About twenty-two years
ago, I was given a charity anthology called Unusual
Suspects. The reason: the book boasted a “lost” Jim Thompson story, “The
Car In The Mexican Quarter”. Now I couldn’t tell you much about that story (I
probably liked it), nor do I remember the details of work by the likes of Joyce
Carol Oates, George Pelecanos, James Lee Burke or Jonathan Lethem. The only
thing I do remember is the jolt of the penultimate tale, a short-short piece
barely four pages long, called “Homeless”.
“When I was a little kid, I saw this demonstration in the
park near my house. A lot of people, screaming and yelling. Most of the men had
long hair. The man who lived with my mother would have said they were fags.
There was a big sign. BRING THE WAR HOME it said."
This was my
introduction to Andrew Vachss. It blew my world apart. I didn’t know writing
could be like that. Declarative sentences, meticulously crafted. Statements of
fact. This is the world. This is the truth. This is important. And God help you
if you don’t pay attention. His voice is that of the voiceless, his focus
unparalleled. Many writers are described in pugilistic terms; very few read
like they’re fighting for their lives. Further research confirmed the theory:
this was an author who’d been an aid worker in Biafra, a labour organiser, a
director of a maximum-security juvenile prison, an attorney specialising in
cases of child abuse. For a young writer prospecting for authenticity in his
prospective influences, Vachss was the motherlode.
I read Shella. I read the Burke books. I
narrowly avoided tumbling into existential despair. Burke’s New York is rancid
to the core, populated with irrevocably damaged outsiders trying to keep the
predators from their prey. His worldview is grim, his victories small. Vachss
became a tough recommendation to make, more so as ultra-hardboiled pretenders aped
the violence and eschewed the informed indignation. In the end, it became
easier to file Vachss under “grim-dark” and leave him there. For all their
rigorous intensity, Vachss’s work felt too nihilistic to revisit. But then I
felt the same way about Pinter for a while. And I was wrong there, too.
“Don’t confuse me with others in this game. I’m no cold
reader. I don’t do hypnosis, I don’t look for tells, and I don’t use Amytal or
psychedelics. Staging is important, yes, but I am the only indispensable
element in the equation.”
Vachss’s latest is The Questioner, a novelette from
snarling new publisher Utopia Books. The eponymous (and nameless) questioner is
a man schooled in the dark arts of interrogation, but for whom violence is
never a means to an end. He is a persuader, a diviner, a truth prospector. Over
the course of 36 pages, we follow The Questioner through a series of
interrogations as he gently probes his subjects and guides them towards their
absolute truth, interspersed with meditations on his craft. On a surface level,
this is another in a long line of skilfully rendered psychological thrillers
from Vachss; scratch that surface and you’ll find a philosophical investigation
into morality on a global scale. The hard, simple truths of Burke and his ilk
have become something nebulous, their solutions no longer applicable if indeed
they ever were. And in case you think this is a blurring of talent, rest
assured that Vachss’s prose is still as precise as ever. The difference now is
that he dares to leave room for interpretation. In this respect, the
novelette’s ostensibly slight length is a bonus: this is a story that demands repeated
reading, and promises to offer more with each experience.
Now if you’ll excuse
me, I have some re-reading to do. And what the hell, it’ll start with a
demonstration in the park. That never goes out of style. --
Ray Banks has worked as a wedding singer, double-glazing salesman, croupier, dole monkey, and various degrees of disgruntled temp. He currently lives in Edinburgh, Scotland and online at www.thesaturdayboy.com.
A new study just released claims that so-called "chick lit" is bad for self-esteem. This study has nothing to say, as far as I can tell, about whether the genre is bad for your soul, but that's another matter.
"The negative effects produced from the current study underscore the concern of previous scholars for the potential effect of chick lit protagonists' obsession with weight and appearance," write Kaminski and co-author Robert Magee in the study, "Does this book make me look fat?". "Scholars and health officials should be concerned about the effect novels have on women's body image, especially since these issues could lead to disordered eating and other health issues."
In reading the stories on the study (you can get a copy of the scientific article itself for a low $39.95 (roughly two Euros according to today's exchange rate (God bless America))) the claim seems to be that the focus on body weight in these novels is harmful. Ya think?
We could, and perhaps have, argue about "chick lit" and whether the term alone is simply a pejorative and misogynistic attack attempting to reinforce the patriarchy of belles lettres.
California is everything we've come to expect from Ray Banks. It's taught, funny, human and deliciously fucked-up.
A novella can be a tricky thing. As a writer, it can lead to either rushing a story, or padding it out when it ran out of steam several thousand words earlier.
But, when you get the right story for the right length, a novella can become a perfect punch to the gut. A great novella can deliver just the right dose of character and story to suck you in without throwing in the kitchen sink to keep you hooked. What Banks does here is exactly what he does best; he gets in, he tells the story, he gets out. No messing, but plenty of mess.
Shuggie Boyle is fresh out of prison, and he's hell bent on doing things right this time. He avoids getting in fights, he counts to ten when he can feel his temper going, and he goes out of his way not to split your head open with a bottle. He's all about the long term goals these days. That's what he was taught in prison. Give yourself something to aim for, and all the small problems will sort themselves out. Whether Shuggie misses the point in what he's been told to do, or whether the people telling him missed the point in what he needed, that's up to you; point is, it's not going well. He sets his sights on the big dream. He's going to get to California, USA, after a brief stop off in California, Scotland.
