difference whether you watched a movie on DVD or saw it in the theater. My answer: the theater.

Movies are larger than life. They are, and always have been, made to be viewed in a theater. They were intended to be mechanically projected through light onto a giant screen in front of perhaps hundreds of people. The viewers are colonized into a large room, where they sit in darkness with total strangers, gazing at a screen several stories high. When the image appears, they almost involuntarily surrender to the wonder of Hollywood magic.

Television is smaller than life. DVDs, as presented over television, are, and always will be, made to be shown in a small room. They are intended to be electronically projected through a (relatively) small screen in front of perhaps four or five people. The viewers are colonized into a small room where they sit with the lights on among friends, gazing at a screen dozens of inches wide. When the image appears, they may talk to one another, get up to go to the kitchen, pass around refreshments, go to the bathroom, or answer the phone. The remote is never far away, and the image can be, and usually is, paused at will. The continuity effect that the director built in constructing the movie is virtually destroyed. The suspense, as enhanced by lighting, setting, and dialogue, is destroyed. Large-scale action scenes lose all magical quality.

Years ago I saw The Last Emperor in the theater. I sat there in awe of the story, the acting, the look, the detail, the whole presentation. A few months later, I saw it on TV. I was looking forward to reliving my experience I’d had in the theater. It was terrible. I turned it off after about fifteen minutes.

Say what you will about Titanic (1997), but it was a sensational movie. The haunting story, which could never have been invented, was so faithfully rendered on the screen, and of course, the effects…the ship, the clothing, the sinking, the faces of the victims…all of it touched me. Needless to say, when I saw it on TV, it played like a network movie of the week. None of it, and I mean none of it came across as the director had intended.

This is not to say that all movies fail on TV. Just most of them. Woody Allen movies would be among the exceptions. His movies are small, heavily reliant on sharp dialogue, and utterly lacking in real action. They seem a perfect fit for TV. There are others, too, but not many.

Film noir plays much better in the theater, in my opinion, although it doesn’t lose everything on TV the way that big-production movies do. Classics like Double Indemnity, The Maltese Falcon, and Detour can still be enjoyable on TV. The big screen, however, really brings out those shadows and angular camera shots.

Not long ago, I watched The Lost Horizon (1937) on DVD. It’s a great film, but the sweep of the Shangri-la scenes and the frigid desolation of the mountain-climbing scenes were really lost. Another one was The Hurricane (1937), directed by John Ford. The mind-blowing special effects, especially for 1937, were extremely impressive. But they were greatly diminished by the smallness of television. There are a lot of older films like that, where you can only see them on DVD because they’re so old.

Nothing much you can do about movies made in 1937; DVDs are really the only way we can usually see them. But movies made in 2010 deserve your attendance at the theater, where you can see them and be overwhelmed by them as you ought to be. If you’re not overwhelmed, then it’s a bad movie and it ain’t gonna get any better by the time the DVD comes out.

Besides, popcorn doesn’t taste the same in front of a TV.

Scott D Parker posted a blog on the Do Some Damage site today which got me to thinking. He posited the analogy of a book to a concert t-shirt.

When you read a book, according to Scott, the book becomes an artifact of the reading experience, in much the same manner as a t-shirt becomes the artifact of a concert you attended. People see the book, they can assume you’ve read it. People see the t-shirt, they can assume you went to the concert. If he reads a book, the experience is internal, personal, and not needing a souvenir for verification. He goes on to say that in a book, the story is everything, and the medium is irrelevant. As long as the material can be delivered to the reader, what’s the difference if it comes through an iPad or a 500-page hardcover? It’s through this prism that the book becomes like the t-shirt. An artifact. This is a somewhat original way of looking at it and it works, up to a point.

I would highlight a big difference, though. If I want to reread a particular passage in the book, or reread the entire book, for that matter, I can do so. The written words are still there. The concert’s music, however, is long gone, vanishing the moment it was played. The t-shirt is just a memory of the event, embalmed in a cotton-polyester blend and growing more distant with each passing day. If I want to hear Don Henley sing, “Freedom, oh freedom, that’s just some people talkin’” once again, well, I’m going to have to go to another concert.

