Tribe’s Blog

Swiss cartoonist Thomas Ott’s noir comix must be seen to be believed.

Publishers Weekly says:

Ott employs neither dialogue nor captions in his stories; words appear rarely, usually as chapter titles or signs in the background. Appropriately, Ott uses the early silent cinema as a motif….In keeping with the silent movie motif, Ott uses black, white and grays, enveloping his realistically drawn characters and settings in an expressionistic mood. The characters initially display understated emotions, and their situations seem familiar. Ott’s storytelling moves at a slow but steady pace, making his protagonists’ extreme reactions more believable when they, and the readers, are caught in Ott’s imaginatively conceived, masterfully executed traps.

But it’s Ott’s uncanny ability to portray horror and noir, from a pulpy aesthetic, that make his images so compelling, hallucinatory, and so damn bleak.

Thomas Ott’s strips are the old EC horror comics for the new century, rendered as if the artists and story-tellers from the 1950s really, really meant it.

This is unspoken minimalism with some of the most twisted narratives I’ve read.

Has anyone seen this?

It looks splendidly fucked up…in the best possible way!

Twenty-two-year-old Sebastien (Georges Babluani) leads an impoverished life with his immigrant family constantly struggling to support them. While repairing the roof of a neighbor’s house, he overhears a conversation about an expected package which promises to make the household rich. Sensing the opportunity of a lifetime, Sebastien intercepts the package which contains a series of specific instructions. Following the clues, he assumes a false identity and manages to slip through the grasp of the enclosing police as he ventures deeper and deeper into the countryside. The closer he gets to his destination and the more people he meets along the way, the less he understands about what he is looking for. Ultimately, he comes face to face with a ring of clandestine gamblers placing bets on the outcome of a multi-player, high stakes tournament of Russian roulette. Directed by newcomer Gela Babluani, 13 TZAMETI is a winner-take-all thriller, where an unfortunate young man is transformed into Contestant #13 with no way out save his luck.

And check out the bad-ass trailer.

So often the simplest concepts are evident only when someone cuts through the crap and spoon feeds it to you.

Over at Pinckney Benedict’s MySpace blog there’s been a rather interesting ongoing discussion over the past month or so regarding “Apocalyptic Literature.” First he notes:

a word about what I take to be the meaning of apocalypse, which is the Greek word for “revelation” (as in The Book of Revelation—notice, no S at the end—by St. John the Divine, also known as The Revelator, also known as That Nutty Guy Locked Up on Patmos and Scribbling Away). In the context of this course, I take apocalypse to mean revelation through destruction (a sweeping-away of the old order), followed by renewal.

The renewal is important. It’s what made Anthony Burgess so mad when the final redemptive chapter of Clockwork Orange (a book that I wanted to use in the course, but which didn’t make it because the nadsat language in it would have been pretty tough when combined with the Riddley-speak of Russell Hoban) was left out of the American edition, and the Kubrick film; and which still hasn’t made it back in most people’s experience of the work. Without at least the possibility of renewal or redemption, all we are left with is spectacle, usually bleak. And that’s not enough.

Pinckney goes on to note that “all significant literature is, in the end, apocalyptic, at least as I’ve defined it here. The apocalypse may be universal (the deluge) or local (Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle) or completely private (The Lathe of Heaven, or Edith’s Diary, an unbearably tense novel by Patricia Highsmith), but the world must be swept away and remade in every work of fiction.”

Now, this isn’t anything new, because I’ve read similar things in various theoretical essays, treatises, yadda. But “apocalypse to mean revelation through destruction (a sweeping-away of the old order), followed by renewal,” well, that gives the whole Joseph Campbell spiel a twist that I can relate to.

Don’t think that Pinckney is merely addressing snooty “important” works of fiction. After all, in his listing of examples he includes Richard Matheson’s pulpy classic I Am Legend.

All in all, there’s lots of practical useful thoughts on the practicalities of fiction writing, as well as some discussion on theoretical underpinnings (be sure to read his posting on the difference between story and vignette).

