By the Balls

by Jim Pascoe

  Obvious fans of crime fiction, Jim and Tom had an idea of how publishing worked, and they promptly decided that they didn’t care. They were going to publish their way. Their way meant damn good-looking books, books you want to own and read and show off. Books that they loved. Over the next year it became obvious that if it said UglyTown on it, I would love the book. Everything they did was unique and wonderful.

  Without even knowing it, they inspired a whole generation of writers; people saw what they were doing and realized there is more to books than huge office buildings in New York. UglyTown was more than books, it was an attitude, a look, a way of seeing the world. If you’ve read a small press book in the last ten years, its existence might just be due in part to what UglyTown did.

  Tom and Jim wrote a wonderful book themselves, By the Balls, under the moniker Dashiell Loveless. A PI novel like something right out of the ’40s and set in our time. Funny, fast paced, and wonderfully pulpy. They followed this up with Five Shots and a Funeral, a collection of five short stories. People claim to be fans of noir and pulp, but if they haven’t read these books they are just pretending. There should be a class that centers on these books and what UglyTown is.

  Tom and Jim have gone on to new things, leaving their mark wherever they go. Two cool guys who are just cool—they don’t try to be, they just are. To be perfectly honest, reading these two books will make you a bit cooler.

  Gary Phillips

  Author of Warlord of Willow Ridge and editor of Orange County Noir

  Before I met Jim and Tom I’d bought a copy of By the Balls. This would have been at the Mysterious Bookshop on Beverly Boulevard in Los Angeles. Fact, seems to me Shelly McArthur, who ran the place, must have steered me to it among the new books as I wandered about the overstocked shop checking out recent titles one afternoon.

  Now I’ll admit it wasn’t the idea that one Dashiell Loveless was the supposed author, though I found that wordplay intriguing. What really drew me to the book was the cover by Paul Pope, a guy whose style I recognized from his comics work. I figured this UglyTown publisher must be cool if they had the savvy to hire Pope—who it turned out did some interior illustrations for the book as well. How much sweeter was it that I dug the first-person tale Jim and Tom’s private eye Ben Drake got immersed in when some nefarious type began bumping off bowlers. Nice.

  Lost in my memory bank is how the three of us eventually met, but I distinctly recall how our paths crossed professionally. A few years down the line I’d written an action-adventure novella called The Perpetrators. This was for a publisher tapping into the zeitgeist of hip-hopism and had several writers doing books as a kind of homage to Holloway House of the ’70s. This was the white outfit here in LA that published the black experience, as they would term it: novels by the men who would become the Godfathers of Ghetto Lit, Donald Goines and Robert Beck a.k.a. Iceberg Slim.

  But I was at odds with the publisher over the book. Put simply, the publisher didn’t dig the way I’d told the story and I did. Okay, I’m the writer, so of course I’m biased, but I didn’t think it was as bad as the publisher did. I made some changes per his suggestions and neither of us were happy with the results.

  Somehow or other—and I believe Tom and I had been commiserating the way writers do—the offer was made to give my then orphaned manuscript a read. The UglyTown gentlemen offered me some sound edits that tightened and honed The Perps. Post those changes, we were off to the races. How sweet was it that they got Paul Pope to do the eye-catching pop art–style cover and interior illos.

  But the best were the bus bench ads UglyTown put up for the book. Fuckin’ great. See, that’s what can happen when you have publishers who are also talented writers and think with both hats when it comes to promoting their line. While those of us who were published by them and readers alike mourned the passing of the press, we can celebrate the issuance of this definitive volume by Akashic: By the Balls: The Complete Collection.

  Most excellent all around.

  Eddie Muller

  Author of Dark City Dames, Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir, and The Distance

  The UglyTown boys were ahead of the curve before anybody knew there was a curve. That was the great glory Tom and Jim shared. It was also, unfortunately, an aspect of their premature demise as publishers. They could sense where the publishing business was headed before there was a route to get there. They had the vision before the new tools existed to properly build it. They mapped the brave new world, but still had to cope with broken and outmoded distribution channels.

