By the Balls

by Jim Pascoe

  UglyTown was a breath of fresh air for me, an electric jolt that reminded me what simple, balls-out fun crime writing and reading could be. The entire enterprise filled me with glee and delight with its seat-of-the-pants, outlandish, bawdy, blackly humorous, and seriously twisted plots. Being on the periphery of the UglyTown world was the literary equivalent of hanging out backstage with the Talking Heads or The Clash. Jim and Tom and their stable were serious comic book/art/design nerds who gathered like minds around them.

  These guys also had an ear for finding good writing from the slush pile. Who can forget the great Victor Gischler’s opening line in one of UglyTown’s first books, Gun Monkeys: “I turn the Chrysler onto the Florida Turnpike with Rollo Kramer’s headless body in the trunk, and all the time I’m thinking I should have put some plastic down.”

  Judges felt the exuberance too and rewarded it accordingly—Gun Monkeys was a finalist for an Edgar Award. It would be the first of many coups for UglyTown over the years. So I’m delighted to see that UglyTown is back courtesy of another rocking indie publisher, Akashic Books. A shotgun wedding made in pulpy noir heaven.

  Scott Morse

  Graphic novel author and Pixar filmmaker

  Unless you’ve picked up a seven-ten split, you’re not likely to feel a sense of wonder as palpable as this beauty of noir. Pascoe and Fassbender deliver a punch of nostalgic flair as strong as three fingers of Old Grand-Dad, as Pope drips his periodic atmosphere to punctuate the madness. Make your other books jealous they’ve got to share the spotlight on their shelf with this monster of mayhem.

  Bill Fitzhugh

  Author of Pest Control and Cross Dressing

  Fassbender? You’re talking about the actor guy in Inglourious Basterds? Oh, wait, no, you mean the guy who hooked up with Pascoe, did the whole UglyTown thing. Sure, yeah, I remember them. Something a little off about that pair. Can’t put a finger on it sitting here but yeah, I remember them. Hustlers, but in a good way. Publishers, also in a good way. Had that logo, like a half-Chinese Sherlock Holmes with Will Smith’s ears, big pipe and a derby, standing in front of some buildings with the rays of the sun, I guess it was, fanned out in the background. Never knew what that was supposed to be but I liked it. Way I heard it, they got fucked by the distribution end of things, that old story. Of course, for all I know, that could have been all horse shit to cover for embezzlement or god knows what, a ten-thousand-dollar-a-day coke habit, or maybe they were doling out hundred-thousand- dollar advances. I’m kidding, nobody does that. Anyway, Fassbender and Pascoe were a stylish pair of jacks. Inglourious Basterds too, as far as that goes. So, anyway, yeah, I remember them, why you bringing them up? They in trouble for something? Wouldn’t surprise me a bit. Give ’em my regards. Tell ’em I said, Good luck.

  Lauren Henderson

  Author of Flirting In Italian, Kiss Me, Kill Me, and The Black Rubber Dress

  (and better known as the bonkbuster author Rebecca Chance)

  It wasn’t the sight of Tom Fassbender and Jim Pascoe that made me spit out my drink all over the big, horseshoe-shaped bar of the Adam’s Mark Hotel in Denver: that was a barman who thought you made a white wine spritzer with lemonade instead of soda. I remember John Connolly and Dennis Lehane laughing like drains as the poor barman grabbed my glass back, utterly embarrassed, and then had to clean out all of the little olive and maraschino cherry containers, into which my mouthful of white wine and lemonade had landed. Thank goodness, then, that just as a new drink was set in front of me, the UglyBoys walked into the bar, all dapper suits and brightly dyed hair, and immediately everyone forgot about my high-trajectory spit and focused on them instead.