Now, I know that ebooks offer the same reviewing capabilities as print books; if you want to reread something, just scroll back to the point and read away. But Scott cited Stephen King, who in a recent interview, said he felt a certain “not-thereness” to ereading. It’s exactly this “not-thereness” which crystallizes the difference between books and digital files.

Books are much more than mere souvenirs of reading. Rather, they are the physical repository of the art itself. They are tangible proof that the author and his muse came together in a magical confluence of events. Their covers are large enough to be examined in close detail. They can be signed, displayed, resold, reprinted (with different covers), and, perhaps centuries later, gazed upon with awe from behind a velvet rope. And, not incidentally, they can never be deleted with the stroke of a key.

I remember seeing the original Magna Carta around 20 years ago, as it rolled through New Orleans. It was on tour along with several other “documents of democracy”, and was displayed inside an air-conditioned tractor trailer, out of the bright sun. It was lit with the dimmest of bulbs, difficult to see, fading after nearly eight hundred years of existence. But there it was. The paper that started it all. I mean the very paper with the very ink forming the very words which, back in the early 13th century, shook England to its core and would go on to resonate around the world. It’s hard for me to imagine staring at a digital file on a computer screen with that same sense of reverence.

Don’t get me wrong, now. I’m not blind to reality. I know digitalization is here to stay and it’s only going to have a larger presence, much larger. Furthermore, it’s going to be mostly to our benefit. A quick check of the blogosphere–Joe Konrath, for example–will convince even the most hardline skeptic. Ebooks are the future and we’re probably all going to be better off for it. Indie authors will multiply and thrive because they’ll be able to draw a straight line between themselves and their readers. This is a fantastic development which could never have been foreseen just five or ten years ago.

But in the process, we’re going to lose something. Whether you call it the artifact of the experience or the vault of the knowledge itself, it’s going to disappear, straight into the digital mist.

Yesterday afternoon, I returned from Los Angeles, where I attended the Left Coast Crime conference. It was held at the Omni Hotel downtown, and despite the sky-high room rates and costs of everything else inside the hotel, the conference itself was, in my opinion, a smash.

First of all, despite many trips to LA in the past, I’d never really been downtown. I quickly learned that it’s divided into two distinct areas: the clump of gleaming skyscrapers where all the big business is done, and “old” downtown, which is down the hill from the shiny stuff. Fortunately, the Omni is on the border between the two, at the crest of the hill, so that when Jim Bell conducted his walking tour, we all just slipped down the hill and into the old section.

The “old” downtown is surprisingly viable, looking for all the world like LA of the 1950s with newer cars. I half expected to see a Megan Abbott character skulking around, or maybe even Jack Webb pull up at any moment. We toured the Bradbury Building, a gorgeous relic if ever there was one, and down its hallways I kept looking for the pebbled glass door that read “Spade & Archer.” We also zipped through the Central Market, an open-air bazaar where Philip Marlowe had his regular bowl of chop suey. Jim’s informative commentary held everyone’s attention without a dull moment. There were other stops, but you get the idea. It was wonderful.

In addition, I was stunned at how little traffic there was downtown. I never, and I mean never, saw more than four or five cars at any one stoplight, and the streets were generally near-empty most of the time. This compares very favorably with other downtown areas I’m familiar with, such as New Orleans, Houston, Nashville, and Miami. Even my adopted hometown of Key West, hardly a paradigm of metropolitan traffic jams, usually musters up more traffic than I saw in four days in downtown Los Angeles.

Okay, enough of the wide-eyed tourist stuff.

The conference, as I said, was terrific. Every attendee got a goodie bag which included no fewer than six books, each by one of the authors at the conference! Lee Child, Michael Connelly, Jan Burke, and many others were in attendance, and unlike the big authors who were at Bouchercon, they didn’t just fly in, do their bit, and then disappear. They were around and available for buttonholing. Very classy.