  My novel, The Distance, was the first “reprint” UglyTown ever published. Known for their original taste in crime fiction and iconoclastic approach to its packaging, Tom and Jim had developed their own stable of authors, like Victor Gischler, Nathan Walpow, Curt Colbert, Mike Lester. But after we’d drank and caroused together, developing a terrific rapport and a genuine trust, I wanted the paperback edition of my first novel—originally published by the esteemed New York house Charles Scribner’s Sons—to be produced by UglyTown.

  A lot of people thought I was stupid, opting to go with a tiny boutique publisher instead of a big New York house. But the writing was already on the wall for the big boys too. The ship was sinking, and I preferred to be in a smaller, lighter craft—one with a full bar and good conversation.

  UglyTown compensated for an unsatisfying experience at Scribner’s. These guys worked off gut instinct and uncommon cleverness. We came up with terrific, fresh ideas for repackaging the book. Where it took months of painfully slow “communication” with the various departments at Scribner’s to accept or reject an idea, things happened with Tom and Jim in inspiring bursts of creativity. Working with Jim on the cover design for The Distance, we scanned photo options, e-mailed, designed, reworked, typeset—all in a single phone call. What would have taken a month or more with Scribner’s took less than an hour with Jim.

  We were living in the future, before it had actually arrived.

  Okay, boys, let’s do something new.

  Nathan Walpow

  Author of The Manipulated, One Last Hit, Death of an Orchid Lover,

  and The Cactus Club Killings

  I met the UglyTown boys at the yearly paperback show in the San Fernando Valley. There, tucked in among the bald and/or gray dealers in the side room, I found two youngsters pitching a couple of books they’d written: By the Balls and Five Shots and a Funeral. The kids were charming and enthusiastic and I bought their books, which were good and fun and different.

  Shortly thereafter they published a Sisters in Crime anthology I had a story in, and it was gorgeously produced, and people started noticing them. Tom and Jim built a reputation as “the future of crime fiction.” They found new authors and revitalized old ones, and they got an Edgar Award nomination for Gun Monkeys, and when my Joe Portugal series got dropped by a New York monolith, they gave Joe a new home and a chance to appear in two more beautifully realized adventures.

  The boys were excellent editors; I got far more useful notes from them, sitting there dodging the noise at Swingers on Beverly Boulevard in Los Angeles, than I ever did from the monolith. And we became friends. My wife and I were around when Tom’s first child was born (Frankie!) and when Jim got married. They introduced us to Iron Chef. And still each book was more beautiful than the last, and the “mystery community” marveled, and Jim’s hair became legend.

  That time ended way too soon, victim of a bankrupt distributor and a capricious universe. But I’ll always treasure it, and I’ll always have my shelf full of elegant, french-flapped prizes to remind me of the UglyTown Days.

  Brett Battles

  Author of The Destroyed, No Return, The Silenced, and The Cleaner

  For me, it was all about timing.

  My UglyTown adventure started at the very end of the company’s reign, though I don’t think any of us knew it at the time. It started off on the highest of high notes: me sitting at a coffee shop, doing edits on what I though
t would be the next novel I sent out on submission; my phone on the table in front of me suddenly ringing with a number I didn’t know; and on the other end? Jim Pascoe telling me he wanted to buy the rights to my book. And it seemed to end on the lowest of lows: Jim and Tom coming to the difficult conclusion that UglyTown had to go on what turned out to be a permanent hiatus about four months before my scheduled publication date.

  But it didn’t actually end on the lowest of lows. What could have been a horrible, gut-wrenching experience, wasn’t. Not even close.

  Jim and Tom could have abandoned me and concentrated on their own concerns. They had every right to do that. They didn’t owe me anything more. In fact, they had already given me a lot by working with me to make my book so much better.

  But they didn’t abandon me. They did something I will forever be grateful to them for: they passed my book on to an editor at a much larger house, and they sent their highest recommendations with it.