  Nothing like them had ever been seen at a crime convention before. Male crime writers and publishers aren’t the nattiest of dressers, and I distinctly remember hearing an older male bookseller bitch jealously about “upstart young guys with blue hair.” But the UglyBoys were the opposite of upstarts. They were there, I think, to publicize By the Balls, and to look for new authors, but they were utterly, charmingly unpushy. My abiding memory of their comportment at the convention—during the day, at any rate—was of them standing or sitting beside each other, entirely composed, calm and focused, their hands folded in front of them or in their laps. I’m sure it was I who went up to them and introduced myself: I was dying to meet them. They were the soul of politeness and affability. I think Jim had green hair then, and Tom blue streaks, the perfect contrast to their sharply tailored suits. I saw them as the incarnation of a certain LA style, nouveau dandies who, Beau Brummell-like, let their clothes speak for them. They were certainly not strutting peacocks.

  It was my favorite Bouchercon ever, and the UglyBoys were an essential part of that. We hung out one evening—Thursday?—drinking in the bar. I remember them ordering Ketel One martinis, the first time I had ever heard someone specifying the brand of vodka they wanted: LA-style again, ahead of the rest of the country, perhaps even the world. The next morning I had a panel. To my great pleasure, as the panelists all trooped in, I saw the UglyBoys had not only turned up, despite the late night we’d all had, but were sitting right in the front row, bless them, smart-suited and self-possessed as ever. No friends, before or since, have ever sat in the front row at a panel of mine; I cannot say how much I appreciated the gesture, how lovely it was to see sympathetic faces laughing at your jokes and nodding gravely as they agreed with the points I was making. (Even if they didn’t, it was hugely appreciated.)

  That evening we all went out—I think it was that evening, but it may have been Saturday. We found an Irish pub in Denver, which had never seen anything like us: Jim and Tom in their sartorial splendor, me in a black silk fringed dress with Chinese embroidery, and Gary Phillips, who I’m sure was the only black guy in the bar. Some man came over to ask us if we were part of a circus. I told him that Gary and I had just eloped and that the UglyBoys had been our witnesses. This made Gary smile widely and edge as far away from me as he could get, just in case I threw myself upon him to prove the point. John Connolly turned up, having just won a Shamus, and I was sure that the bar would keep serving us even though it technically closed at twelve—after all, John was an authentic Irishman flourishing an award with an Irish name.

  But no. We were chucked out on the street at 12:10, roaming the empty wastes of Denver by night, looking for somewhere which would take us in, but all we found, after what seemed like a very long walk to me in my high-heeled sandals, was a brightly lit diner. It didn’t serve alcohol, but Gary was insisting loudly that he needed to eat something, now, so in we went, only to discover that it was the gathering place for all the disaffected youth of Denver. Pretty little girls and boys with carefully placed piercings and equally carefully ripped clothes stared at our group, their mouths open in shock. Two girls in the toilet asked where I was visiting from, and when I said London and New York, one started to cry, saying how much she wanted to visit those cities. Gary proceeded to put away a double stack of pancakes smothered in maple syrup, which made John—I think it was John—proclaim incipient nausea and hold his laminated menu over his face. On the way back to the hotel, seeing that my heels were killing me, Jim chivalrously carried me the last two blocks. It was one of those random, hilarious nights that so rarely happen, when a group finds itself in utter humorous harmony; John and I loudly bantering, Gary dropping in dry observations between pancakes, Jim and Tom expertly feeding the flames. We never stopped laughing. They were simply perfect company.

  I fell in love with the UglyBoys that night, but then I think we all did; I remember so many people talking about how funny, how nice, how unpretentious, and how clever they were. If I had known then that they would barely be back to future Bouchercons, that we wouldn’t hang out like that for years to come, a group of metropolitan sophisticates roaming strangely shuttered American cities that, for the hours they kept, might as well have been small towns, making our own entertainment, finding amusement in the eccentricities of every new locale, I would have
been heartbroken.

  They were the first Los Angelenos that I met, and they turned out to have given me a rather over-elevated idea of their city’s populace: when I eventually visited to pitch a movie, I was very disappointed that LA’s denizens weren’t more—well, Ugly. But I had a lovely meal out with Jim and Gabrielle, his gorgeous wife, who took me and my agent to an old-school cocktail bar where they got the pianist to sing “New York, New York” in my honor, and later Tom and Jim visited New York and stayed in my apartment. I went to sleep at my boyfriend’s place, to give the men a bed each, and Tom rang me there the first full day they were visiting to ask me where my iron was. I told him I didn’t have one, but that there was a dry cleaners round the corner that would iron anything he needed. There was a sharp intake of breath at the first part of the sentence; I don’t think he even heard the second half.

