Underbelly (22 page)

Well, after writing my first book, I knew I had to write another book. After the L.A. riots or the civil unrest, depending on your political point of view, in 1992, at that time I was working at a nonprofit, the Liberty Hill Foundation. Then and still today, they grant money to community organizing. So I knew a lot of the players in L.A., the mainstream local power brokers as well as grassroots people and some of the ones involved in the gang truce. Knowing this range of folks, I thought I could then write a mystery novel set after the riots—a mystery set amid a changing racial and political landscape. It was titled
Violent Spring
, with my PI Ivan Monk delving into the death of a Korean merchant in South Central. The book eventually got published, despite some publishers telling me in their rejection letters to drop the socio-political aspects of the novel. The book even got optioned for HBO and I did the Hollywood shuffle. Hilarious.

But now I was hooked. I'd written one book, I had to write the next one. 'Cause you're only as good as the last book … your last trick. Which gets us to today, twelve or so novels later and some short stories, anthologies and scripts I've banged out, the deal is to keep repeating the trick, which is especially arduous given the state of publishing today. Or maybe it's easier, because you don't have to worry about a publisher buying your next book. Anyway, maybe it's a good thing you won't need to publish your book in the traditional way. It's gotten harder and harder to sell a book given it's all about the P &L—the profit and loss on your last book.

Yeah, because with the Kindle, iPad, and what have you, and just to bite the hand that feeds, why do we need publishers,
if there's no real book, no physical copy? So what is the publisher's role if they're not “publishing” a hard copy of the book? We now have some cases of young writers like my boy Seth Harwood, who wrote
Jack Wakes Up
and
Young Junius
, who have gone this route. Initially they publish an e-book, even doing podcasts of reading the chapters. They then work the social media, Facebooking and twittering and who knows what else, building up an audience. So they can quantify a readership based on downloads and hits, and counterintuitively, the same people who got the book for free or cheap electronically, a good number of those folks, went out and bought their books when these works came out as real books. I mean, a book you can feel and smell, man.

I don't think so. I hope so, but young people growing up in a paperless society won't need or want the hard copy of the book. For them a book isn't an artifact. Conversely, there are still books that catch fire. There seems to be young people, among other people, who will go out and buy those books.

My wife Gilda recently read a book on her iPhone,
The Devil in the White City
by Erik Larson. And because she was engaged in the story, she didn't care that she was reading it on this little device, though she showed it to me on the iPhone and the text was pretty readable. The fact remains we still need and want stories. There will always be a need and a hunger for stories. That's just how our brains are hardwired. I guess something about order in the chaos that's life. And we're storytellers, whatever form that takes. Someone still has to come up with the plot, the characters and situations. But it seems to be the case now that when the publisher takes on your book, they expect you to quantify and deliver your audience.

I agree.

Deadlines. Seriously, I'm reluctant to say that I have a muse because to me, as a commercial writer, a genre writer, I write better if I have a deadline. The pressure. If I had any muse, it would be the ghosts of my mom the librarian and my dad the mechanic who always encouraged me, particularly about writing. Especially my dad, Dikes, because he didn't have much of an education, he had to drop out of school in the sixth grade. I grew up hearing his stories. He was born in 1912, so was a teenager and grown man during the Great Depression. He dug ditches making highways for the Works Progress Administration, was a lookout as a kid for a bootlegger in his hometown of Seguin, Texas, was an iceman delivering blocks of ice to cold water flats in Chicago, delivered bodies to the mortuary, chopped cotton for a quarter for a day's work, and so on.

Eventually his older brother Norman came out to L.A. and got a job and had Pop come out too. I grew up hearing his stories, of being a young man on Central Avenue, the jazz clubs and night spots then as given the segregation of L.A., blacks were on the East Side of the city and Central Avenue became the Stem, it was called, of black life. Hotels, doctors, dentists, newspapers like the
Eagle
and the
Sentinel
, they were there on or around Central Avenue. He got drafted, going to the war … I grew up hearing those stories, and those are the tales that stuck with me then and even today.

Los Angeles itself is certainly an inspiration and a continuing character for me. I think L.A. can be plumbed for a lot of ideas. As thin as the
L.A. Times
is now, there's always something you read in the paper, see on the news, hear somewhere that invariably sparks an idea in me. I carry that around with me and make little notes. At some point it worries your brain enough that you have to write the story.

I'm also fascinated with the retelling of tales often told. How many versions of timeless iconic characters like Frankenstein, Sherlock Holmes, and Robin Hood are there … yet there always seem to be room for more—allowing for different angles and perspectives on the characters. Or take the late comedian, the monologist Lord Buckley, Richard Buckley. This big, six-foot-six onetime lumberjack white guy from the sticks in upper California, who reinvents himself as a bebop hipster with a baritone voice, a pith helmet, and Salvador Dalí-type moustache doing a aristocratic English accent knocking it back with black slang.

“But I'm gonna put a cat on you who was the coolest, grooviest, sweetest, wailin'est strongest cat that ever stomped on this sweet, swingin' sphere. And they called this here cat, the Nazz.”

This is part of Buckley's version of the life of Jesus of Nazareth. Cool and crazy. See, it's all in the telling.

(Nods)
Plus writing is such good therapy. I don't know what I'd do if I couldn't write.

Absolutely.

That's right. Our job is to go out and get those stories and tell them.