  Without their assistance, my publishing career could have very well ended with the closing of the UglyTown doors. It did not. Not by a long shot. So where I am today is due in no small part to Jim and Tom. It’s this kindness and advocacy that symbolizes what UglyTown was and remains to me, and I will be thanking the two of them for the rest of my life.

  Naomi Hirahara

  Author of Summer of the Big Bachi, Gasa-Gasa Girl, and Snakeskin Shamisen

  “My friend’s husband is starting a publishing house,” Martie, a former newspaper coworker, told me one day in the late 1990s. “Something about mysteries.”

  Say what? We were in Los Angeles, the home of celluloid with little interest in print publication, aside from Hustler, Tiger Beat, and Motor Trend magazines. An actual mystery book publisher? Here in my little hometown?

  Working on the same novel since the mid-1980s, I submerged myself in writing communities in hidden margins of the city. A beat-up houseboat in Marina del Rey. A photo gallery with hardwood floors a stone’s throw from MacArthur Park. An expansive residence in the Hollywood Hills next door to the director of the Freddy Krueger horror movie franchise. But an honest-to-goodness book publisher? A publisher anchors a writing community. While everything else seems to float by, a publisher has weight.

  So when this publishing house had an event at a local crime bookstore in Pasadena, I was there. The name of the house: UglyTown. The logo: absurd but strong and memorable. The two publishers, cowriters of UglyTown’s first two books: Tom Fassbender, a handsome Abe Lincoln-like figure, tall, willowy, and more introverted; and Jim Pascoe, a naughty leprechaun with eyes that danced—I can’t remember exactly what color his hair was that day—green, blue?

  I bought those two books, By the Balls and Five Shots and a Funeral. They were paperbacks, small and compact, that felt good in my hands. Collectors would immediately think of the pulps in the 1940s and ’50s, but I saw them more in the fashion of Japanese paperbacks. Beautifully designed with fabulous ink drawings by Paul Pope, they were immaculately produced—seams that held together, terse but interesting front matter, vibrant prose that moved the stories of Dashiell Loveless forward.

  Was it a send-up to pulp? An homage to Los Angeles? I don’t actually think it was either. For one thing, there’s the fictional town, Testacy City. There are elements that are familiar—the dame in trouble, the rundown bars—yet there’s also something that feels like a parallel universe, almost of another world. The publishers have said it best: “[Dashiell Loveless] exists solely in fiction time . . . the true creator and innovator of the pulp artifact—a novel out of place in time.”

  At the turn of the twenty-first century, the UglyTown boys were pretty much a fixture of the mystery scene in Southern California. They created fine, beautiful books by other authors as well, with the same consistent attention to detail. My favorites: Sean Doolittle’s Dirt, Victor Gischler’s Gun Monkeys, Gary Phillips’s The Perpetrators, the paperback edition of Eddie Muller’s The Distance, Nathan Walpow’s two Joe Portugal novels, and Curt Colbert’s Sayonaraville, a mystery which told the story of Japanese Americans in Seattle in the 1940s. What I appreciated, too, was that both Fassbender and Pascoe seemed to really care about their writers, even helping to broker deals with an editor (also my editor!) at Random House for a wider release.

  I had always imagined that one of the large New York City publishers would buy the UglyTown brand and whisk these two men to the Big Apple to oversee its operation. That didn’t happen. But now we have Akashic Books here breathing new life into UglyTown.

  I don’t see this reprint as nostalgia. I view it as more of a kick in the pants. You see, as we have been distracted with whatever for the past several years, Testacy City has continued on. By the Balls: The Complete Collection will give us a clue of what we have been missing.

  Robert S. Levinson

  Author of Phony Tinsel, A Rhumba in Waltz Time, and Ask a Dead Man

  The UglyGuys, Jim Pascoe and Tom Fassbender.

  Met ’em and learned about their UglyTown publishing operation about a dozen years ago, at one of those Bouchercon conventions designed for mystery authors and fans, not necessarily for the likes of an UglyJim or an UglyTom, who looked as if they’d made a wrong turn heading for a convention where delegates dress up like their favorite comic book or movie characters.

