Underbelly (21 page)

Anyway, Nathan knew I had a background as a community organizer and that my wife was an urban planner and ran a nonprofit. I drew on those experiences to write the novella. Essentially, the plot centers on a semi-homeless Vietnam vet named Magrady who's now been sober for eight months. He was on and off booze and drugs for years and suffers from flashbacks. A disabled friend of his, a man in a wheelchair, who's not a vet, but lives on Skid Row, disappears, and Magrady has to find him. This sets the plot in motion.

The story takes place in Los Angeles, and that was the point of locating it in the sphere of FourStory, which is to say it takes
place in a gentrifying downtown Los Angeles. And à la L.A. Live, this complex of venues recently built there that includes the Staples Center where the pro-basketball Lakers play and nightclubs, restaurants, and a large hotel, there's a mega development project in the book called the Emerald Shoals. This project like in real life has displaced working poor folks and impacted the homeless as the so-called urban pioneers move into converted lofts and the like. To reflect this one of the characters in the book is a community organizer named Janis Bonilla who is a friend of Magrady's and also an organizer for a community empowerment organization.

Hopefully
Underbelly
walks the line between having substantive issues as context, helping to ground a story, and being on a soapbox with just having the story as an excuse for a polemic.

If I want a polemic I'll read nonfiction. As storytellers, it's our job not to be the opiate of the masses but if you're going to tell a story, it should have characters that resonate with the reader and have a plot and structure and is just not an excuse to go on forever.

Take for example John D. MacDonald, a mystery writer who created the Travis McGee character and series. It seems to me he got consumed at the end of his writing career with his own conservative politics, and there would be long passages in his books having his characters ranting on about environmentalists, treehuggers, and lefties, but the job of the writer or storyteller is to tell a story. Obviously you want to have these realities in your work but you have to be clever about weaving that stuff in your story.

I think peoples' points of view certainly come into play, so that's fine, but I'm also interested in having characters having different points of view. It makes for better drama, right? Characters always want something, and invariably these interests collide.

Another example is a book of mine called
Freedom's Fight.
The novel is about African American soldiers and civilians during World War II. In the book we see the racism and conflicts the all-black units encounter with white soldiers. Because of Jim Crow policies, black troops weren't sent into combat until end
of 1943, beginning of 1944. The story also unfolds through the eyes of a black woman reporter, Alma Yates, for the
Pittsburgh Courier
, the largest black weekly newspaper at the time.

Via her, the reader gets glimpses of what's happening in the States. The
Courier
was part of something called the Double V Campaign, victory at home and victory overseas. During that time there were arguments among civil rights organization and on the left about the role of the black soldier. Why should they fight and die for freedom abroad if they didn't have freedom here at home, versus the pressure for African Americans to show white America they were good, loyal citizens.

Freedom's Fight
came about as my way to tell a slice of this bigger story. I think I'm accurate in stating there are less than a handful of novels about black soldiers during this period—though certainly there are several informative nonfiction books such as
The Invisible Soldier
by Mary Penick Molley,
Lasting Valor
by Medal of Honor winner Vern Baker and Ken Olsen, and
Brothers in Arms
about the 761st tank battalion by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Anthony Walton.

But if you watched the TV miniseries
Brothers in Arms
or now the recent
Pacific
on cable, you wouldn't have any idea that there were all-black units who fought in those theaters of conflict, but there were. My late dad Dikes was in combat at Guadalcanal, his brother, Norman, was at D-Day Plus One, and the youngest brother, Sammy, served in India. My mother, Leonelle, had a brother named Oscar Hutton Jr., who was shot down and killed over Memmingen, Germany, as a Tuskegee fighter pilot.

Given all that, I tried not to make
Freedom's Fight
preachy, but, hopefully, entertaining historical fiction with a socio-political grounding, and even some hardboiled elements—there is a murder mystery subplot, dimensional characters and action on the battlefield.