And he's not going to Falkirk to settle old scores. He's not looking to hurt anybody or outstay his welcome. He just wants to pick up something that's his, and then get out of the way. Out to where the skies are blue and the wine is fresh. Or clear. Or whatever it is that wine is supposed to be.
The truth is that Shuggie knows only slightly less about California and wine than I do, and I know nothing. But ambition, ego and delusion make for great copy. If Icarus hadn't flown too close to the sun we wouldn't have had a story. Shuggie is Scottish, and doesn't know what the sun looks like, let alone how to aim for it, so he has to settle for a few vineyards.
And if you think I'm dropping in Greek myth just for shits and giggles think again. Banks has cultivated his own brand of Noir over the past few years, one that pits the ego and self-delusion of modern tragedy against the overbearing sense of fate and destiny from Greek and Roman storytelling. And the real essence of noir often lies in that battle, in my opinion. No matter how much Shuggie tells himself he can change, there's nothing he can do about the fact that the world doesn't want him to. He's stuck in repeat, he just doesn't know it. Banks' other character, Cal Innes, had a similar battle, and a large part of the tragedy came in Cal's eventual realisation of his place in the grand scheme.
There is a lot to admire here from a craft point of view. Faced with very little amount of time to set scene and character, Banks manages to rely on using the right amount of small detail to do both. He didn't have the luxury of letting us get to know Shuggie over the course of 60-70,000 words, so he gives us just enough to get a total grip on the character now. Shuggie spends a lot of time thinking about the way his Granda behaved, and possibly measuring himself against that ideal. He also drops in a few telling references to cinema, through both New Jack City and Sam Peckinpah. If a character has those as his reference points on male behaviour, then he's going to look to go down in the messiest way possible even if there's a much safer answer.
To go into anymore detail would be to spill the beans on what happens. What I will say is that it's not all grim and bleak. As we have come to expect, there is some nice fast dialogue and a wicked dark sense of humour. You'll laugh both with Shuggie and at him, and you'll wince each time events take a violent turn. The story doesn't let up and, if you're not careful, you'll get sucked in and pulled along in one sitting.
While I'm raving about the book it's only fair I take a moment to praise the publisher. Five Leaves Press has built up a great head of steam with british crime fiction. Not only have they been home to two PI novels from our own Russel D McLean, but they have established the Crime Express series of novellas, of which California is the latest. Each novella in the line is a tight little bundle of dark crime goodness, and look out for reviews of some of the newest additions on here in future. Amidst all the furore that's broken out online about ebooks and price-points, lets not lose sight of the fact there are publishers out there who are doing interesting things with print, and they need to be praised and supported.
So, yes, anyway. Book. Go buy it. It'll knock you out.
(This is my second and last post for DSD. Just wanted to add that it's been a blast, and I may be looking for ways to incapacitate Stringer for longer next time. I also wanted to say how proud I am of myself for writing a whole post about Harrogate and not mentioning Russel's fancy man. Aw, hell.)
Spent last Saturday down in Harrogate for the (deep breath) Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival 2010. It was originally supposed to be a fleeting visit - basically the panel and then offski - but we ended up staying a little longer thanks to some fine company and another panel that caught my attention. Otherwise, I have to admit, I have something of a love/hate relationship with events. See, like the vast majority of other people what have written books an’ that, I have a day job and, like a vast majority of people what have day jobs an’ that, relish the idea of spending my free time as I wish. Now “as I wish” normally means “spending time with my wife”. It can also mean “getting some writing done”.
What it very rarely means is “being a writer”.
For me, “being a writer” is the least comfortable part of this whole business, because the simple fact of the matter is I don’t really consider myself that way - not in an arena any wider than our spare bedroom, anyway. I don’t make my living from writing, I don’t hang out with creative types that often, and nobody at my day job knows about this secondary “career”. It’s an existence that’s worked out pretty well so far, except for those occasions that demand a public appearance. Then I spend most of my time waiting for the tap on the shoulder and a request that I not make a scene as I’m escorted from the premises. I suppose this is some throwback to my early events, typified by empty rooms and piles of books that need to be signed so they can’t be sent back to the publisher. Little old ladies who come for the free wine and stay for the moral superiority. Stock signings that require identification before they’ll believe you are who you say you are. Convention signings without books. Convention signings with books that nobody wants. Holes in convention conversation where people look around for someone who’ll benefit their career more than you, the general awkwardness of being at a school reunion and getting stuck with the lad who used to eat stuff for money. And then the horrible realisation that the lad pities you.
I could go on, but you get the picture. The idea of travelling across the country only to feel like shit gets old really quickly, especially when you’re doing it on your own time. It’s taken me five books and a word from my missus to call it a day and ditch this ridiculous obligation to show up for everything I’m invited to. I dare say I’ve missed out some sterling opportunities to sell books, but then one of the few benefits of having a day job is that bills still get paid regardless of how much I sell. And while it doesn’t change some of the minor irritations about even the best events - and I’d definitely call Harrogate one of the best - it certainly puts those irritations in perspective and makes the whole experience a lot more enjoyable.
