I would not be the noir writer - or a fiction writer at all, probably - if I hadn’t stumbled across the mass market paperback of Ellroy’s White Jazz in a B. Dalton in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, during my junior year of college. I had no idea who Ellroy was (although after picking this up, I remembered seeing L.A. Confidential and The Black Dahlia on my local library shelves), and as you can see, the cover wasn’t anything special (not like the hardcover, which I found years later). I don’t know what made me pick it up except it was new, I was bored and browsing, and the title was weird.
The staccato fever-dream narration hit me like a fist. Not even full paragraphs, no dull descrips. Just the voice. A despicable character, sure, but mesmerizing the way he told his story. I said aloud to myself in the store, “I didn’t know you could do this in a crime novel.”
So after buying it, reading it, then devouring as much Ellroy as I could (watching the style develop from his early days to what it became was a writing master class all its own), I said, “I want to do that in a crime novel.”
Oh yeah, I admit, I imitated the fuck out of Ellroy in the beginning. All the while, I knew what he was doing was unique, and that clones would appear and be called just that - clones. Worthless. Weak copies.
Not long after, Pulp Fiction hit theaters, and I went to see it on my own. These two stories - Ellroy’s and Tarantino’s - were the sparks. Before then, I had wanted to be a crime novelist, but had no idea how to get there or what I wanted to say. After, I dug in and promised myself I would be one of the world’s greatest noir writers one day.
My fucking ego, right?
In the meantime, I discovered Walter Mosley, George Pelecanos, James Crumley, Elmore Leonard, Vicki Hendricks, on and on. I loaded up on Hammett and Cain. I started reading Publishers Weekly, back when that meant finding paper copies in the library stacks, hiding in a corner and reading five at a time. Then I found Armchair Detective.
Ellroy forced me to learn.
I’d already sent terrible stories to Ellery Queen’s Mag. Terrible. I’d already started reading James Lee Burke’s Robicheaux series - another touchstone, but not in the same way Ellroy struck me. I was already a fan of Flannery O’Connor, who, while not technically a noir writer, was as bleak and sickly funny as any of the crime gang.
I admit, around the time of The Cold Six-Thousand, I was a bit tired of the rat-a-tat-tat rhyming stuff. I couldn’t finish the book. Same with Blood’s a Rover.
But his memoir, My Dark Places, goddamn. That was fearless. I wrote a paper on it once.
He published a collection of pieces and a novella in Destination: Morgue, and I thought, “Yeah, this is good. This is growth.”
Eventually, the stylistic stuff I’d copied wore thin, but I never abandoned the goal of the barest bones writing I could achieve that still sounded nuts. Like, “spare, but insane.”
With James Ellroy, Jim Thompson, and Jim Crumley under my belt, I then discovered Chester Himes, Richard Stark, and Jerome Charyn. In my mind, they were writing “gonzo noir.”
James Ellroy proclaims himself the world’s greatest noir writer. I’m not going to argue with him about it. But I once wrote an article for Crimespree Magazine called, “James Ellroy Taught Me How to Be a Man, and Now I Want to Kick His Ass.”
That’s a good place to end this.
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I know jack all of Jerome Charyn's work. Looked him up and recognized a book I've been intending to get to since pub date in 2008.