  When I returned to the apartment, I found that Tom had bought me an iron “as a house present.” Clearly, he had been unable to bear the thought of not being able to iron his shirts to his own precise specifications. They’ll be dandies to the last, the UglyBoys. Buried in tailor-made suits that fit them perfectly. And despite their lack of peacocking, they do know how good they look. They wouldn’t have called their company UglyTown otherwise, after all . . .

  Scott Allie

  Editor in chief, Dark Horse Comics

  Reading By the Balls marked the beginning of one of my ongoing policies, which serves me well to this day: if someone has written one thing that blew me away, I will move heaven and earth to work with that writer. I don’t have to read everything from a writer, because it’s pretty hard to make that big an impression on me, and if lightning struck once, I’m willing to gamble it’ll strike again for me. For the UglyTown boys, it struck for a second time with Five Shots and a Funeral. Why did I think their ability to create a fresh take on pulpy crime prose would translate to Buffy the Vampire Slayer comics? The UglyTown work showed their ability to get inside an idea, to put their colorful, loud personalities aside and commit to the work. We spent a couple years doing those Buffy comics, before they decided to move on to other things, and those colorful, loud personalities made for a lot of good times.

  Sean Doolittle

  Author of Lake Country, Safer, The Cleanup, Burn, and Dirt

  Awhile back I took a spin by the UglyTown.com website, my former home base. I wanted to see what the old stomping ground looked like after all these years. What I found was a bare-bones photostream hosted by agents unknown. Ironically—or maybe fittingly, depending your view—the first image I plucked from that stream depicted a dreary gray office building on a dreary gray street, in a dreary gray city, somewhere in the overcast West Country of England, all tagged with the following brief caption: A town destroyed by modern architects.

  Instantly my nostalgia tripled for the vivid yellow streets of the UglyTown I remembered: its quirky swagger, its high-style juxtapositions, its energetic boomtown vibe. I wasn’t the only young prospector to stumble out of the desert and set up a stake there, but I was one of the lucky first, and I’ll never forget my initial trip out to the ore seams that started the place: one book called By the Balls, and another called Five Shots and a Funeral, both written by Dashiell Loveless, the shared alter-ego of town fathers Tom Fassbender and Jim Pascoe. I remember thinking, gratefully, Here’s the place I’ve been looking for.

  So what the hell happened? Where did it all go? What damned fool modern architects came along and turned the rootinest, tootinest indie burg this side of Testacy City into a stripped-down online slideshow from a collection of strangers?

  Nothing happened. Nobody went anywhere. Nobody touched a thing. Because UglyTown wasn’t a location, it was an idea—the vision of two guys with an inspiring, invigorating, sometimes alarming combined sense of fashion and manifest destiny. And nowhere is that idea more clearly preserved than right here, in these two books, presented together, the way they belong.

  It’s so nice to see the place again.

  Victor Gischler

  Author of The Deputy, Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse, Pistol Poets, and Gun Monkeys

  The Internet is amazing. You can explore the whole world in your boxer shorts. This is exactly what I was doing nearly fifteen years ago. I had a manuscript, wanted a publisher, and knew next to nothing about the publishing industry.

  At the time of writing this reflection, I am an agented author who writes for a living. It’s how I pay the mortgage and feed my family. These considerations were the furthest thoughts from my mind as I was trying to find a publisher for my first novel. I mean, yes, the dream clunked around somewhere in the back of my brain, the distant idea that I could actually be a professional writer, but my sincere goal at the time was just to get my name on the cover of a book. The notion that I could walk into a bookstore and pull a paperback off the shelf with my name on it literally made me giddy.

