Books to Die For

by John Connolly

  * * *

  I wonder if the great Sara Paretsky realized what a gem and masterpiece she was giving us when she published Indemnity Only in 1982? That she was sending, kicking, into our lives one of the most memorable and feisty of private investigators—one hundred and a quarter bucks a day, plus expenses—V. I. Warshawski, Victoria Iphigenia, or just plain “Vic” to her nearest and dearest.

  And that’s one of the reasons why the first Warshawski novel will always remain one of my favorite crime reads, because at the heart of the story is a “new” woman. There had, of course, been plenty of women in stories about private investigators before, but not like Vic. She touched me because, in many ways, back then she embodied the type of woman I wanted to grow up to be—fresh, youthful, has a mouth on her, couldn’t care less about the dishes piling up in the sink, and no way is she playing at being one of the boys. One character mockingly calls her “Philip Marlowe,” but they’re wrong: this is a woman who is happy in her own skin. Right from the get-go, when a client questions her ability, as a woman, to get the job done, she tells it how it is, speaking for every woman on the planet: “If things get heavy, I’ll figure out a way to handle them—or go down trying.” Time and again V.I. has to show the lads that she’ll tangle with the worst before she gives up on her investigation.

  Looking back on the world with our twenty-first-century hindsight, feminist V.I. may seem like no big deal, but back in the early ’80s women were still feeling their way toward a different role, and attitude to life, and Sara Paretsky does women with Role and Attitude. This is a woman who can head-butt, kung fu chop, and separate ribs using her open palm. As one character puts it, she’s “a wise-ass karate expert.” And when it comes to the witty put-downs and sarcasm, V.I. is good at doing that, too:

  “You’re no more a detective than I am a ballet dancer.”

  “I’d like to see you in tights and a tutu.”

  Paretsky makes sure, though, that V.I. is not the token tough lady on the block. Indemnity Only is full of other like-minded independent women, among them V.I.’s friend Lotty, and redheads punching out guys who just can’t take no for an answer.

  But V.I. is not one of those superwomen who feel no pain. Every now and again, when she interacts with a character, we get one of those transparent moments when we’re able to see the emotion that’s right inside of her, such as when she’s confronted by bouncy college girl Gail, who oozes a naïve friendliness that makes V.I. feel old and gives her conscience a twist at having to deceive her. She’s a woman with daddy issues—her grin turns sour when she thinks of the great things her father had expected from her. In an age when we’re all (apparently) size-zero women it is a bit (ahem) “tasty” to read about a character who enjoys her food.

  Indemnity Only was the first crime book I ever read where the main character was up front about fighting for the small guy against the big bosses, where politics was laid bare, where social justice wasn’t just something sellotaped on to show that the author “cared.” Being black, and growing up in a working-class community, these are issues that are not merely close to my heart; they are the very bones that have created the type of adult I am today.

  The crime at the heart of Indemnity Only is gripping because it took me to places I wasn’t expecting to go. The setup is simple: a father wants V.I. to find his son’s missing girlfriend. But instead of finding the woman, V.I. discovers a decomposing body slumped at a kitchen table—no, not the girlfriend, but the client’s son. And the love interest is still missing . . . and then the plot really starts hotting up. I ended up in a world of unions—the gloriously titled International Brotherhood of Knifegrinders, Shear Edgers, and Blade Sharpeners—insurance companies, and gangsters, where those who should be looking out for the small guy are using him to make a quick buck for themselves.

  As well as breaking new ground, Indemnity Only draws heavily on the traditions of the classic noir novel. The city is never just a city; it’s a place that lives and breathes with the lives of those who have created it. We meet the city of Chicago right on the first page, “moving restlessly, trying to breathe.” V.I.’s Polish and Irish heritage paints a cultural mural that adds texture to the city. The use of light, shadow, and dark is exquisite. We move with V.I. through a city where little fires shine here and there, where water is a host of green and red running lights, where one room can go dark in an instant and a single naked bulb illuminates another. I remember the first time I ever read Raymond Chandler, and being struck by the way in which he constructed images of buildings in simple, effective sentences. Sara Paretsky works in this tradition. It would have been so easy for her simply to describe Chicago’s murky underbelly, but she doesn’t do this; instead, she uses powerful visual images, from drinking holes with mahogany, horse-shaped bars and Tiffany lamps, to stately homes made of dull red brick protected by elegant wrought-iron railings, and on to peep shows and the hidden world of lockups. Throughout, V.I.’s love for, and honesty about, her city shines brightly.