The panels were rewarding, too. I learned something from every one I attended. The one I served on featured Boyd Morrison, Lee Goldberg, Dana Kaye, and Ashley Ream as the moderator. Boyd has a compelling story to tell and he told it in great detail at this panel. If you don’t know it, look him up. It’s worth reading. Lee also gave some good advice on the coming electronic age to unpublished writers, and Dana is a publicist whose depth of knowledge regarding internet publicity is astonishing.

Overall, the atmosphere was one of warmth and camaraderie. I made several new friends whom I hope to see again down the road somewhere.

Saturday night brought a cocktail party followed by the banquet. The wine was good, the food was tasty, and the subsequent awards ceremony and auction were lively.

As writers conferences go, you really can’t ask for more. Congrats to Jean Utley, Sherry Lilley, and all others who were involved in putting it together.

Dan O’Shea’s blog, Going Ballistic, got my attention today. He pondered the question of whether or not writing can be taught. He cited several writers and each of their takes on the subject, and they more or less agreed: good writing can NOT be taught. It has to come from within. Dana King added a comment that the same is true for a musician.

Well, this is where I come in. I’m an author now, but I spent decades as a professional musician, and I can say that I wholeheartedly agree with all of the above. Up to a point.

When I was 13, my mother made me take piano lessons. Now, we had a piano in the house and I was always fiddling with it, but couldn’t really play anything of any consequence. On top of that, at age 13, I had other things on my mind way more compelling than major scales. But Mom ruled, so I took the lessons.

Fortunately, my teacher was a guy who worked in the Post Office and played in a little trio on weekends. They did old standards and jazz and whatnot. He didn’t know from classical. One night a week, he would come to the house and show me how to make chords. “This is a C chord, Mike,” he would say before hitting another one. “And this is an F chord.” He got me to listen to the intervals between these chords and how one resolves into the other. Anyway, without getting too technical, what he did was, he effectively taught me to play by ear.

I can’t overstate the significance of this. Within about two or three weeks, I could string a couple of chords together and make a half-assed attempt at a song that was on the radio!  Holy shit! The light clicked on, and from that moment forward, my Mom never had to make me practice again. I was all over that piano.

One night, some eighteen months later, my teacher announced to me that this would be my final lesson. “What, are you leaving town?” I asked. He said no, he just didn’t have anything more to teach me and he didn’t feel he would be earning the money my parents paid him to carry it any further (BTW, he was getting $1 per lesson. That’s one dollar.). Seventy-some-odd little half-hour lessons, and it was all over. So I felt like I was in a rowboat being pushed off into an unstable sea, as he stood on the dock waving goodbye.

Remember what I said about practice? That’s what I did from that day on. Every chance I got. When my parents would go out for the evening, I’d sit at the piano trying out new stuff. And they certainly didn’t mind. They thought it would be just great if they could pull me out for company and have me play a little tune. You know, be the hit of the party. Little did they know I’d been bitten and they’d created the Wolfman.

When I started playing for a living, I took a portable piano with me out on the road so I could practice in my hotel room late at night with headphones. I even took a turntable with me to cop stuff from records (yes, I’m that old!).

Now, you could say that my teacher just guided me rather than taught me, since I had the aptitude for it already, and you may be right. But when he showed how to listen for those chord changes, I put that down as pure teaching. That was something I was just totally unaware of.

So now, I’m writing. My first novel was picked up by a publisher and is coming out this year. I’ve got two more right behind it and working on a third. The writing thing took me a lot longer to pick up, since I didn’t have anyone to show me anything or give me guidance. But I believe I had the ability deep down inside myself, struggling to get out. The cry of the artist, you could say.

Or as Dan O’Shea says, the magic is in the repetition somewhere.

Time for a little BSP. Here’s a link to an interview I did with The Examiner.

http://shar.es/mXyXX