Simon Lewis: Comrade Hack

So on Saturday I was taken to the UCLA campus for the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. It was enormous. As well as stages, and halls where you could watch writers talk (for free), there were hundred of booths, mostly of bookshops and publishers – Mystery books, christian books, independent comic producers, the sinister sounding ‘immigration enforcement publications’, the Aynn Rand people (apparently some kind of cult), healing books, self help, a pet bookshop. More than a hundred thousand people visit over the two days.

There was a green room for the writers, which, I was pleased to see, had a massive buffet all day long. I met a bunch more people in here – some comic writers, and Paul Tremblay who’d written ‘the Little Sleep‘, about a narcoleptic private detective.

I did a panel. I didn’t know what to expect and was quite surprised to see about three hundred people in the hall.  Sarah Weinman was the moderator, and then me, the PI and this lady noir writer Denise Hamilton were asked questions and expected to talk. I tended to just answer the question, which took about two minutes, whereas the others produced beautiful extemporised essays that went on for ages. We were asked about crime and the social conscience, is crime writing all black and white or shades of grey, and should we write across class and race. I don’t think I was as polished and eloquent as the others.

I think my most coherent point was that whereas literary fiction tends to be psychological, and deal with one class, crime fiction tends to be sociological, and takes a vertical strip through society, from the lowest to the highest – as an example I cited Chandler, who would write about street hustlers and corrupt politicians in the same book.

Then there were questions from the floor, and they were all about the economy – should journalists give up their job and write novels? How will the Kindle affect publishing? I said I’d never even seen a Kindle and a guy held one up and said he’d just downloaded the first chapters of each of our books.

Indeed, if there was one thing I kept hearing, it was anxiety about a perceived crisis in publishing, particularly journalism. People just aren’t buying papers any more, apparently. There was a lot of talk about how to get money out of new media. It was telling that in the green room, the Amazon Kindle people had a table set aside for them in the middle and squatted there kind of aggressively, and no one else was talking to them. They were like emmisaries from this feared ogre.

I did a signing at the Mystery Bookshop. I got to sit next to David Benioff, who was this laid back guy who had got two million dollars for the Wolverine script. And he wrote the Kite Runner too. He was there to promote his new war novel. He signed a few more books than me, of course. He had been to Kashgar for the Kite Runner, cause since the writer’s strike there was now a clause in film contracts that the writer could demand to be flown once, first class, to the set. Someone kept up to him and said, ‘I read your screenplay!’ – Surely only in LA.

I went back to the hotel knackered about 6, and then went up to the resturant thinking that I would eat then sleep. But it was an off-puttingly posh restaurant that people had dressed up for, and the maitre’d said, if you want to eat alone we can squeeze you in there at the bar. So I had heard about this party and thought that trying to look for it was probably better than eating a posh meal on my own and there was bound to be food there. So I got a cab to Venice Beach and found the party, at Equator books, and fortunately they let me in, and I was like, shit there’s no food. The people I knew – Kortya and his agent – left straight away cause they had to catch an early plane. So I dulled my hunger with red wine and found some people to talk to, blathering at this playwright lady, Beth Henley, much of the time.

This important British writer was there – and he made a point of not talking to me, even though we’d been published together in an anthology once. I saw him at the festival the next day and he did it again – I’d been warned that LA was full of poeple puffed up with self-importance but the only one I met was British.

No, the yanks were lovely. It was striking how media savvy the writers were. it was like everyone was their own PR agent. I guess they’re very conscious that it’s a crowded market out there and you have to shout pretty loud to be heard. And I noticed that unlike, say, Hay, there was a real focus on shifting product.

Sunday was pretty much a wash out as I had been drunk, jet-lagged, often hungry and pumped with coffee for three days now. But I managed to drap myself out for a panel, which was really good, about the culture of fear. This one guy had a great argument, that the world now was so much more open to disruption, and that in those terms there were striking similarities between hedge fund managers and terrorists – which went down well. Good that when it came to questions, anyone who rambled was shouted at by other members of the audience to get on with it.

I suppose as a travel writer I should say what I thought of LA but I didn’t see much. The hotel was next to a freeway, and not only were there no shops within walking distance, walking as an activity was pretty much impossible. There were pavements around UCLA, but I saw more joggers on them than pedestrians. In the car I saw houses barrel past, no flats. So LA looked like endless suburbia. More like Japan than anything in Europe. There were a lot of palm trees. A sense of space. Huge cars. The few buses that I did see had an attachment on the front you could put your bike in, that was pretty cool. There was an earthquake button in the hotel lift. People talked about race a lot. They eat bacon that’s brittle as twigs.

Ok that was my LA adventure. I’m sure there are people for whom these jamborees are a grind, but it was my first and far as I’m concerned it was awesome – I word that I never heard anyone use, incidentally. Now I can dream about going back, this time as a two million dollar screenwriter.

I woke up on saturday morning looking at a massive blotch of mold on nicotine-stained wallpaper, and I thought, oh yes, I know this, I’m in a Chinese no-star hotel room, with cigarette burns on the carpet and a spittoon in the corner. It was a couple of seconds before I realised that, no, the mold was just a shadow, the wallpaper was tastefully marbled and I was in fact lying in a massive bed in a ritzy hotel on Sunset Boulevard, and for perhaps the first time in my life I got out of bed with enthusiasm.

I was having the best time. Yesterday afternoon I had been met at the airport and put in a limousine. The driver was a half-Filipino half-Belgian army vet. He was writing a novel, worked on it while waiting for people to come out of restaurants. He, like every American I met, was disarmingly friendly and happy to tell me his life story. I don’t know if that’s cause they are more open than Brits or just like talking about themselves. A bit of both I guess. I had spent ages in immigration and the LA traffic was slow so when I got to the hotel I only had half an hour before I was supposed to be picked up again – just time to shower and change into a suit.