And he’s no slouch, as you can read from his bio over at the Barcelona Review and another bio here.

That’s one way for me to look at it.

After the lengthy hiatus, looking back over my two works in progress (Rank Strangers and The Knoxville Girl), I’ve lost any interest in reviving them.

Instead I started yet a third with the working title of Persistence of Vision.

But I’m finding it problematic that I can’t bring myself to follow through on these longer projects. Of course, inexperience (if not lack of ability) is clearly a factor. Then there’s an inability (if not an unwillingness) to devote daily time to these things. I still have to eat and pay for a roof over my head and the like.

Still, when I return to those projects I find myself uninterested in pursuing the ideas, themes, characters I was working with.

So it’s likely that if I’ve lost interest in them, they couldn’t have been all that compelling to begin with.

I’m not gonna give it up. It’s just back to the drawing board.

And the previous projects aren’t wasted…they’ll live to be cannibalized.

When I first got access to the internet, which would be sometime in 1994 or 1995 (it must have been 1995 ’cause that’s they year the Indians got to the World Series…believe it or not, I’m able to place events in my life to a particular year depending on who was in the World Series…this is mostly due to the fact that a baseball season, from Spring Training to the World Series, takes place in a calendar year, as opposed to those other sports which run their course over portions of two calendar years), it was right on the heels of my discovery of Thomas Pynchon.

I read Gravity’s Rainbow during the summer of 1994, that I do remember.

‘Cause I read it twice.

Right after the Rocket fell to that point where it can’t fall anymore:

…just here, just at this dark and silent frame, that the pointed tip of the Rocket, falling nearly a mile per second, absolutely and forever without sound, reaches its last unmeasurable gap above the roof of this old theatre, the last delta-t.

And I went right back to page one, and started it all over again: “A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.”

Over the past ten-plus years, I’ve probably read Gravity’s Rainbow at least five times, and I’ll bet I’ve actually read it more than that if you count fucking around reading.

And each time, each damn time I’ve read that damned book, it’s always been different. I’ve always been able to get a different reading, something to build on what I got from it that first time and again. “It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.”

Since then, a Pynchon book is an event for me, the only new Pynchon book since ‘94 was Mason & Dixon in ‘97 (and that one was underwhelming, keeping in mind that its publication was sandwiched between two other encyclopedic postmodern classics which I’ve also read a couple of times each: Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace in 1996 and Underworld by Don Delillo later in ‘97).

And now there’s a big-ass new Pynchon book coming out in a couple weeks, all one thousand plus pages and reportedly with a cast of hundreds, characters breaking into song at the slightest opportunity, technology issues, in other words, Pynchon being Pynchon ala Gravity’s Rainbow.

And I can’t wait.

I’m not referring to that song by The Band (and I’ve never been terribly impressed with them…they just never did anything for me…they knew all those great country tunes, and then they’d ruin them with drums). I’m just sort of elated that I finally finished “Henry Lee, the Little Girl and the Dreadful Snake” the night before last after pulling a Puerto Rican coffee fueled honest to God all-nighter.

If you’re familiar with the Anthology of American Folk Music and classic Stanley Brothers bluegrass tunes, you’ll know where the title is coming from in part.

In any event, I got the sonofabitch done and submitted before the deadline, thanks in no small part to the bad-ass editing skills of Mrs. Tribe.

What I’m discovering is that I waste so much time (literally days sometimes) sweating over relatively minor things like transitions between scenes, or connections within a scene. It’s awful. I mean, I’ll get stuck there and not budge.

Yet, once I hit a juicy (bloody) piece of action, I am going *boom boom boom* at the keyboard and before I know it I’ve written a thousand words or so.

Another plus, I don’t fall in love with passages that slow everything down and that were written just to show how cute I can be. So I’m getting better at cutting drivel.

None of this is to say that HL, LG & DS will make the final cut, but I do feel good about being able to make a wee bit of chicken salad out of what was at first chicken shit.

Peter Watkins‘ magnificent six-hour faux documentary La Commune (Paris 1871) is finally available in a beautiful three-disc set.