  Indemnity Only opened up the writing landscape for female authors like me, making us realize that a woman can be the central character of a book without having to be the stereotype of the aging spinster or the sashaying, high-heeled vamp. One character tells V.I. that she could’ve been a happy housewife, while another says that she’s never going to grace the cover of Vogue, but they’re so wrong. When it came to opening doors, V.I. and Sara Paretsky were right on the money.

  Dreda Say Mitchell is a novelist, broadcaster, journalist, and freelance education consultant who describes herself as a “complete busybody.” She is the author of five novels. Her debut, Running Hot, was awarded the CWA’s John Creasey Memorial Dagger for best first crime novel in 2005. She has appeared on BBC television’s Newsnight, The Review Show, and Canadian television’s Sun News Live, and has presented Open Book on BBC Radio 4. She chaired the Harrogate Crime Writing Festival, Europe’s biggest crime festival, in 2011. Her commitment to, and passion for, raising the life chances of working-class children in education has been called inspirational and life changing. Visit her online at www.dredasaymitchell.com.

  LaBrava

  by Elmore Leonard (1983)

  JAMES W. HALL

  * * *

  Commonly regarded as one of the greatest living American crime novelists, Elmore Leonard (b. 1925) made his publishing debut with The Bounty Hunters in 1953, and continued to write Westerns until the publication of his first crime title, The Big Bounce, in 1969. The author of more than thirty crime novels, Leonard won the Edgar Award for LaBrava (1983). A number of his novels, among them Get Shorty (1990), Rum Punch (1992), and Out of Sight (1996), have been adapted for film; he is currently a cowriter on the TV series Justified, which features his series character Raylan Givens. Elmore Leonard was awarded the Grand Master Award by the Mystery Writers of America in 1992, and the F. Scott Fitzgerald Literary Award for Outstanding Achievement in American Literature in 2008.

  * * *

  A quarter of a century ago, I decided to teach a course in crime fiction at the university where I had worked for most of my adult life. The focus was on crime novels set in Florida. I had plenty to choose from, ranging from John D. MacDonald’s smart, tough, and well-known Travis McGee novels to the less celebrated work of Douglas Fairbairn, whose Street 8, a thriller set in Miami’s newly flourishing Cuban neighborhoods, was an inspiration to me as a young writer whose aim was to write my own realistic Florida crime novel. (One of the wonderful benefits of university teaching is to merge one’s vocation with one’s avocation.)

  LaBrava by Elmore Leonard was one of the books in that long-ago course. Published in 1983, LaBrava was set on Miami Beach, more particularly on South Beach in a period before its rise to the internationally celebrated, flashy-neon, art deco, fashionista, late-night-clubbing district it was to become. The year after LaBrava was published, that culture-changing TV show Miami Vice first hit the airwaves. I use the phrase “culture-changing” in a limited sense, for Miami
Vice fundamentally changed the landscape of Miami by creating the illusion that a hip, ultratrendy scene already existed in South Beach. It did not.

  But this single TV show was about to change all that.

  By focusing its camera on the two or three examples of slightly updated, neon-encrusted art deco hotels, and through the wonders of soundstage mock-ups, the television folk broadcast an imaginary fairyland of ultracool that began to attract waves of tourists to the area whose sheer numbers caused South Beach to begin its long revitalization.

  What truly existed there as Miami Vice first appeared was captured with photographic precision and understated realism by LaBrava. A ragtag collection of Marielitos, many of them newly released from Castro’s prisons, roamed the dilapidated neighborhoods of South Beach and, in a surreal collision of cultures, wound up mingling with (and preying upon) the profusion of Jewish grandmothers who slumped in aluminum lawn chairs on the front porches of run-down, two-story, rent-by-the-hour-day-or-week hotels.