So there we see it, under Ray’s Advice For New Writers (Abridged), the same refrain: Do What You’re Comfortable With. Because for all the marketing gurus telling me I should be out there with the sell-sell-sell and network-network-network, I reckon the key factor in any event should be enjoyability, otherwise you’re (most likely) paying for the privilege of wasting your spare time in misery in front of a crowd of people who’ve never heard of you and, because of your lacklustre performance, probably won’t do much to change that fact. So no more readings - quite apart from the fact that I don’t like watching authors read from their books, the turnout for one of my solo shows would be embarrassing. No more stock signing unless it’s an in-and-out - sitting at a table in the middle of a bookshop getting stared at is even more embarrassing.
And much more time to write, which is infinitely preferable to being a writer.
So Stringer’s buggered off to get married and celebrate another year of breathing, and as a result won’t be able to struggle up to the pulpit for a couple of weeks. Also, the bloke he was talking about last week – y’know, the human book daredevil wrestler fella – well, he got a touch of hay fever (apparently there’s too much rape in the air or something) and couldn’t make it. Anyway, thanks to those photos I have of Stringer’s half-hour spree in the marmoset enclosure at Barcelona Zoo, I managed to wangle the spot instead.
And I’ll tell you right off the bat, I had some dynamite for you. Get this, I was all set to blog about blogging (how enormously fucking meta of me), and how I’m wary of it, and how I’ve lurched from one blog platform to another – started with Blogger, went to Typepad, then Wordpress and now I’m messing with Tumblr – only to find that, despite posting stuff on a semi-regular basis, my biggest hits came from the semi-literate fuckwits wanting to know if Wrong Turn was based on a true story. And then I was all about how the Internet despises context, and how an online personal history comes in the form of sound bites wrapped up in persona, and how that relates to marketing yourself as a writer. At one point I got deep, started throwing philosophical questions into the mix, stuff that was going to blow your minds and make you come together and proclaim me your new king and shower me with candy and beer. Seriously. You would've been building shrines to me.
And then, just when I was about to get it all typed up and posted, Harvey Pekar died.
Yeah, thanks, Harv. I had ‘em showering me with candy and beer there.
Anyway, I’ve not noticed much of a reaction to Pekar’s death, other than the main news sources, and that’s a shame. If you’re not familiar with his work, I’d urge you to pick up any copy or collected trade of American Splendor that you can get your hands on. A particular favourite of mine is 1994’s Our Cancer Year – it, amongst others provided the basis for the 2003 movie American Splendor (for those of you in the UK, it’s on Film4 on Saturday 24th), which is certainly one of the finest, if not the finest comic book adaptations of all time.
Now Pekar isn't crime fiction. In fact, he’s barely fiction. And I have to say, that’s more important to me than any genre considerations, because Pekar was one of that rare breed: the honest voice. He eschewed fashion and told personal stories without recourse to the sex-crazed juvenilia that marred many early “comix”. Despite having no particular drawing skills to speak of, and with little in the way of early enthusiasm for the medium (thinking it “kid’s stuff”), he still believed wholeheartedly in its potential. According to Pekar, the only thing limiting comics was those who produced them, the publishers and writers and artists who insisted on pigeonholing themselves by creating books solely for kids. And he stuck to his guns throughout his thirty-plus year career, asking for nothing but a couple of bucks every now and then to keep himself and the comics going.
Now that might not mean a lot, especially in an age defined by popular culture's relentless "re-imagination" of itself as an autotuned and primary-coloured karaoke. In this climate, the concept of originality takes a back seat to that of branding, and honest, down-at-heel voices have trouble making themselves heard above the cacophony of shite. The quotidian concerns of a file clerk at the VA hospital seem too personal, not likely to hit a wide enough target audience.
This is not to say, however, that all the original voices have gone with Pekar's passing. If anything, the Internet has given further opportunity for these voices to be heard. So instead of me whinging on about the same old rubbish, how's about we take the opportunity to really recommend those voices that have meant something to us over the years, the ones with an honesty that might not always make them easy to take, but which make them even less easy to forget.
This week, I'm running late again, with deadlines, so I thought why should I do all the yakking? I figured, why not let you see some of the great stuff I've been finding on the web of late. But let's pretend to have a theme by linking only to interviews.
I also thought you might enjoy some video interviews, too. Such as an hour long session with the legend that is Lawrence Block conducted by Charles Ardai. I was at this Bouchercon and missed the intervew because I had been taken by a bearded bad influence to get beer and chicken wings somewhere else the city.
Or this with the incomprarable Laura Lippman, whose WHAT THE DEAD KNOW still haunts me.
But then I figured, "oh, you want more bang for your buck, right?" and remembered a little project I was thinking about lately. When Crime Scene Scotland folded into irregular blog-only fomat, a wealth of content dissapeared from the web. But I still had many of the original files. Such as one of my favourite interviews with the best writer you should be reading, Mr Ray Banks (whose latest US release, NO MORE HEROES, has just hit US stores in harback, you lucky, lucky people). So, in honour of Ray's release, and to save me typing original content (I really should be concentrating on the next novel), allow me to take back to 2006 and the halycon days of Banks first releasing his brilliant second novel, SATURDAY'S CHILD upon the world:
Ray Banks is one of the best writers to emerge in recent years. Kicking Brit Crime hard in the crotch, he's one of the new breed of noir writers who are taking the British crime novel back down into the gutters where it belongs. His characters can hardly be described as likeable and yet they are compelling in their own ways... fascinating studies of some of the worst aspects of our nature. His grimy take on modern Britain reflects the true nature of the darker facets of our modern urban existence. And more than that, he writes like the Devil himself.