Watkins has to be the most unrecognized genius in cinema working today. His specialty is the “fake” documentary, but describing his films this way is misleading really…but how else to describe his work? Take, for instance, Punishment Park. The Masters of Cinema site describes it as (don’t forget to look at the awesome trailer at the Masters of Cinema link):

Both controversial and relentless in its depiction of suppression and brutality, Punishment Park was heavily attacked by the mainstream press and permitted only the barest of releases in 1971. However, like Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool (1969) and Robert Kramer’s Ice (1969), Peter Watkins’ film has established itself as one of the key, yet rarely seen, radical films of the late 1960s/early 1970s. Giving voice to the disaffected youth of America that had lived through the campus riots at Berkeley, the trial of the Chicago Seven and who were witnessing the escalation of the Vietnam War, Punishment Park was named by Rolling Stone as one of their top ten films of 1971 and has earned many admirers in the four decades since its release.

Set in a detention camp in an America of the near-future, Punishment Park’s pseudo-documentary style (continuing Watkins’ subversive innovations with Culloden and The War Game) places a British film crew amongst a group of young students and minor dissidents who have opted to spend three days in ‘Bear Mountain Punishment Park’. The detainees, rather than accept lengthy jail sentences for their ‘crimes’, gamble their freedom on an attempt to reach an American flag — on foot and without water — through the searing heat of the desert. The pursuit of Group 637 — a lethal, one-sided game of cat-and-mouse with a squad of heavily armed police and National Guardsmen — is contrasted with the corrupt trial of Group 638 by a quasi-judicial tribunal.

Unlike Easy Rider’s mythologising of American counter-culture, Punishment Park’s uncompromising stance, and its uneasy parallels with Guantanamo Bay, retain a powerful and prescient message in the post-9/11 present. Rarely seen in the UK, The Masters of Cinema Series is proud to celebrate Punishment Park’s 35th anniversary with its first British release on home video.

Watkins’ La Commune, on the other hand, uses the 1871 Paris Commune uprising as its setting. But one conceit here (among others) is that television covers the events as they occur, with competing “Commune TV” and conservative “Versailles TV” coverage of the unfolding events. At the same time, the non-professional cast go in and out of character, creating their own dialogue as the film progresses to its inevitable violent ending.

And in light of the French riots, maybe this set is particularly relevant today. Not that I’m equating juvenile delinquents with the Communards….

A very nice analysis of the film can be found here. And if you have the patience to wade through Watkins’ own agit-prop and eggheady analysis, well, be my guest.

This from today’s NY Times:

Stanley Kubrick never threw anything away. On the other hand, he didn’t have much of a filing system, and when he moved — permanently, it turned out — from Hollywood to London in 1962, a great many things went astray. Among them was the sole copy of a film treatment called “Lunatic at Large,” which Mr. Kubrick had commissioned in the late ’50s from the noir pulp novelist Jim Thompson, with whom he had worked on “The Killing,” a 1956 bank-heist story that became his first successful feature, and then on 1957’s “Paths of Glory.”

The manuscript remained lost until after Mr. Kubrick’s death, in 1999, when his son-in-law, Philip Hobbs, working with an archivist, turned it up, along with a couple of other scripts, and set about trying to make it into a movie.

Lunatic at Large is described as “a dark and surprising mystery of sorts, in which the greatest puzzle is who, among several plausible candidates, is the true escapee from a nearby mental hospital.”

[The] screenplay has the feel of authentic Thompsonian pulpiness. Set in New York in 1956, it tells the story of Johnnie Sheppard, an ex-carnival worker with serious anger-management issues, and Joyce, a nervous, attractive barfly he picks up in a Hopperesque tavern scene. There’s a newsboy who flashes a portentous headline, a car chase over a railroad crossing with a train bearing down, and a romantic interlude in a spooky, deserted mountain lodge.

