Six of these men aren't Jed Ayres
I am very happy to have Jed Ayres on My Dark Pages today. If you've never heard of him, you probably don't have anything to do with crime fiction, because he's one of the driving forces behind the healthy underground scene we have today. He's the man behind the now national (hopefully soon to be international) Noir At The Bar evenings. He also co-edited the anthology, as well as the amazing D*cked .Oh and did I mention he also writes? And it's pretty damn good. Oh and he's also running the very cool Hardboiled Wonderland.
Something I’ve noticed about myself as a writer and as a human being is a cowardly reluctance to formally recognize things that I enjoy. It’s a terrible quality, not at all complimentary, but it’s there. I’ve got to be very intentional and deliberate about not covering up or obscuring those parts of myself (to a degree that I’m often obnoxious and arrogant - sorry), and it’s not because those parts of me, my views and tastes are so sacred or precious, but rather that I’m afraid that they’re wrong. I’ve got the wrong tastes, the wrong likes/dislikes whatever. I’m afraid they unmask my ignorance, low-breeding and poor character. That’s what I deal with.
So, I hate to admit it, but I came to crime fiction through the side door. I started off with the funny stuff – the pastiche, bordering on parody, the clever shit that reveled in skewering the tenants of an art form I knew only as an escapist grab-bag of clichés about tough guys and sexy gals. Clichés, it turned out, that I had an appetite for, but was reluctant to cop to. Chicken shit that I persist in being, I subside/subsisted on tongue-in-cheek fare, but it is/was weak medicine.
Likewise, Carl Reiner’s Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid taught me what I knew of film noir, and as much as I do love the film – it’s still wonderful – deciding to write crime after watching it is rather like deciding to be an architect after studying the illustrations of Dr. Seuss.
But that’s pretty much what I did. I wrote a couple of detective novels in my early twenties and they suffered from the self-awareness that emerges when an artist comes to their form through parody, kitsch or academia, constantly apologizing to their readers, to their family, themselves for dabbling in material so lurid, or base, or prurient. I pulled punches, didn’t let things get too dark (read – realistic) and hit the beats of the genre with predictable timidity. What I ended up with was tepid… limp… a joke.
You know what it took to give me a proper crime boner I couldn’t hide anymore?
James Ellroy’s White Jazz, that’s what.
Ho-lee-kray-ap, the things that book did to me. Everything I was too candy-assed to write, or admit that I wanted to read, he put on the page for the whole world to see. I saw it, I blushed, I blanched, I puked and lapped it up again. I’d gone straight from Sanka to crank in an hour, and I was hooked. I was not alone, either.
In a few years I believe that White Jazz will be recognized as ground zero or the Typhoid Mary of early twenty-first century crime writing – that is, the source that infected more spreaders than any other to bring about the current (future) state of the form.
Ellroy’d been doing it for years, but White Jazz… White Jazz is his masterpiece. All the hallmarks of his shtick are present:
Extensive, gleeful and absolute corruption and abuse of office and authority? Check.
Excessive, brutal violence? Check.
Obsessive sexual mania? Check.
Transgressive social/political values run amok in the protagonist? Check, motherfucker.
Not only do those themes exist, flourish and multifuckingply like never before in his work, but White Jazz is also his most distilled and accessible book of his post Black Dahlia career to boot - told from a single protagonist point of view. And the prose, kids? The prose comes off the page with the rat-a-tat-tat of militant, be-bop poetry.
Everything wrong with the world is what’s right with White Jazz - America’s Benzedrine jacked, McCarthian clusterfuck of a psychedelic, Freudian free-fall mid-century.