We were honoured to be able to catch some time with Banks before his appearance at Waterstones in Edinburgh alongside Al "Sunshine" Guthrie and Alan "Sparky" Bissett, although we perhaps should apologise for ensuring that he was late for his own event.
RAY BANKS: Before we start, should I hold my book up?
RUSSEL McLEAN: Okay, hold it up.
RB: Yeah, right in front of the microphone.
RM: Well you’re away to do a panel so you should really hold it up, then.
RB: Sure, I’ll put it on the table. I’m sure it won’t make me look like a prize ponce.
RM: Right, well I think we’ll dive right in. We’ll start with Saturday’s Child: fantastic book as we’ve already said here on the site. Actually we’ll be changing the review once this is finished.
RB: Finally admitting it’s a pile of shite.
RM: Yeah, that’s it. What struck me was that you’re dealing with the PI mythos in a very British environment which is a very tough thing to do. I seem to remember someone (I’m fairly certain it was Stuart MacBride) [Although it should be noted that MacBride can't remember this, and it may have been my mind playing tricks on me]saying that PI novels are the toughest thing to do in a British setting.
RB: I suppose that’s true because the PI’s a very American archetype. And a lot of the British PI novels that I read,.. they all seemed to be a bit, for want of a better word, lame. In that the PIs were very much the kind of Marlowe stereotype: they all had drinking problems, mostly divorced, mostly this and mostly that. There were just little things that would throw me out like… a certain PI, I won’t mention who wrote him, got hold of a gun very very quickly. I said, okaaaay, and that would be the end of that book for me… well you know how I feel about guns anyway [Making reference to his Not The White City panel at Bouchercon 2005 which became very heated on the subject of gun control in the UK]
RM: I was sorry I missed that panel
RB: Yeah, it got a little out of control, a little heated. But it always seemed to me that these characters were always playing PIs rather than actually being PIs. We do have private investigators in this country but its corporate crime, pretty dull stuff, and you don’t have that kind of Lone Wolf PI tradition… and this basically originated from the short stories… Cal Innes is a very, very different character in the books than he is in the short stories. I was originally gonna tie them in with the book but it was impossible because an almost entirely different person.
RM: So the same name but a different kind of feel?
RB: It’s the same name… kind of a shared history but the temperaments might be different. When he was in the short stories he was basically a PI who had a bit of trouble in his past and… there wasn’t a great deal about his home life… and there was a little bit about Donna in one of the short stories and Paulo and the lad’s club and so on but there wasn’t a great deal of back story. He was basically just a tool to tell the story which a PI often is… like a commentator on what’s happening rather than an active participant… that’s what he was in the short stories.
RM: Like a camera?
RB: Yeah, so you’re seeing everything that’s going on through this one guy who’s supposed to be some kind of moral yardstick. But when it comes to translating that to a novel he would have been very dull to read about. So in order to address that… and what I prefer to read anyway is characters who are a little bit screwed up, who don’t necessarily have all their functions and aren’t necessarily thinking straight… I mean they’re trying to do the right thing, but it always turns back on them. But he’s not really a PI.
RM: No. He acts like one and he obviously thinks he’s one… I mean he makes up his business cards at the machine in the service station. One of the things that quite struck me was the parallel in one sense with the early Matt Scudder stories. When he was doing favours for friends before he got his license.
RB: You mean when Scudder was good? Before he quit drinking? But the main PI that I was always thinking of was Jack Taylor [Ken Bruen’s Galway based PI: an alcoholic and generally rather screwed up hero] because the beautiful thing about Ken’s books is that you’re reading them… and you’re not necessarily reading them for the plot.. you’re reading because he’s an alcoholic, essentially… which is why I like the early Scudder books… you’re reading about this alcoholic who tithes…
RM: The character is important rather than the plot?
RB: Yeah, and these books are alcoholism dealt with properly rather than “uh, yeah, I like a bit of a drink and then I have a blackout and then, ooo, something else bad’s happened to me” I’d actually prefer to read and write about someone who actually had issues to deal with on an almost minute to minute basis… With Cal it wasn’t necessarily the drink but the ex prisoner thing and his ties to Uncle Morris [a criminal boss in Saturday’s Child]
RM: I feel when I’m reading it he’s trying to constantly turn that part of his life around but he never quite seems to manage it. And that’s something with both Saturday’s Child and The Big Blind… they both seem to be about these kind of choices…
RB: God, you’re good, man: that’s exactly what it was all about. It was all about choices. The Big Blind was, I think, a bit more obviously about one moral choice that Alan has to make about whether Stevie lives or dies and he has to face the consequences of that… but he takes the easy way out… the good and right thing to do is never really the easy thing. With Cal, these choices are more on a kind of ongoing basis. As much as he’s trying to turn his life around he’s kind of stopped by himself. Especially in the later books. Especially in the book I’m writing just now. Suffice to say that car accident, when he gets knocked over… that has major repercussions in the rest of the book and the rest of the series.