The great set piece is a nighttime carnival sequence in which Joyce, lost and afraid, wanders among the tents and encounters a sideshow’s worth of familiar carnie types: the Alligator Man, the Mule-Faced Woman, the Midget Monkey Girl, the Human Blockhead, with the inevitable noggin full of nails.

Been busy as shit with work…mindless drudgery. Too boring to talk about, much less blog about.

That and still wrestling with this goddamn story…well, you know the rest and how that goes.

On the plus side, Mrs. Tribe has a brand spanking new editorial job with these folks.

It’s that time of the year when these “best of..” things start trickling in. The Village Voice named Sara Gran’s Dope the Best New New York Noir of 2006.

Me, I’m not surprised, ’cause I still think Dope was the best noir novel of the year.

I’ve made no secret of my excitement for Murdaland since its initial announcement. It sounded edgy, experimental, hard-core, literary…all those things that go into the crime fiction tht I enjoy.

The best part is that it hasn’t disappointed.

I had the good fortune to get a sneak preview of the premiere issue of Murdaland right before Bouchercon. Let me tell you that it doesn’t disappoint. It’s everything I imagined and hoped it would be and more.

If the first issue is any indication, Murdaland is the future of crime fiction.

Here’s what Mike Langnas, Murdaland’s editor in chief had to say.

Tribe: What is Murdaland?

Michael: Murdaland is a term that I believe was originally applied to Maryland where much of our organization is based. It’s larger implications are obvious. It’s since been used on HBO’s ‘The Wire,’ but by that time copyrights and web pages had already been pursued. Or so I understand. I actually had nothing to do with the name. I will however be happy to talk about Murdaland the magazine.

Tribe: And Murdaland the magazine is….?

Michael: A crime magazine that comes out in book form twice a year. Nothing but fiction. The debut has an excerpt from Tom Franklin’s new novel, a work-in-progress by Mary Gaitskill and reprints a classic David Goodis short story, but it’s mainly original short stories. Sixteen in the first issue. It’s very strong lineup of talent from the mystery and – this, yeah, sounds awful – literary world. The focus is on dark stories with a noir feel. As opposed to not just cozies, but also the whole Raymond Chandlar/Ross MacDonald tradition.

What else can I tell you? We’re a mere $12.00 even though we look like a book. We’ll be taking credit card and international orders in November when our full website is up, but you can order it in the U.S. by check now. Some independent bookstores have it already. Other stores can order it now and it’ll ship immediately. We’re on sale now in New York in Grand Central Station and Penn Station and in various newsstands and places like that. Our major distributor hopes to have it in Barnes & Nobles and Borders and Hastings and similar retail outlets across America in January.

Tribe: Now when Murdaland was first announced…some people got pissy with the perception that you folks sought to distinguish yourselves by dissing the Ellery Queen and Alfred Hitchcock magazines…?

Michael: Yeah, I had nothing to do with that, but there are few things in life I’d be happier to glom onto (and take credit I don’t deserve) then for knocking them. The amount of hostility those comments incurred and continue to incur is incredible. And me, I want a slice.

Tribe: I didn’t think you were dissing them so much as distancing perhaps…

Michael: Oh, no – they were being dissed. They’re two magazine owned by the same people. And, sadly, they’re the only game in town. They set the rules. And I’d argue that the occasional snotty remark is rather healthy when you’re dealing with such a powerful monopoly.

Tribe: So Murdaland is going to be David to their Goliath…

Michael: Eh, we should be so lucky. David had a chance. We have no chance. No one has a chance. I want to be clear. I’m not putting down Ellery Queen or Alfred Hitchcock magazine’s readers. I’m not putting down their writers. I’m not putting down their editors. Everyone who’s so pissed off may want to read those last three sentences a few times. But, hey, we are going to be snide about a system where the only two drinks in the world are Coke and Pepsi and they’re owned by the same company. Imagine if Microsoft and Apple were both owned by the same company. We’d all be lucky to have floppy discs and dial-up modems. And that’s what’s happened with the mystery short story. It’s not healthy. The fact there’s no competition is the reason you can pick up either magazine and feel like you’ve been magically transported to a dentist’s waiting-room in 1971. They’re anachronistic and genteel and totally out of touch. That’s what absolute power does evidently. And it’s been a disaster for the crime short story.