  That photographic precision was no accident. Photography drives much of the action in the novel. Joe LaBrava, a former secret service agent, is now reinventing himself as a Diane Arbus–like photographer/artiste. His subjects, like Arbus’s, are people of the street: freaks, and hustlers, and hookers, and sad, going-nowhere-fast outcasts. In a kind of quiet postmodernist way, it must be said that Joe’s chosen art form is a great deal like Elmore Leonard’s. Same subjects, same unadorned style, same parade of ultrarealistic freaks.

  LaBrava is a watcher, walking the streets, mingling with the down-and-outers, memorializing them with his snap, snap, snapping. His training as a Secret Service agent serves him well, for he can blend in with the shabby street people and bond with nearly anyone, from the con man who uses a stolen wheelchair as his conveyance, to Jean Shaw, the aging movie star who becomes one of Joe’s love interests. The black-and-white images that LaBrava develops in his first-floor hotel room on Ocean Drive are as quaintly old-fashioned and unembellished in technique as the enduring classic black-and-white films that starred Jean Shaw.

  In fact, when I taught LaBrava long ago I was struck by its use of frequently recurring images of black and white. One of the words, or some permutation of those images, appears on every page. As literature professors like to do, I pointed this out to my students and asked them what they made of it. We considered the obvious associations, such as the tension between white-hatted good guys and black-hatted bad guys. Another interpretation was that black-and-white photos and films were emblematic of an earlier era, a time more simple and minimalist than our current period of gaudy neon and flashy tropical hues and moral ambiguity; a resonance of a kind of nostalgia for a more genuine state of being.

  If Elmore Leonard has a favorite theme, then one contender has to be this comparison between the authentic and the artificial. Real heroes go up against false heroes. The laconic, modest cowboy is forced to strap on his gun and outdraw the garish loudmouth armed with badass weaponry. Hemingway is one of Leonard’s models. He unabashedly admits this, and surely Leonard learned many lessons from Papa, from his elliptical prose to his spare but snappy dialogue.

  And like Hemingway, Leonard is preoccupied with cool, which Hemingway knew as grace under pressure. For both writers one of the ultimate tests of value is authenticity, that no-bullshit genuineness that defines Jake Barnes as well as Joe LaBrava. LaBrava (whose last name has a Hemingway echo that might as easily apply to a bull or a toreador) is a man who has protected presidents, yet now, in his new identity, lives a modest, unassuming existence. A small apartment, cameras instead of guns, skilled at watchfulness. A man whose great gift is his very inconspicuousness.

  All this I first noticed in that long-ago literature class in which we put LaBrava under an academic microscope. After the course concluded, and in a fit of fan-boy enthusiasm, I wrote Elmore Leonard a letter informing him that I’d found his novel not only first-rate entertainment, but it had “stood up to literary inspection.” I advised him about some of the literary techniques that had come to light and how we admired, among other things, his use of “image patterns.”

  At this time I had not published a novel myself, nor had I met any of the writers, like “Dutch” Leonard, whom I would later be fortunate enough to get to know. I was a nobody; merely a college professor who had been pleased to discover that a book I loved as entertainment also made a profitable object of academic study.

  Lo and behold, Mr. Leonard answered my note. He was gracious and succinct. He was pleased to hear that my students had enjoyed his novel and thankful I had let him know about these “image patterns” I had discovered in his work. He went on to say that he didn’t think he would make a very good student in my class, however, because he had no idea what an “image pattern” was.

  Ah, yes. Leonard’s trademark dry wit.

  Years later, after I published my own novels and got to know Dutch on a personal level, I discovered that one of the lectures he often gave to libraries and reading groups was something he called his “Funny Letters” speech. And sure enough, my “image pattern” fan letter had made it into that talk. He told me it got a good laugh every time: the pretentious professor finding meanings and techniques that the author never put forth.