  But I felt strongly that not just any publisher would do. I needed a publisher with attitude. Some guys who shared the same irreverent streak for violent, crazy pulp fiction. When I saw the words By the Balls accompanied by Paul Pope’s great pulp cover, I felt sure I’d located kindred spirits. These were guys, I imagined, who were serious about putting out kick-ass books while not wallowing in literary self-importance. In short, they seemed to be the publishers with the attitude I was looking for. I wrapped up my first manuscript—a collection of linked short stories about a detective who took supernatural cases—and sent it off to Los Angeles. And then something great happened.

  They rejected me.

  Okay, that’s not the great part. But in an atmosphere where new, unagented authors were being swatted away like annoying mosquitoes, UglyTown took me seriously. They didn’t accept my manuscript, but neither did they ignore me, and for a rookie author trying to break in, that’s no small thing. When I immediately sent them the manuscript for my first novel, Gun Monkeys, we made a connection, and I was on my way to seeing my name on the cover of a book.

  What you’re holding in your hands is the reprint of By the Balls, and I’m here to tell you it was more than just a great fun pulp read when it first came out. It was a beacon for writers and readers like me who were looking for a publisher with that certain attitude. The original paperback, reminiscent of an old pulp mapback, signaled clearly to the world just what they were getting into when they read an UglyTown publication. Publishers large and small have risen and fallen since those original days of By the Balls, but none have been quite like UglyTown—although at least one publisher has admitted to me at a convention that he looked to UglyTown as an inspiration.

  Now you, lucky reader, have a chance to glimpse what those heady days must have been like. Read. Enjoy.

  Curt Colbert

  Author of Queer Street, Sayonaraville, Rat City; editor of Seattle Noir; and coauthor of the new Barking Detective mystery series

  My introduction to the publisher UglyTown was anything but ugly. I’d just parted ways with my agent after my first private detective novel was turned down by most of the major publishers. So I started looking for a publisher on my own—a publisher that might appreciate a 1940s-style private detective novel.

  Raymond Chandler gave this advice about writing a hard-boiled thriller: “When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.” Well, I was in doubt about ever getting published when Publishers Weekly came through my door with an article about UglyTown and the two-fisted, hard-boiled books that its founders had coauthored: By the Balls and Five Shots and a Funeral. Written in a 1940s style, they featured a hard-charging private dick named Benjamin Drake. Fassbender and Pascoe were kindred spirits and I had to get their books!

  By the Balls had me by the short hairs as soon as I started to read it—same-same for Five Shots and a Funeral. The books really lived up to the great reviews they received. They could be read as a straight homage to the noir era PIs, as wickedly playful satire, or both.

  In a nutshell, I sent my novel Rat City off
to UglyTown and it was accepted for publication. Tom and Jim gave me the opportunity to be published and also produced my next two novels over a three-year period. They were, and are, great editors and authors.

  And now their Ben Drake stories (and two new ones) are being combined in a single volume from Akashic Books, itself a terrific press led by the talented Johnny Temple whom I had the good fortune to work with when I edited Seattle Noir in 2009.

  Pascoe, Fassbender, and Temple will make a fantastic team. Lovers of hard-boiled derring-do are in for a real treat. I can’t wait to get this edition in my hands!

  Jon Jordan

  Copublisher and coeditor of CrimeSpree Magazine

  In the summer of 2001 I went away for the weekend with my wife, and as a result we missed a book signing with a new author named Sean Doolittle. When we returned home, my pal at the bookstore informed me that he’d arranged for me to interview Sean. I was a little put out as I had not read the novel and didn’t even know if I would like it. I took home my first book from a publisher called UglyTown and fell in love. Not only was Dirt a great book, but it was a great-looking book. I did the interview and became friends with Sean. Fast forward to October, Washington DC, Bouchercon.

  The first night of the convention I ran into Sean, a tall guy with a deep voice. He asked if I wanted to meet the publishers, and so I followed Sean to the bar. He introduced me to Jim Pascoe and Tom Fassbender, along with fellow UglyTown author Victor Gischler, who had a book coming out soon. Jim and Tom were both dressed up in great shoes, wonderful smoking jackets, and had dyed hair. They talked fast and I liked them immediately. What really struck me was that these guys had such a great attitude.