Tribe: What kind of response has Murdaland been having so far?

Michael: You mean beyond the groupies?

Tribe: Yes, there are groupies, no doubt. I’d say there are groupies ’cause there is a real sense of desperation to have something like Murdaland available. But is there a larger positive reaction?

Michael: Well, we’ve already touched on the lingering (and very real) hostility because of the Ellery Queen/Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine comments. That’s marvelous, of course. Reward in itself. Sadly, there are no groupies. That said, there are a few other things that give me encouragement in the wee hours of the night. First, people we respect seem to like it. And then the more they see of it, the more of the issue they read the more enthused they are. We plan on having Vicki Hendricks in the second issue and we sent her the debut and she said some very nice things that, ahem, would seem to be genuine and that really means a lot.

Tribe: Vicki Hendricks has a reputation for not pulling punches, so yeah, I’d say that’s genuine.

Michael: She wanted to know if we’d have a problem with explicit content and we said “No.” And she sort of was like, well, um, are you sure? And we sent her the debut. And she was like “Oh, nice. This won’t be a problem at all. Great job.” I’m, you know, paraphrasing. But this brings us back to Ellery Queen and Alfred Hitchcock. The story she’s writing could never appear in either. Anthony Neil Smith gave us a hysterical black comedy about Midwestern goth teens that could never appear in either. We have a war story from an ex-Sandinista fighter that could never appear in either. Les Edgerton’s amazing riff on his own life, including the crimes he committed and his rather scary time in one of America’s worst penitentiaries could never be in either. Okay, now, yeah, I guess, they could wait for, you know, ‘[Fill In The Name Of The Metropolitan Area Nearest To You] Noir’ to come out and then maybe – just maybe have the piece there. So when they get around to ‘Pendleton Correctional Facility Noir’ Les will maybe find another mystery market that would take his fine story. But that’s it.

Tribe: The original notice had Cortright [McMeel] as the mastermind behind this….how did you get involved?

Michael: I went to graduate school with Cort back in the nineties. Cort wrote this infamous novel at Columbia called ‘Fullback Glory‘ that was very, very strong. And very strange. It was never published and it has achieved a sort of a cult following among the people who read it there or in the decade afterward. A few years ago Cort reached a strange nadir when he appeared as a fictional character in a novel by the wife of a very famous writer. A woman we went to school with. The Cort character’s this thug who’s written this amazing story. But, you know, the actual novel, whatever, it remains unpublished. What can I tell you? Ah, life . . .. ah, irony . . . ah, the publishing industry. Que sera sera. Anyway, Cort contacted me out of the blue and said he’d raised some money and was putting together a crime magazine and would I like to submit a story or contribute my time in some way. Cort had (and has) an awful reputation as a drunk, a brawler and somewhat charming, if totally irresponsible, loose canon, but I remembered him for the amazing ‘Fullback Glory’ and naively agreed. Several months of madness and rage followed and I ended up editing and then asked Cort to submit a piece. So I went from potential writer to editor and then, as such, got the original gifted demon-child to submit something.

Tribe: What’s your involvement now?

Michael: I’m editor in chief. Which means I’m the one person working on this full time. I deal with a lot of the more boring non-editorial crap and I solicit the majority of the writers and do the majority of the editing. But ‘Murdaland’ was very much Cort’s idea. Not mine.

Tribe: Did you expect a different reception at Bouchercon for the first issue? Or did events just conspire to keep it from being presented right?

Michael: We signed up too late to actually participate in Bouchercon, but they told us we could come anyway and have a table and have some of our promotional stuff in the giftbag everyone gets and blah blah blah. No one wants to hear me whine. Anyway, I made my way up to Wisconsin and nothing we were promised was there. You know, the table wasn’t there, our promotional material wasn’t given out. I’m sorry this is so boring. Anyway, the people from Crimespree magazine saved our ass. So God bless Jon and Ruth Jordon. A shout-out to them. They were incredibly gracious and gave out copies at their table and saw to it that people heard a little about what we were doing. What was your impression of Bouchercon?