Looking at this book you have here on your table about William Mulholland, who engineered the bringing of water, or
some would argue helped steal that water, to make what has become the modern metropolis of Los Angeles, drives home the concept of L.A. as the seat or crucible of noir. Even though the word 'noir' is bandied about a lot these days, to me the term refers to a doomed character or characters consumed or at least driven by lust, greed, gluttony, revenge … one of those baser instincts of us humans.

Invariably this bent mental state gets the character all caught up; when they should turn left they turn right, when they should keep walking, they turn the knob on that battered door and their fate can only spiral down into the velvet whirlpool. Noir means doomed characters in search of a doomed destiny, but they don't know this and they can't help themselves. They're self-deluded but they're making themselves self deluded by lust or greed. Usually it's one of the seven deadly sins but there are only two or three of those that really trip people up. Ha.

They can't see up for down, wrong for right, because they want something. It's usually not a big thing. It's a reasonable thing. They want money but they don't want a lot of money. A couple hundred thousand, let's say. Or you desire your neighbor's wife 'cause she looks so damn good in that summer dress.

It's your own undoing that you if not willingly, at least subconsciously, participate in and bring about. When you should make a left turn, you make a right. When you should lock that door, you open it. Because you're driven, obsessed. Often it's a situation you've put yourself in. Noir will kill ya.

Denise Hamilton writes crime fiction set in contemporary, multicultural Los Angeles. Her novels have been shortlisted for every major mystery award. She is also the editor of the Edgar Award winning short story anthology
Los Angeles Noir
(that Phillips has a story in) and
Los Angeles Noir 2: the Classics.
Visit her at
www.denisehamilton.com
.

The Underbelly
(2010)

The Jook
(1999, and PM Press, 2009)

The Perpetrators
(2002)

Bangers
(2003)

Freedom's Fight (2009)

Kings of Vice
(2010)

Ivan Monk Series

Violent Spring
(1994)

Perdition, U.S.A.
(1995)

Bad Night Is Falling
(1998)

Only the Wicked
(2000)

Monkology: 13 Stories From the World of Private Eye Ivan Monk
(2004)

Martha Chainey Series

High Hand
(2000)

Shooter's Point
(2001)

Short Stories

“King Cow” & “Hollywood Killer,”
Angeltown: The Nate Hollis Investigations
(2010)

“The Investor,”
Damn Near Dead 2
(2010)

“The Performer,”
Orange County Noir
(2010)

“The Snow Birds”
Once Upon a Crime
(2009)

“Blazin' on Broadway,”
Phoenix Noir
(2009)

“The Thrill is Gone,”
Sex, Lies and Private Eyes
(2009)

“The New Me,”
Noir: A Collection of Crime Comics
(2009)

“House of Tears,”
Black Noir: Mystery, Crime, and Suspense Stories by African-American Writers
(2009). Originally ran in the first issue of
Murdaland.

“Swift Boats for Jesus,”
Politics Noir
(2008)

“The Freeze Devil,”
The Avenger Chronicles
(2008)

“The Kim Novak Effect,”
Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine
(2008).

Reprinted in
Between the Dark and the Daylight.

“And What Shall We Call You?”
The Darker Mask: Heroes from the Shadows
(2008)

“Roger Crumbler Considered His Shave,”
Los Angeles Noir
, (2007)

“Where All Our Dreams Come True,”
Hollywood and Crime: Original Crime Stories Set During the History of Hollywood
(2007)

“Sportin' Men,”
Full House
, (2007)

“The Man For the Job,”
Dublin Noir: The Celtic Tiger vs. The Ugly American
(2006)

“Blues, Sex, and Bad Hot Mojo” & “Broken Willow,”
Kolchak: The Night Stalker Casebook
(2006)

“Incident on Hill 19,”
Retro Pulp Tales
(2006)

“The Socratic Method,”
amazon.com
shorts (2006)

“Disco Zombies,”
Cocaine Chronicles
(2005)

“Searching for Cisa,”
Kolchak: The Night Stalker Chronicles
(2005)

“Chatter,”
Plots With Guns: A Noir Anthology
(2005)

“The Accomplice,”
Creature Cozies
(2005)

“Beginner's Luck,”
Shades of Black: Crime and Mystery Stories by African-American Writers
(2004)

“Branded,”
Flesh & Blood: Erotic Tales of Crime and Passion
(2003)

“Rio Blanco,”
Guns of the West
, (2002)

“Hollywood Spring and Axle,”
The Mighty Johns and Other Stories
(2002)

“The Counterfeit Comrade,”
Measures of Poison
(2002)

“The Measure,”
The Blue and the Grey Undercover: All New Civil War Spy Adventures
(2001)

As editor or coeditor:

The Cocaine Chronicles
(2005)

Politics Noir
(2008)

The Darker Mask
(2008)

Orange County Noir
(2010)

Influenced by the likes of writer Rod Serling, comic book artists Jack Kirby and Jim Steranko, the records of comedians Bill Cosby and Richard Pryor, enchanted when Shirley Bassey sang “Goldfinger,” and never forgetting those stories his father told of being on the road during the Great Depression, what else could Gary Phillips do but make stuff up? He currently writes a darkly funny webcomic,
Bicycle Cop Dave
, on
www.fourstory.org
, ghostwrote an upcoming crime novel with pioneer rapper-actor Ice-T, writes the further adventures of pulp spy character Operator 5 for Moonstone Comics, and has a crime graphic novel forthcoming from DC/Vertigo Comics entitled
Cowboys.