It is a finite series. Because if I didn’t make it a finite series he would end up like so many PIs being cranked out again and again and again and eroding what made the earlier books so much fun... and I don’t want to be one of those writers, all fat and comfortable and lazy. With Cal, considering his circumstances, he’s not that kind of PI. He doesn’t even really have an office. He doesn’t have a background in law or anything like that. He has no skills, he’s just making it up as he goes along. Like me.
RM: He can’t keep meeting clients in pub toilets and getting beaten up?
RB: Yeah, that’s it exactly.
RM: That was what I was planning to mention, your thoughts on the nature of series characters and whether Cal was a finite character.
RB: It’s only five books. I might do some odds and sods with Cal, but not another full-length book...
RM: Do you think there’s ever a point with any character where you could keep them going more or less indefinitely? Do you think anyone’s managed it convincingly yet?
RB: Not off the top of my head. I mean, Ken Bruen’s going strong with Jack Taylor. At the end of The Dramatist I thought, right, that’s it, he can’t possibly… I mean there’s gotta be a limit to the amount of punishment he can take before, you know, he collapses into a coma. And he has some horrible things happen to him in The Dramatist. There’s that kick-arse ending.
RM: Ahhh, you see, I’ve still not read that one. I’ve read Priest, though.
RB : So you know what happens at the end of The Dramatist, then?
RM: Yeah.
RB: You’ve just spoiled it for yourself! ‘Cause when that comes, oh, you just don’t expect it! A real kick in the heart. And I think Ken’s doing a wonderful thing whereby it’s kind of like a cycle… a pattern that he [Jack Taylor] goes through, like the kind of choral way he writes... There’s repetition and reinforcement like a great song. A real murder ballad. It’s the same thing with the books of Jim Sallis… He wrote what is very much a finite set of books and yet it’s totally infinite too… and I’m hoping to get that kind of feeling. Because when you get to the end of the Lew Griffin books [Sallis’s series] you start reading them again because they are kind of like a cycle whereby patterns repeat themselves and he puts on different masks all the way through it…
RM: But you get a feeling of finality at the end?
RB: Yes. The ending of the books as I’m planning at the moment is going to be pretty finite.
RM: But Cal and Donna aren’t going to spoil the romantic tension like Maddy and Dave of moonlighting?
RB: It’s funny, did you read that on the Blog [Ray blogs on a semi-frequent basis at his website: http://www.thesaturdayboy.com - although it has undergone so many revamps since this interview that the post in question is long gone]? Kerri was asking when Donna and Cal were getting together. They are in the third book together. She does come down to Manchester.[Did this actually happen? UK readers will already know, but US readers will have to buy the new hardcover edition of the spanky NO MORE HEROES to see if Ray got this bit in the book] As to whether they consummate that relationship is another story entirely because of certain things that I probably shouldn’t go into.
RM: You put in all the romantic tension to widen your audience base, didn’t you?
RB: Actually, yeah! Well, there’s gotta be some respite from the doom and gloom and all that, and it can’t just all be cracking gags. There’s gotta be some kind of hope of redemption. And that’s a beautiful thing that Jason Starr does… and Al [Guthrie] as well. You give the character that glimmer of hope and then you go, no, you’re not having that! That will make you keep reading. So, yeah, Donna and Cal are gonna be that kind of glimmer… but they’re both really, really damaged, Funnily enough. I don’t think there’s anybody who’s not damaged in these books, to be honest.
RM: So we’ll never see a Ray Banks chicklit, then?
RB: Well after the response to the Cozy [Ray wrote a cozy paragraph for reading at a panel at Left Coast Crime 2006] you never know… I might write a cat mystery! With that cosy paragraph I was really just taking the piss… but… people seemed to enjoy it! So you never know… Francesca Muldoon might be written under a pseudonym...
RM: Next thing you know you’ll be writing in the style of Rendell…
RB: REEENDEEELL! Ah, I think I’d better move on before the red mist falls.
RM: I find the violence in the books very well done… kind of a nice change… its very street level and there on the page in front of the reader compared to some serial killer books where violence is often grotesque but often offstage and not so affecting.
RB: The thing is with serial killer books… its like John Rickards has said that certain writers feel they have to up the ante every time… so you’ve got people’s eyelids being cut off and all that… and I read these things and I think, “yeah, it sounds like it hurts,” but I can’t really relate to it, it’s out of my sphere of knowledge so it’s just ick for ick’s sake. I’m more likely to relate to somebody getting their nose broken. You know what that’s gonna feel like… we’ve all smashed our heads or whatever, got into those two-punch fights… and you get the tears in the eyes, you can’t focus, the blood and everything… But… and I was talking about this the other day… I don’t think that the eyelid stuff’s necessarily violent. It’s just gore.
I think there are some violent parts to the book. There’s the bit in the toilets at the beginning… it’s violent, but not a lot of violence takes place…
RM: It’s more a scuffle.
RB: Yeah, its more like, when I was in the toilet earlier some guy went into the cubicle and it sounded like he was wrestling with it… that clatter, clatter, bang, crash… So there’s that, there’s the bit where Cal gets beaten up… the cricket bat scene which keeps coming back to haunt me. I mean, its kind of sadistic, but I hope you understand why he’s doing that.