Tribe: It seemed to me that the reaction to Murdaland from the typical Bouchercon attendee was the same reaction I got when talking about a novel I’m writing that involves an unexpected handjob…”Oh, that’s nice” but I really expected folks to be excited about Murdaland and I didn’t see that

Michael: Jesus, okay. Needless to say, before we go any further we’re going to have to discuss what exactly an “unintended handjob is.” I mean talk about your no-brainers. Here [cough] goes then . . . Pray tell, what is a U.H.J.?

Tribe: Uhm, well, the recipient is sitting in a movie theatre…and voila, gets a handjob…a victim of opportunity rather than intent.

Michael: And he receives this from a person of a different gender. You know – a woman?

Tribe: Well, yeah.

Michael: Then in fairness to the philistines “Oh, that’s nice” would seem to be a perfectly valid response, no?

Tribe: But I think the “Oh, nice” reaction was the polite thing to say. As opposed to “Oh, that’s fucking nice.” My point being that the reaction was along the lines of “Why write about something that has a handjob to begin with?” It was that sort of almost sarcastic “oh nice”

Michael: James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses‘ is set on June 16th because allegedly on that day he got a handjob from the woman who would one day be his wife.

Tribe: Ha

Michael: It was a U.H.J. too. Totally unexpected. So, hey, you’re working out of a very distinguished tradition, Tribe.

Tribe: If I recall correctly, ‘Ulysses’ initially inspired indifference, if not downright hostility…maybe I am onto something here.

Michael: And not without reason either. Virginia Wolfe read it, rejected it for publication and offered up a great snotty quote about how Joyce was an ill-bred, lower-class schoolboy being deliberately rude or something. Though her own use of stream of consciousness would seem to own a heavy debt to Mr. I Got A Unexpected Handjob On June 16th And Am Now Going To Write A 700 Page Modernist Masterpiece Set On That Very Day!

So really, dude. Take heart.

Tribe: Back to Murdaland though…people were indifferent to it. I wanted to grab folks and yell this is new, literary, experimental! Try it! You might like it!

Michael: Okay, if you’ll allow me, I’m going to go on for a bit here. There were two kinds of people at Bouchercon. There were the fans and there were people like myself and you and countless writers who were sort of hustling. Now I don’t mind that the fans were indifferent. That’s their right. We’re not their cup of tea or whatever. That’s fine. They paid their money. They want to see established authors in the flesh that they care about. That’s great. God bless them.

The other group were writers and people like us. They tended to be much younger and ostensibly into noir and the whole pulp tradition. And, you know, I have a bit of an attitude towards them. Look – the issue is very strong. We have Mary Gaitskill who, among other things, wrote perhaps one of the two great short story collections of the past twenty-five years. We have Rolo Diez whose ‘Tequila Blue‘ may be the best noir novel to come out of Latin America. We have Daniel Woodrell and Tom Franklin who are pretty much top of the line in the crime field. We have simply killer stuff from Anthony Neil Smith, Les Edgerton, Tristan Davies and a host more. I’ll be blunt. We’re a $12 magazine and if there’s going to be a mystery anthology out this year that consistently has better stuff than our debut it’ll come as quite a surprise.

Tribe: That’s a pretty bold statement.

Michael: Well, I didn’t write the stories. You know, I’m not blowing my own horn. I’m just trying to see that the fiction in here gets the credit it deserves. And, frankly, I’ve read a bunch of anthologies this year and, yeah, the fiction we have is much better. There’s no comparison. The fiction in ‘Murdaland’ is better written. It’s more diverse in theme and content. It’s darker and has more depth. The characters are rooted in real psychology, which is a nice way of saying they’re humans as opposed to the usual fucking embarrassing stereotypes. The milieus are credible and detailed. Clichés are avoided. Labored cutesy riffs aren’t passed off of as wit. That last one’s huge, by the way. What can I tell you? We’re not like the other kids. We have some real quality stuff by people who can really write. And if you’re an up and coming noir writer making the scene in Wisconsin, boozing and schmoozing, and you’re not interested, hey, that’s your prerogative. It’s not our place to interrupt your careering. But, truth be told, you’re missing something that’s actually pretty Goddamn fucking solid.