  They were impossible not to notice in their retro suits and ties, Runyonesque Warner Bros. movie mobsters on a break from their next bank heist or rub-out or—no, wait a minute—that wouldn’t explain UglyJim’s punk green hair and loop earrings.

  Anyway, you get the idea, right?

  So now, while sharing a cocktail-reception wall with them, they’re telling me about this UglyTown publishing partnership they’ve created on a foundation of the mystery novels and short stories they’re selling from a card table they’ve set up in a hotel corridor outside the legit book sales room that costs more than they can afford, hawking their relatively new and rising UglyTalents—names like Victor Gischler, Eddie Muller, Gary Phillips, Nathan Walpow, and Dashiell Loveless.

  With the passage of time, those spotlighted author dudes all rose to genre prominence beyond UglyTown, except for Loveless, credited as the author of the imprint’s first two titles, By the Balls and Five Shots and a Funeral, who never existed.

  Loveless was the nom de plume UglyTom and UglyJim used on novels and short stories of their own outlandish invention. He went underground about the same time as the economy dove south, pushing UglyTown six feet under and the two publishing Uglies off to other creative pursuits, but—

  Whaddaya know?

  The great thing about forever is that it doesn’t necessarily last forever.

  The boys are back in all their pulp glory, along with Dashiell’s books and some old and new Loveless short stories, wisely resurrected by publisher Johnny Temple’s equally adventurous Akashic Books and hopefully for a longer stay than last time.

  Kevin Burton Smith

  Founder and editor of the Thrilling Detective website

  The first UglyTown book I ever saw grabbed me, appropriately enough, by the eyeballs.

  There, among all the neat, genteel rows of shiny new mysteries was a rude little paperback that looked like it belonged on a spinner rack in a downtown bus station—fifty years ago.

  If ever there was a cover that had been whupped by an ugly stick, this was it. It looked like an ill-conceived Dell Mapback; a phlegm-clearing cascade of pulpy, over-the-top graphic elements and grungy mismatched typefaces that bumped against each other like surly rush hour passengers on a crowded subway car. Even the ink-heavy illustration of a hairy arm gripping a bowling ball—with a skull emblazoned on it—seemed somehow not quite ready for prime time.

  By the Balls, the title read, in loud red hand lettering. By Dashiell Loveless.

  Hah. Good one. Dashiell Loveless. Was this for real?

  Off in the top corner, it proclaimed itself A Bowling Alley Murder Mystery. Then down along the right, it said the illustration was by indie comic
hotshot Paul Pope, no stranger to ugly himself.

  And then, almost as an afterthought, we were told it was written by Jim Pascoe and Tom Fassbender.

  Finally, just to make sure nobody could possibly take this seriously, an oversized logo, itself heavy on the cheese, and the proud announcement that it was An UglyTown Mystery. Oh, and that there was a “Crime Map” on the back cover.

  Of course.

  I scanned the first few pages. What this Mystery is about. List of Exciting Chapters. List of Thrilling Illustrations.

  Was this for real? What were these guys smoking? Benjamin Drake was the hero, one of the Persons this Mystery is about. A private dick with “a passion for small cigars and Old Grand-Dad, and a weakness for women in trouble.”

  No way was I letting this sucker escape. I plunked down my $8.95 (Canadian) and chuckled all the way home.

  By the Balls proved to be every bit as audacious and fun as promised, full of mysterious women, gangsters, murder, and . . . um . . . bowling; a two-fisted riff on classic pulp fiction that was as much love letter as lampoon. Evidently Jim and Tom, the evil masterminds behind UglyTown, took this stuff every bit as seriously as I did.

  Even better? By the Balls was no one-shot effort, but a first spit in the eye of the prim, cloistered world of crime fiction. UglyTown was a real publisher, albeit a selective one, bringing out only a few books a year, but each one a killer. Smart, hard, proud stuff that didn’t pull punches, and never took cheap shots, either. Transgressive, I’d call it, if I knew what that meant. They published some great crime books—by Sean Doolittle, Curt Colbert, Eddie Muller, and others.