RM: It’s where Cal’s at his lowest ebb, I suppose… it’s where he makes the choice to go in a certain direction.
RB: For the most part of the book he’s trying to control that base anger, And at this point it just spills out: he’s had too much to drink and he’s really upset, hopefully understandably so. And the most horrific bit of violence comes right at the end [edited here for spoilers to the plot]: that was the only bit that maybe I thought I’d gone a bit too far but then I said, “nah.”
RM: But it’s in the nature of [this character]. You can’t forgive him but you do expect it from him.
RB: It’s almost casual… and that’s what’s disturbing. And it’s uncomfortable because there’s this tenderness after the fact, which is really what I thought was going too far. Its not posed punches or anything like that. In real life people are scuffling and they can’t throw punches and they’re kicking each other in the shoulders, punching each other’s ears and that… that’s what you see. Round where we live on the weekends when the pubs kick out you can see these drunk people hugging each other, almost or they’re just rolling around… It’s the kind of violence I like to see in books because violence is supposed to hurt and it’s supposed to be awkward.
RM: If Cal ever makes it to the movies, we’ll never see him in bullet time, then?
RB: Maybe if he’s really drugged up or something…
The kind of violence that stays with me in movies is like the pavement thing in American History X, or the pistol-whipping in Goodfellas... you know the bit where Ray Liotta just stalks over to the guy next door and wails on him with his .38. And the effects of violence... like the aftermath of the kicking Jeff Bridges gets in Thunderbolt and Lightfoot... saw that when I was kid, scarred me for life.
I can’t emotionally engage with violence that’s atrocity after atrocity after atrocity. When it becomes almost… well, comic…
RM: Like an over the top gory horror movie? Where you end up laughing instead of being scared?
RB: You reach a sort of Troma level of things like heads exploding… I’m not keen on that and I like to see characters who’ve been hit suffer and carry those scars with them. Like I was saying about the series character, there’s only so much they can suffer before it’s too much. The one I’m writing at the moment he’s carrying two books worth of beatings with him. That horrific beating he gets in the first one, he carries that with him… you know, with the codeine he gets prescribed by Dr Dick and then he gets part of his ear shot off in Donkey Punch.
You know, I wanted to get him shot. But I couldn’t set it in Britain and have him shot [Donkey Punch, Ray's second novel - also known as Sucker Punch - takes place in the US]
RM: I think you can get away with it in some settings and not others.
RB: There’s a certain market and a certain type of book that you can expect it in. Like Simon Kernick’s books. You can believe it in them because, well, they’re thrillers and these guys are all packing guns and that’s fine and Kernick does that really well. But what annoys me is very much a middle-class thing where they’re like, “Oh, I’ll just go to a rough pub and secure myself a weapon” and you think, no, what are you, high? Or just lazy writing... With the gun culture in this country it’s just not that easy to buy a gun. There aren’t people just walking around with guns.
RM: Well, maybe in parts of London.
RB: Yeah, and I hear Birmingham’s got a bad gun reputation. One of my favourite moments was in the film Bullet Boy, where the cops burst into a flat because there’s a hand gun on the premises... that’s the kind of reaction the police have to weapons... it’s like there’s a bomb in the place... But where I grew up a weapon was batteries in a sock or a pool cue or a six inch nail in Mars Bar. Its what they used to use in football grounds. One of the hooligan tricks was they’d put this nail inside a Mars Bar so they could get it through into the stands and then, wham! And then there’s knives, and Stanley knives which I’ve never liked the look of… car aerials, which can be particularly nasty… cricket bats…
RM: What’s frightening about these kind of weapons is that they’re so easily obtainable. Like glassing, I suppose.
RB: Y’know, I haven’t done a glassing scene yet. I will do one at some point. I mean… you can just grind it and… well you can see the damage it does to people’s faces. You only need to look at the late Oliver Reed because he was glassed at one point and he had scars all over his face. It’s a horrible way of disfiguring someone for life.
But I’m not keen on guns. There’s a gun in Donkey Punch but it’s set in America so I can kind of get away with it... and even then I was reticent about having one... maybe even more so because it was set in America, because I didn’t want to be one of those writers who’re like, “Oh it’s America, everyone’s packing heat because they’re all crazy and violent”... that kind of patronising rubbish... But the kind of gangsters in Saturday’s Child… well, there’s Rossie who carries a butterfly knife. There was this kid at school had a butterfly knife. He used to flick it about like that [demonstrates] and he cut his hand to ribbons because he couldn’t do it.
You know, I’m not interested in the big gun-toting gangsters. I’m interested in the low level ones. The Scally gangster. The ones who’ll rip off a car and then not know what to do with it. Well, Mo Tiernan [From Saturday’s Child] is a small time pill pusher. He’s not even graduated to Heroin. So he pushes pills because it’s something he can do and it makes him feel like Tony Montana.
RM: Which again is about this street level mentality that I think has been missing from mainstream Brit crime for a long time. Of course there are a few writers trying to bring that back. There’s you and Al Guthrie for sure, and for our purposes here I’m going to use Ken Bruen…
RB: …the London novels, yeah…
RM: …As an example even though he’s Irish. I mean, I’m not saying this is a massive movement but it’s gaining in popularity at least on an underground level.