I got down to the lobby and there were the other nominees. They put us on a coach and I sat next to an eminent theoretical physicist, Leonard Susskind. You don’t meet one of them every day. He told me about Stephen Hawking’s dinner parties. He went all round the world lecturing so mostly we talked about travelling. We had a good chat cause the bus was stuck in traffic for an hour.

We were taken to the LA times building and then there was like a cocktail party.  I wasn’t going to stand on my own twirling a bit of cheese on a stick so I went up to people and talked to them. I met a biographer who was writing a history of the lightbulb and a cartoonist and a wise cracking private detective turned novelist, and his agent, who quickly seemed pretty keen to be my agent.

Most of them seemed to be from New York or other cities and wanted to stress to me, the US newbie, that I shouldn’t think that the rest of the country was like this.

The actual awards ceremony was in this big hall and there were a thousand people or so and it was a format like the oscars, lots of categories. I met James Ellroy on the way in. He was very tall and bald and wearing a bowtie. He said, or rather barked, ‘I think you’ll win.’
‘Why?’
‘Cause you’re white. And you look heterosexual. And a white straight man has to be favourite.’ Then a black guy walked past and he said, ‘No, he’ll win cause he’s black. It’s cool to be black now, have you heard?’

Then we started talking about Wales – he’d been there – and he said how confusing the road signs were and I got to tell an anecdote about the road sign that says in Welsh, ‘The translator is out of the office right now but will get back to you shortly’.

Every winner made a brilliant speech, and I started to dread winning my section, mystery/thriller, cause I hadn’t written a speech, and was drunk, tired and hungry, so not in a good state to improvise one. But the private detective, Michael Koryta won, and made a funny speech, so I was relieved. I was pleased to see the physicist win his ‘science book’ category. Terry Pratchett, who won the Young Adult category, sent his acceptance speech in by video. He was filmed in his office and this grouchy old cat was in the foreground, looking like it was trying to take a shit on his computer. A few titters started, then increased as the cat looked more bemused and uncomfortable and pretty soon you couldn’t anything that Terry was saying for people laughing at his cat. 

Then there was another, even bigger, cocktail party. So – six hours of cocktail party after a twelve hour flight. Still, I was one of the last to leave. And I had another long chat with a novelist lady on the bus back to the hotel. I am rarely so social, I guess cause I was psyched by the whole thing. And drunk of course, cause all I’d eaten was canapes.

Get Carter by Ted Lewis (1965)

‘The rain rained. It hadn’t stopped since Euston. Inside the train it was close, the kind of closeness that makes your fingernails dirty even when all you’re doing is sitting there looking out of the blurring windows.’

Jack Carter, hitman for a gang of London pornographers, goes home to Doncaster for his brother’s funeral. Mild Frank died drunk in a car crash – but Frank didn’t drink. Suspicious Jack starts poking around, and the local firms don’t like that at all…

The noir private eye genre is peculiarly American – this is the only British attempt at it that is any good that I can think of. Making the ‘detective’ a gangster outside the law was a masterstroke, as it’s at once an investigation and a revenge thriller that comes across like a western. As in its American models, sense of place is vitally important; the whole thing takes place in pool halls, smoky pubs and grimy back to backs that are described so vividly you feel the need to shower while you read – it’s grim up north.

this is not the care-free side of the swinging sixties – the characters are teenage prostitutes, bouncers, council tenants; the gangsters are fighting over a slot machine empire; the plot hinges around a porn film featuring Frank’s daughter called ‘Schoolgirl Wanks’. The book has lost none of its power to shock with laconic descriptions of causal violence and poverty.

The best British noir, bar none. And made into the best British noir film too, of course; only in the book, Carter doesn’t die at the end, and Lewis wrote a couple of sequels set in London.

Cold Caller by Jason Starr (No Exit, 1997)

 ’On most days, I wouldn’t have said anything. Like the typical New Yorker, I’d have given her a couple of dirty looks, maybe grunted a little, and minded my own business.’

It’s a corporate crime chiller about ex-advertising executive, Bill Moss, who’s slumming it in a telesales job but will do *anything* to get back on the career ladder.

I bought it just cause of the blurb – I was working in telesales – and was rewarded with my introduction to that distinctive noir universe of long shadows and seedy rooms, inhabited by hapless, trapped characters doomed by their desires – the dark side of the American dream.  

The book is narrated in first person in a flat, uninflected style that leads you straight into Bill’s flat, uninflected mind. Desperate to maintain his yuppie lifestyle, poor Bill discovers that some days, the office really can be murder, but by the time he’s on that excruciating slide to hell you are right there riding down with him – all the way to one of the best (and most cruelly ironic) endings ever.  

This book blew me away when I first read it – it was a revelation to discover that writing could be so simple, strong and direct, there to do nothing but tell the story. And Moss is a great tragic sordid hero – one whose time, now that the credit crunch is really biting, has come again.

The Grifters by Jim Thompson (1963)

‘As Roy Dillon stumbled out of the shop his face was a sickish green, and each breath he drew was an incredible agony.’

Thompson wrote flashier crime books, such as the Getaway, but I reckon this is his best, and it’s certainly the best book ever written about con-artists. It reveals not just the details of their schemes but their twisted pathology and alienation: these characters might be bound by love and blood but they just can’t trust each other, and their antagonisms have murderous and, well, ‘Oedipal’ consequences.

This is  more than just an acute chronicle of the low life; it feels as if these three people live and breath, and you can’t help but be drawn into their twilight world.

And it’s another book that made a great film.