  One of Leonard’s famous admonitions in his 10 Rules for Writing is to cut away anything that sounds like writing, and surely this is an understandable pose for one who wants to be seen as an unpretentious natural, and not some egghead with a quiverful of literary techniques. So okay, I’ll give him that. It is his work, after all, not mine. He knows what he’s up to far better than a lowly academic.

  But damn it, I just can’t help myself. There’s a hell of a lot of black-and-white imagery in LaBrava. And it sure as hell didn’t get there by accident.

  James W. Hall is the author of seventeen novels, several collections of poetry, short stories, and essays, and the newly released Hit Lit, an examination of the biggest best sellers of the twentieth century and a dozen things they have in common. Visit him online at www.jameswhall.com.

  Tapping the Source

  by Kem Nunn (1984)

  DENISE HAMILTON

  * * *

  Surfer and novelist Kem Nunn (b. 1948) is credited with inventing the “surf noir” subgenre with his debut offering, Tapping the Source (1984), a novel nominated in the American National Book Awards’ best first fiction category. Nunn subsequently published a further four surf noir titles, the last of which was Tijuana Straits (2004), which won an L.A. Times Book Prize in the Mystery/Thriller category. He was the cocreator, with David Milch, of HBO’s John from Cincinnati, a drama set against the backdrop of a Californian surfing community.

  * * *

  From its earliest days, Southern California was a land of civic boosters who sold America a gorgeous, impossible dream.

  With dollar signs in their eyes and subdivision plans in their fists, city fathers and developers hawked the region’s glories: dry, healing air, fragrant orange groves, snowcapped mountains, year-round sunshine, and home ownership.

  And from all over America they came, desperate to be reborn, to reinvent themselves, to find fame in Hollywood and frolic on the shores of the mighty Pacific where, as Joan Didion once said, we run out of continent.

  Here on its golden beaches, the Southern California dream found its apotheosis in the swaying palms, bikini-clad girls, and majestic waves where bronzed surf gods hung ten and made it look so easy. After lolling on the white sands, you’d sip cocktails on the deck of your oceanfront home as the bloodred sun plunged into the waves.

  Yes, it was a postcard-perfect paradise. And our Dream Factories spread the Surfin’ U.S.A. lifestyle around the globe.

  But if boosters exist to perpetuate the myth of endless summer, then thank goodness we have artists to question it, to pull back the veil and illuminate the shadows that the L.A. light casts into such stark relief.

  And when it comes to surf noir, no one does it better than Kem Nunn.

 
Nunn’s first book, Tapping the Source, was not only a magnificent crime novel, but a finalist for America’s National Book Award in 1984. A meditation on lost innocence, Tapping the Source explores beach culture, the deceptively alluring face of evil, and a teenaged boy’s quest for his missing sister. Nunn’s genius was to set his literary noir novel in one of Southern California’s most celebrated and hedonistic surf spots—Orange County’s Huntington Beach—and then invert the paradise.

  In Nunn’s book, the stranger who comes to town is Ike Tucker, a naïve seventeen-year-old refugee from the high deserts of eastern California. He arrives in surf city looking for his older sister Ellen, who hitchhiked west two years ago and washed up here, though no one will talk about her except to discourage Ike with vague, ominous warnings. Like most seekers (and private eyes), Ike is a tarnished knight following a mirage that might not be grounded in reality. He never knew his father and his mother disappeared years ago, leaving the siblings stranded in a desert hellhole with a sexually predatory uncle and a religious zealot grandmother. When they were kids, enigmatic, sexy, troubled Ellen was Ike’s sole friend and ally. If only he can find her, he can save them both and feel whole once more.

  The Huntington Beach depicted in Tapping the Source is a sleepy rustic seaside town with a motley population of pensioners, surfers, druggies, bikers, runaways, and layabouts that no longer exists. Even as Nunn wrote his book, the greasy spoons, surf shops, and run-down motels that once lined Beach Boulevard were already being bulldozed as developers bought up the coastal land to build luxury waterfront resorts.