I think I’ll make some posts about my favorite noir writers, my influences, and why, and how you should be reading them. Starting with literary badass and friend Vicki Hendricks.
Many people who have read Hendricks point to Miami Purity, which is her incredible debut novel, as a jumping off point that turned them on to the possibilities of noir with a woman in the role usually played by the guy instead of being the typical femme fatale.
Sonny Mehta bought and edited the damned thing!
A lot has been said about the lurid, explicit sex in the book, and how it’s modeled on the James M. Cain (you’ll hear more from me on him soon) novel The Postman Always Rings Twice. This thing really pushed the envelope of what the mainstream crime world was reading in 1995, right smack in the middle of me discovering James Ellroy’s White Jazz and the movie Pulp Fi
ction, opening my eyes to just how much style could be injected into crime fiction. I knew I wanted to be a writer, but those few years, 94 to 99, were like an inferno, burning away the shit I didn’t want to write, leaving only the essentials.
But I didn’t start my Hendricks’ reads with Miami Purity. Oh no, no, no. It was her second novel, Iguana Love, I discovered accidentally on Amazon in 1999 or so, that slayed me. It was weird, darkly funny, and definitely kinky. It was after that I went and very luckily found a hardcover of Miami Purity in the Books-A-Million discount piles.
I was in love! Literary-ly.
In 99, I was in grad school for creative writing at Southern Mississippi’s Center for Writers with the Barthelmes, Rick and Steve, and Mary Robison - some heavy hitters in minimalism. I’d been asked to work on the webzine Mississippi Review Web, and I was starting my own online noir journal, with my friends Hunter Hayes and Victor Gischler, called Plots with Guns. The internet was a new and wild frontier, and us young writers were taking advantage of it to get our work in front of new eyes. The market for explicit noir short stories seemed painfully small (nonexistent), so I started PWG to find more stuff to read. I loved that feeling of digging into the slush pile and discovering something amazing from a writer no one had heard of yet. Still love it.
Yes, the gimmick was “every story has to have a gun in it, somehow, some way.” It didn’t need to be used in a stereotypical way necessarily, as long as it was in there.
I was young, I was brash, and even though I was usually a shy dude in real life, the web emboldened me to reach out to writers I liked to ask for stories. Like the majority of lit mags, we couldn’t pay them anything, but I started to tell them, “Next time I see you, I’ll buy you a drink.”
It worked. Soon I had work from James Sallis, Gary Phillips, Robert Skinner, and others who’d already started making names for themselves, plus a whole batch of newcomers who would eventually climb through the ranks to victorious publishing.
But the most thrilling for me was asking Vicki Hendricks to send stories. And she was incredibly generous to a nobody guy in Mississippi fawning over her work. This led to her allowing me to publish stories like “Gators” and “Purrz, Baby,” and she even guest-edited an issue of PWG in 2002.
I met her in person for the first time at the annual Bouchercon crime conference in 2001, held in D.C. only two months after 9/11. And I bought her that drink I owed her for stories. There have been many other B’cons since then, and an AWP conference once where I moderated a panel I’d asked her to join, which she did, all the way in Vancouver. Yes, in her black leather jacket, she looks like she could knock you upside your head with a boom box, but in-person she’s nothing like that. A delight, and a fount of knowledge about a lot of things from scuba diving to sky diving to dolphin sex (you had to be there).
The most important thing I learned from reading Vicki’s work was not to compromise. Write exactly what you want. Fuck the critics, the naysayers, the “crime community,” whatever. And she told me about touring with James Ellroy, where she learned something about getting in the booksellers’ faces, don’t take any excuses for why the books aren’t selling.
This article by Craig Pittman about the genesis of Miami Purity is a hoot, especially about the women in her class blushing and acting shocked when some of her work was read aloud by the professor, while Vicki was amused by it all.
I write about bad sex, about the terrible things people do to each other, and about things that scare me. Without Hendricks, who would I have had to encourage that, exactly? I remember when I made a “breakthrough” in workshop, writing the first of my stories that really pushed past what I had before (it was called “You Can Watch,” later published in Exquisite Corpse). I knew I had a winner when Rick Barthelme summarized the whole thing for his partner (my boss at Mississippi Review’s print version, where I was editorial assistant), dying laughing about it, while I sat there soaking it in.
You’ve got to seek out Vicki’s other books: Voluntary Madness, Cruel Poetry, and Sky Blues. All of them are worthy of your time and devotion. And she’s got a great collection of short stories called Florida Gothic Stories. Her most recent novel was Fur People, a novel about animals, really. If you know Vicki, you know her incredible love of animals, so it’s a fantastic read.
I hope she doesn’t think this post is way too much. But hey, I’m a fanboy.
I was lucky and honored to have read her latest in manuscript format: Chez Usher, which is a wild ride. A south Florida, queer take on Poe’s gothic classic, I am really crossing my fingers that this one finds it’s way to a enthusiastic publisher willing to take risks. You’re all in for a treat.
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