I stumbled into it at as a kid, I played sports as a kid in school, but because my mom was a librarian, I was literally forced to read. When I came home from grade school I'd have to read
Pinocchio and Grimms' Fairy Tales for an hour before I could go out and play. I initially rebelled against this, but damned if I didn't come to like reading. And there's some pretty rugged stuff in those Grimm stories, including cannibalism and murder.

I still remember at 61st Street Elementary, they taught us the Dewey Decimal System, and I went to the school library and plucked off the shelf
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
by Jules Verne and I was eight or nine, I hadn't even seen the Disney movie of the book so I don't know how I knew about it, but somehow I knew who Verne was.

How does that get us to noir? I started to develop a love of reading. Somewhere in this I was reading a lot of pulp stories because Bantam was reprinting Doc Savage and The Shadow. At this time I'm starting to watch mystery and detective stories on TV and I heard about Dashiell Hammett so I picked up some Hammett and read some of his short stories. It would be awhile before I read his Sam Spade novel the
Maltese Falcon.
But Hammett got me hooked, I liked the way he wrote, I liked his patter, and I liked that he wrote these tough, and in many ways, unsentimental stories, and from there I branched into Ross Macdonald, though that was a little later.

Then in 1970 when I'm still in high school, playing at the Temple Theater in my neighborhood in South Central was this movie called
Cotton Comes to Harlem.
I didn't know then about Chester Himes—the movie is based on his book of the same title—but the film looked cool what with two black actors dressing '70s-slick in the lead roles as Harlem cops. The stars were comedian Godfrey Cambridge as Gravedigger Jones and Raymond St. Jacques as Coffin Ed Johnson, with Redd Foxx in a supporting role as, yes, a junk man—this before his fame as Fred Sanford on the TV show
Sanford and Son.
Foxx I knew from his ribald party records—and I'm talking vinyl LPs, long play, here—my dad would play for his friends when they came over for beers. Naturally I was sent off to bed but always managed to hear some of Foxx's dirty jokes through my slightly cracked door.

This early '70s is the beginning of the blaxploitation cycle of movies Hollywood ground out, a lot of them with mystery and crime plots. Seeing
Cotton
gets me to Himes. At some point I
began reading his work, a blend of oddball characters, crazy plots and rumination on race relations in America. What always struck me about noir and hard boiled stories is one I enjoyed them because they were crime stories, walks on the wild side … and two, they always looked at what exists in the shadows, the flip side of human personalities. Plus they're great morality tales.

Maybe that's the hard truth, the real truth that life teaches us. When there are ambiguous endings or the bad guy wins. Thus the metaphor for capitalism, I suppose. The character in the novel out to take down the bank or knock over the racetrack is the stripped-down robber baron with no pretense at anything else than being a gangster capitalist. Could be noir is a trap of the proletariat. Your character thinks he or she can change their station in life if only they can get away with this crime … but they're sucked down. Though this can happen to well-off characters. Hell, sometimes the working class gets the upper hand in noir. But only sometimes.

Recently too I saw read this mention of a nonfiction book entitled
American Homicide
by a historian named Randolph Roth. Roth posits that high homicide rates “are not determined by proximate causes such as poverty, drugs, unemployment, alcohol, race, or ethnicity, but by factors … like the feelings that people have toward their government and the opportunities they have to earn respect without resorting to violence.” Roth also stated that looking at FBI stats from the first six months in 2009 taken from the urban areas Obama carried in his election for the presidency, saw the steepest drop in the homicide rate since the mid-nineties.

Of course you also have a rise in neofascist racist groups, and I include the teabaggers in this mix, as a result of Obama's presidency, so there's that. But it does suggest there can be further interesting takes on noir if you track Roth's theories.