RB: We’re kind of undermining the entire crime genre in this country, yes, with our dirty little books... how dare we? And Ken’s a wonderful example because… well, there’s The Hackman Blues and Rilke on Black…
RM: Of course, The Hackman Blues, which, sure enough, a certain someone tried to ban… and then ended up on the cover of one of Ken’s books…
RB: Yeah, Taming The Alien.
RM: I’m sure they said it was disguised but I knew who it was straight off.
RB: It’s pretty obvious who it is if you have a good look, you can’t miss those rows of Critter teeth… But The Hackman Blues is one of my favourite Bruen books… it was my favourite for a long time until I read American Skin. The book’s getting this kind of reputation that,.. well in a way it’ll be strange if it ever gets published because the hype has kind of outgrown it… But it is absolutely… it’s on a par with The Hackman Blues.
RM: I met Ken briefly at Bouchercon… cool guy… and I said to him how much I enjoyed The Hackman Blues… and he turns round and says, “Oh, it’s a horrible little book!”
RB: Well it is a horrible book! It’s completely non-redemptive in every sense… I mean, you shouldn’t have to redeem any one, any of your characters...
RM: A story has to be honest to its core…
RB: Yes, these people should not and do not go walking off into the sunset. Its sort of an old school noir paperback mentality… like the fantastic last chapter of The Getaway [Jim Thompson] where it’s almost existential… its just that good. It shouldn’t have worked, maybe, but it did. Or at the end of Savage Night which is grotesque and… there shouldn’t be any kind of false redemption, I don’t think. I don’t think there’s any real redemption at the end of Saturday’s Child.
RM: That’s true… why would these characters need redemption forced on them? Unless its an attempt to make them sympathetic… to force that on them… one of the notes I have here about your characters is that they’re always interesting and engaging and wonderfully layered but they’re not necessarily sympathetic…
RB: That’s right, me and Al [Guthrie] for sure, we definitely don’t go for sympathy! Why should we? We’re not collecting for charity... Empathy’s the only thing you need. Although I’m twisted in my belief about my characters and I would say if there’s anyone… its Mo that’s probably the most sympathetic to me. Cal can be a real nasty piece of work… I suppose like Slater in The Big Blind. I don’t know that I like him…
RM: But the thing is, in The Big Blind especially, you’re on Slater’s side at first and then… Well, I don’t think with Cal he’s as bad as Slater was…
RB: No, that was pretty awful. But then in my mind there was a direct correlation between Alan Slater and… well one of the Thompson ones, A Hell of a Woman or A Swell Looking Babe where there’s this emptiness to the character and even he eventually notices it but he does nothing about it... he can’t because the scales drop from his eyes too late. It’s kind of his fate to be empty. Whereas with a character like Beale [From The Big Blind; Slater’s mate and a general arsehole] he’s this idiot, but you kind of feel sorry for him. Because he doesn’t know what he’s doing.
RM: In the book you start out hating Beale and liking Alan and then somewhere they kind of cross over…
RB: Yeah, suddenly you’re feeling sorry for him, I hope, despite the fact that he’s a violent drunk and a bigot… but with Mo he’s just so damaged… people like Mo… people who’ve read the book actually like Mo because, well, he’s a bit funnier than Cal and, well, he’s a bit more alive than Cal… Cal kind of sleepwalks through parts of it…
RM: But that’s part of his wanting to be the hero character, I’d imagine. And we all know that heroes have to be dull…
RB: That’s absolutely true! I hope Cal’s not dull, though... There’s this wonderful Tom Waits quote, “a hero ain’t nothing but a sandwich” which is just great and bang on the money. And that’s the way it should be. I don’t believe in… there’s this whole big thing in Donkey Punch about heroes with this American guy he comes into contact with who’s going, “there aren’t any heroes. They took all our heroes away… the good guys used to wear white hats and the bad guys wore black hats and now… Now everybody’s grey and talking like they’re Jesus.”
I don’t know that there’s any room now, especially in this day and age for good guys and bad guys. Maybe in the thriller genre because they might think they need that black and white… but certainly not in the crime genre.
RM: Especially in, how is it Polygon describe it in the Press Release, “Literary Noir”…
RB: Ahhh, you see I’m not so sure Saturday’s Child is noir. I’m not sure it’s literary, either, but what do I know?
RM: I suppose Saturday’s Child isn’t noir because Cal’s coming back… its something you and I have argued about before...
RB: True, you can’t do series noir. Unless it’s an overall arc. Which is what Ken’s done beautifully with the Taylor books. With Cal, taking each book individually, I don’t think it’s noir, but the series might end up that way, if you get me… at the moment, it’s more hardboiled… in fact is it hardboiled? I really don’t know what I’m doing!
RM: Telling a good story, which is what’s important in the end.
RB: Hopefully… You should have seen the book before Mo got his narrative. I mean I’m hearing now that people can’t imagine it without him. When I was originally shopping it around it was just Cal. Mo was in it. But he didn’t have a voice. And my wife – Ana – she originally said to me, “Go on, give Mo a voice!” And I’m going, “Ahhh, shaddap, you don’t know, you don’t understand me: I’m an artist!” and then my agent turns round and says, “Why don’t you give Mo a voice?” and I go, “that’s a wonderful idea!” so I give Mo a voice and make a point of listening to Ana’s advice instead of my laziness, because that advice always makes the book better... But it fucked me in the States though, because a lot of people were coming back and saying its very difficult to read… it wasn’t anything about Mo being a nasty character but just the way it was written… first person local dialect, which I can understand. In order for a book to sell to the widest possible audience, there’s a feeling it has to be as easy to read as possible. So I suppose I am being literary in that respect! I’m glad to hear that Harcourt think it’ll sell in the US, though... we’ll see. Hope I don’t let ‘em down.