Tribe: Is there anything different that’s being done to get Murdaland out there? Anything to maximize the chances of this getting to people who will care about it?

Michael: Well, we’re trying. We have this guy named Nick Sweyze who’s alarmingly competent and he’s been doing great stuff. Just a total pro and unlike Cort or me, I should add, a real class act. Nick’s generously agreed to help us with ads and some P.R. in his spare time. But you know we all live in different cities and I’d be lying if I said the rest of us really know what we’re doing in that regard. I’m talking to you because you obviously care about this sort of thing. That’s one thing. You know, I just read a book called ‘Chinatown Beat.’

Tribe: You were telling me about that. It’s something of an atypical release for Soho Crime….

Michael: It’s an impressive first novel. Truly impressive. The guy gets Manhattan’s Chinatown and various communities across New York and there are glimpses out into the rest of America and other countries. It’s just chockfull of fine sharp details within this vast scope. Complacent waiters, pissed-off gypsy cab drivers, kept women in designer shoes, angry teenagers, aging killers, gamblers, Dominican prostitutes catering to poor immigrants, sullen Chinese gangsters and their new money Taiwanese wives. You could just go on and on. The relations between different Asian groups in New York, between cops and immigrants, Chinese-Americans and other races and ethnic groups. It’s bursting at the seams with ideas and observations yet he keeps the plot moving. It’s got that first-novel mad energy to get everything – a lifetime of observation – in. Which can be exhilarating when the writer genuinely has new things to write about. And you read the Kirkus review and they’re pissed because of the range. Because he does so much more than just give you the rote sensitive stoic cop tracking the scary villain plot like countless writers before him. They’re basically scolding him for his energy, ambition and originality. So, you know, we’re going to try to get Henry Chang to write something for our next issue. So that’s how I’d answer your question. Ultimately that’s really all I can do. Try to get the very best or most promising writers I can. And give them room and support.

Tribe: And that’s the sort of thing that’s being encouraged in Murdaland, right? Doing it differently and doing it well?

Michael: The magazine is in trade paperback form. It’ll last in a literal sense. It’s not going to crumble to dust. And you know Cort and the publishers are committed to, at least, a few more issues. So it’ll be there. You know, it’s not going anywhere. And if we’re ignored or whatever it’ll still be there. And if in the future, ten or twenty years from now, some smart fifteen-year-old kid or someone in their twenties or seventies or whatever picks it up they’ll find there’s some really dark, clever and original stuff inside.

Tribe: What sort of tradition would you say Murdaland arises out of?

Michael: Well, James M. Cain’s significant for a lot of our writers. We have a long piece by David Goodis, our one reprint. You don’t want to be pretentious, but a writer like Louis-Ferdinand Celine is clearly very important. Charles Bukowski. Flannery O’Connor. Patricia Highsmith and George V. Higgins. I really think it’s, also, what we’re not. We’re not coming out of the classic Hemingway hero that Hammett brilliantly put into a crime context and that Chandlar than expanded on and that we’ve since seen a million times.

I’m not deriding that, but that’s what we’re not. That’s key. We’re not the sensitive tough alcoholic heart-of-gold private-eye, okay? We’re the scumbag. We’re the loser. We’re the victim. Or, um, we’re the bystander who really should have done more. Anyone who’s been involved in something shameful. The guy or gal who falls into sleaze and complicity. People you don’t want to be. Or are ashamed to be.