In my twenties, because I was involved in community activist work, anti-apartheid and police abuse organizing and the like, and because I had a bent for art in those days, but that was only because I wanted to draw and write comic books. This meant I'd wind up being on the committees to write and design the flyers for a march or a demonstration. Fact for a while in the mid- to late '80s, I was the co-owner of a print shop in South Central we'd started from the funds my comrade the late Michael Zinzun had put up. He was one of the founders of the Coalition Against Police Abuse, CAPA, and had won a suit after being beaten by the Pasadena Police Department and losing an eye. Our shop, a union shop, I might add, was called 42nd Street Litho and we'd print pamphlets, newsletters, and flyers and I was always involved with writing some of those given the various organizations I was involved in as well. But like Raymond Chandler, I didn't start 'til I was in my thirties writing fiction. By then I figured out what I wanted to do was write a book.

Specifically I'd been fired from a union organizing job in 1989. I'd been working for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, AFSCME, and this particular local, Council 10, represented the groundskeepers and some of the library personnel at UCLA, the university here in Los Angeles. Having time on my hands and talking it over with my wife Gilda, I decided to take this extension class being taught at the university about writing your mystery novel. The class was taught by Bob Crais, who then was coming out of TV as a script writer on shows like
Hill Street Blues
and
Cagney &Lacey
, and had turned to writing mystery novels.

In Bob's class we deconstructed the first Spenser novel by Robert Parker, the
Godwulf Manuscript
, about this illuminated artifact being stolen. We then had to come up with an outline and the first fifty pages of our own novels. It's there that I came up with my private eye character Ivan Monk and the people in his world. The class was over in, I think, ten weeks, but I went on and finished that first book. I didn't get it published but was happy to have just written it.

I guess I always knew I'd write a mystery novel because that's what I'd been reading, all kinds of people from the
established pantheon—Chandler, Hammett, and Macdonald—even Dorothy L. Sayers and her Lord Peter Wimsey stories, to black writers like Donald Goines and Iceberg Slim, Robert Beck. Iceberg, from whom rapper-actor Ice-T derived his stage moniker, had been a pimp and consorted with all types of low life individuals back east. He retired from the “Life,” and came west. He drew on those harsh experiences to craft his street level fiction for paperback originals for the white-owned Holloway House here in L.A.

Goines, a former Air Force military policeman (he enlisted underage, using a fake birth certificate), rooty-poot pimp, petty thief, heroin addict, truck driver and hustler, among his other pursuits, wrote sixteen paperback originals for Holloway House, starting with
Dopefiend
, published in late 1971. His writing routine was grind out pages in the morning and go score dope in the afternoon. His last two books would be released posthumously in 1975. One was
Kenyatta's Last Hit
, a series he wrote about this politicized gangster, and attributed to him,
Inner City Hoodlum.

But as Eddie Allen relates in his biography about Goines,
Low Road, Inner City Hoodlum's
parentage was not Goines' solely, but also that of a writer named Carleton Hollander. Allen states Hollander had to heavily edit and finish the uncompleted manuscript that Goines had left behind. I also know from my friend Emory Holmes, who was an editor two different times at Holloway House, that Goines' use of heroin often impaired his page outage.

You see, Mr. Goines exited this world in as violent a fashion as any depicted in his books. He and Shirley Sailor, who lived together and had two children, were shot to death in their apartment at 232 Cortland in Detroit, their bodies found on the morning of October 22, 1974. Fortunately, the murderers hadn't harmed the children. Like some Ross Macdonald mystery embedded in the past but reverberating to the present day, the killers remain unidentified.

So in those days you'd find Goines' books and Iceberg Slim's in my neighborhood in South Central at the Thrifty's, the CVS drug store of its day. You wouldn't find them at the B Dalton and the Pickwick bookstores. Now you can find their
stuff at the chains. These two cats, for good and ill, are considered the godfathers of what's called Ghetto Lit now.

Circling back to the
Godwulf Manuscript
, and apropos of the kind of stories Goines and Beck wrote, what I remember in that book is Spenser beds a mother and subsequently her grown daughter in the course of the story, because he was that kind of stud. Maybe that was the lesson we were supposed to learn about PI characters.