RM: I suppose I was worried with my own short stories when they were published in the states about whether they would get the accents… but they seemed to pick it up…
RB: Yes, but I think there this rhythm there where its almost perfect English but… and you get this in Rankin… where even though it’s a Scottish accent there’s no, well, “Hoots mon” for want of a better phrase…
RM: There’s reinforcing stereotypes! How long have you been away from Scotland now?
RB: Really, isn’t everyone going around shouting, “See you Jimmy!” and all that? Or sitting around on buckets with their tackety boots and black dungarees oan? But really, I think there’s room for it. It’s all about voice.
RM: Look at Charlie Williams and the Mangel books…
RB: The voice is fantastic in the Mangel trilogy. That’s what I read for. I read for voice. Charlie Williams is fantastic… I can’t hype him enough, And he’s not a crime writer necessarily. He’s simply, well, a fucking good writer! He’s got this whole bizarre, satire thing on the state of Britain which is just bang on every single time… and that would still be good, but it’s the voice that makes it great. All my favourite books are all down to voice. Fight Club. One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest would not be the same if has been narrated by McMurphy instead of The Chief… A Clockwork Orange… the prime example of voice and the prime example of an unreliable narrator. Which hopefully, in both my books we have. I mean, Mo’s completely delusional…. And Cal’s deluding himself about being a PI… and Alan Slater, he’s beyond belief… he thinks everything’s fine!
RM: So with these characters and their delusions, how well do you know them before you start writing? I mean do you spend time getting to know them, thinking about who they are, or do they just kind of surprise you as you’re writing about them.
RB: Mo is based on a few people I know and, you’ll like this, he’s partly based on Tyres from Spaced… that whole rave culture thing and the whole, “I just wish I could control these fuckin’ mood swings!” I’ve known pillheads before and it’s that whole psychosis… Cal… I’ve written about him for such a long time… the first one was 2002, maybe… Hand Held crime were the first people to pay me and edit me… but its no longer on the net and he wasn’t a PI in that, he was just a bloke helping somebody else out which he’s kind of come back to again. Saturday’s Child was gonna kind of be a prequel to the short stories because he’s just out of prison in Saturday’s Child and he’s just coming off probation in Donkey Punch… So it was gonna be a prequel but the shorts got thrown out and all I really had was a backstory… I didn’t realise he was as clichéd as he really was; the ex-con PI.
RM: Although when you’re dealing with the PI mythos you can’t avoid certain clichés.
RB: No, you can’t. I mean if he’s gonna be a PI he’s gonna drink and more than likely to excess.
RM: At least Cal doesn’t have a drawer full of bourbon.
RB: No, well he doesn’t have much of an office! Well in the shorts… Look, those are completely alternate universe. They share some characters… Paulo’s in it.
But the characters… “Donkey” Donkin’s a bit like Beale… but he’s a bit one note although he comes into it more… although there’s the odd thing like listening to Dido which is a direct rip off of Colm Meaney’s character in Intermission with his Clannad obsession…
RM: So what you’re saying is everything you do is ripped off something else?
RB: Yeah…No, wait, I’m paying homage…
RM: So you’re Quentin Tarantino, then?
RB: Yes, but better… Yeah, “better than Tarantino”, that’d be right... but, Cal… Cal is… I share some characteristics with him… you kind of have to if you’re gonna write a series character… there’s gonna be bits of you in there. And I did the same with Alan Slater, but he was more me when I was working in Manchester which was, not a very nice person, to be honest so that was kinda getting that out.
RM: But without all the mess with the dead body, I hope.
RB: No, I didn’t dump any bodies and I didn’t kill any dogs. Despite what you might have heard. I haven’t killed any dogs. Oh God, I am getting such a reputation... No cats, no animals AT ALL in fact were hurt in Saturday’s Child and no animals will be hurt, I think, in the other books… I’ve done dogs and I’ve done cats… what else can you do, gerbils? Nobody cares enough about gerbils. Children?
There is a certain kind of character that I like to do and that you can do in novel length. It’s weird because when I did Barry De Silva, he was like the anti-Innes and now Innes is turning into that… turning into Barry. My wife hates the Barry stories. She thinks he’s absolutely horrific. I mean in Dirty Barry when he’s having a bit of a five knuckle shuffle… But he’s a rip off, Barry’s a rip off of Loren Visser in Blood Simple. I’m ripping folks off left, right and centre here… But the Coens rip everyone else off... That’s what culture’s all about, it adapts the old into the new... that’s my excuse anyway... I’m a serial homager...
RM: Ray, I think we’re gonna have to stop because, shit, you’re meant to be on that panel now!
RB: Oh, shit! I just noticed that!
RM: But thankyou for your time… it’s been fun…
RB: And thank you for touching me all the way through the interview... very relaxing.