We’re willing to go with stuff that’s bleak and morally ambiguous. We want fiction that’s rooted in a reality. Not necessarily LA mean streets a la Chandler. Or even James Ellroy who we quite like. We say in the Writers Submission Guidelines that we’d be happy to read a story about lingering credit card bills, unrequited lust and festering rage at a suburban Iowa T.G.I.-Fridays that led to bloody doom. It was sort of a throwaway line, but a lot of writers have responded very positively, mentioning that one sentence in particular. Which may something rather damning about our competitors.

We don’t need cool or even sympathetic heroes. And that would seem to put us in a very different place from most writers and markets.

Tribe: How important is the internet to the evolution of Murdaland?

Michael: Well, it’s great because we can connect with people like you who really love this stuff and are kind enough to give us a forum. And, yeah, it makes reading stories easier when they’re sent as Word attachments as they don’t jam up a mailbox. But if it can do something more – if it can connect us with the people who we know would really enjoy Murdaland that’d be great. And, hey, if it doesn’t maybe that’s our own fault for not somehow utilizing it better.

Tribe: What’s your understanding of noir? Is it better defined as what it isn’t? Is there even such an animal?

Michael: I really hate to tangle with you on this one because you can probably hand me my head, but I really think you have to talk about film noir and work from there. Though, yeah, with lit. it’s pretty clear that the two volume Library of America thing [‘Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930s and 40s’, ‘Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950s’] Robert Polito put together is now a canon for writers who aspire to it.

Tribe: A canon is a good thing to have, isn’t it?

Michael: Well, more than that I just think he picked some really interesting books. I’d rather someone point me to some interesting books I haven’t read and might like. I’m very grateful just for that.

Tribe: But doesn’t a canon mean the genre or sub-genre has arrived, that its acquired a degree of respectability?

Michael: Well, I think crime writing has been acceptable. Dostoevsky, Flannery O’Connor, ‘Oliver Twist‘. I mean that’s all accepted. I’m not being cute or pompous. I think what wasn’t accepted were a group of specific writers that were highlighted.

Tribe: True. But you’re not claiming that old Fyodor had a noir sensibility, do you?

Michael: Oh, yeah. Certainly. I mean Dostoevsky has a novella called ‘Notes From The Underground‘ and he kind of fucks it up by having a hooker with a heart of gold in the second half, but I’d say the first half pretty much defines or invents, at least, one aspect of the noir sensibility.

I couldn’t think of a better example actually. So, yeah, everyone, if you haven’t read it already, go to your local B&N and just read those first twenty or thirty pages of ‘Notes From The Underground’. I’m not being a wise guy. It’s proto-Jim Thompson. It’s proto-Celine. It’s very dark. It’s totally noir. Then you have the actual novels.

Tribe: Ya know, I get the sense that you guys have a bad fucking attitude about things in general

Michael: Um, define your terms.

Tribe: As in you aren’t going to make any compromises in what you’re setting out do.

Michael: See, I don’t want to be a dick – so forgive me – but that’s the kind of thing that scares me when I read it in stories. You know, the lone cop who’s not going to make any compromises or anything. It’s a bit kitsch. I mean I’m sure we make compromises. Ones we’re aware of and one we delude ourselves about and don’t think we’re making. But, honest to God, we want to find and promote well written, good unusual stuff. We want to give it a platform. It comes back to what we were just saying about Polito’s ‘Library of America’ series. What I like about it isn’t so much that it establishes a canon as the simple fact that it introduced me to ‘They Shoot Horses, Don’t They’ ‘Pickup‘ and ‘The Talented Mr. Ripley.’ It had fantastic stuff in it. And that’s what we want to do in our own modest way. We want to feature really good contemporary stuff that transcends the clichés of the genre. And the first issue’s out and at the risk of being presumptuous I think we succeeded. There’s some really nice dark stuff in there. And, yeah, so if you’re interested in where noir writing or literary crime fiction is as we all slide into 2007 you probably have to check Murdaland out.

Seriously.

Over at The Rap Sheet expect to see James Ellroy guest-blogging tomorrow. How J. Kingston Pierce arranged for this is beyond me.

But this is sort of the biggest news in a while anywhere.

Pierce’s The Rap Sheet may never be the same.