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A Clod of Wayward Marl
This crime novel by the critically acclaimed and commercially underappreciated DeMarinis is the story of a drunken crimewriter who is hired to teach "literature" at La Siberia Tech, and finds himself embroiled in the sordid world of academia.
Design/Dustjacket by Michael Kellner -- notice its cool double-fronted design.
100 Quarter Morocco copies: $125 Trade edition,Cloth, 1000 copies: $30
STARRED BOOKLIST REVIEW 2/15/01:
Hard-drinking, unlettered Guido Tarkenen writes
"trash for cash." So, as a visiting writer in the English department at La
Siberia Tech, the modestly successful creator of novels that "rut and cut, toot and
shoot" is out of step with academic PC, colleagues who worship Smollett, and stud
ents
who mouth postmodern gibberish. Guido's element is losing a barroom fight that begins in a
disagreement over the relative merits of dental floss and water Piks.
Of course, the English department is in emotional meltdown over rumors that the university is being sold to an Asian high-tech firm that will jettison the liberal arts. But as even the wildest rumors seem to be coming true, faculty members start to die, and Guido is drawn into comic-book academic surreality. This is a big, messy, often hilariously funny novel that skewers every subject it touches; it is a plausible speculation, incidentally, that Guido is modeled on James Crumley, the much-respected crime novelist who is known for his bull-in-a-china-shop act as a visiting writer. DeMarinis has been writing funny, angry, and over-the-top literary novels and short stories for 25 years, to critical acclaim but limited reader recognition. Here's hoping his first "detective" novel will turn him into an "overnight" sensation. -Thomas Gaughan
A Clod of Wayward Marl ----- Chapter One
The man looked like Clark Gable but he had a dirty mouth. The bartender was indifferent. The barmaids ignored him. Only Guido seemed to take offense. Shut up, you moron, he said. The dashing man turned on his barstool to face Guido. He was drunk. His big handsome Clark Gable head rocked saucily from side to side in an un-Clark Gable way. He suggested a menu of oral services he was sure Guido had the expertise to provide. Guido knocked the man off his stool with a short chopping punch. This surprised Guido. The punch didn't have much authority, yet the man lay sprawled on his back, twitching. Guido kicked him in the ribs, urging him to get up. Only then did Guido notice the twin aluminum canes resting against the bar next to the man's stool. You shouldn't have done that, sport, the barkeep said. Loren's a very sick man. Two other men helped Loren back to his feet. He's got Lou Gehrig's disease, a barmaid said, her voice crisp. The men who helped the sick man up now helped him slip into his canes. The sick man, who looked like Clark Gable only from the neck up, worked his way out of the bar. Each step required heroic effort. Someone held the door for him as he wobbled through it. Guido, humiliated, headed for the rear exit. Ugly remarks pelted his back like stones as he left the bar he could never visit again.
Chester Stubbs
Craig Miles Miller
The tale of ex-Navy man, ex-husband, and ex-heavyweight fighter Chester Stubbs, and his devotion to sex, violence and booze.
1000 cloth copies: $30
Reviewed in Publisher's Weekly 2/19/01:
"Miller's first novel is a Florida panhandle picaresque following the adventures of a regular piece of work named Chester Stubbs, an ex-Navy heavyweight boxing champ. Chester narrates his close encounters with trouble and various bottles of George Dickle whiskey with a self-deprecating wit and a lot of shaky grammar. A year after being abandoned by his wife, Marleen -- coming home one night, she finds him on the garage roof having sex with a checkout girl from the local grocery store -- Chester is slovenly, drunk, and ornery. His best friend, a black ex-boxer named Crow, finds him a job as a warehouseman, but Chester loses it when he is hospitalized for a broken rib acquired in a fight. He is rather astonished that two of his co-workers, Vietnamese refugees Wayne and Duck, come to visit him. He is further astonished by the friendship that springs up between him and his neighbor, Cecilia Guffins, a feisty old woman who is Chester's polar opposite. Chester rouses himself to get another job, this time as a Pensacola Beach bar. Miller's northern Florida is the country cousin of Carl Hiaasen's South Florida, a place where whiskey is more important than cocaine, Bob Wills more likely to come out of the juke box than rap, and gospel roots still show through the beachfront hedonism."
Writing and Other Blood Sports
Charles Willeford
This is one that Willeford fans have been anticipating for years - his collected essays on a wide range of subjects, but focusing primarily on literary criticism.
From Booklist:The late Charles Willeford may have been the last of the great pulp writers. For decades, he published newsstand paperbacks (complete with lurid covers) before finally achieving mainstream success in the 1980s with his Hoke Moseley series. Along with his fiction, Willeford turned out a steady stream of nonfiction: autobiography, criticism and reviews (he was the Miami Herald's mystery reviewer for many years), and musings on the craft of writing. This superb collection brings together a wide-ranging sampling of Willeford's nonfiction, along with a few appreciations of his work by other writers. Willeford was an American original, a self-taught writer who lived a vagabond's life in his early years and never lost his renegade streak. Whether he's celebrating John D. MacDonald or reflecting on the hats in his closet, Willeford brings an unbuttoned honesty and an unquenchable sense of black humor to everything he writes. If you only know the Hoke Moseley novels, read this collection and then search out Willeford's two volumes of autobiography and those superb pulp novels (Cockfighter is the best of the bunch). Willeford remains the uncut jewel of American hard-boiled writers. – Bill Ott
350 page hardcover - ISBN 0-939767-34-1 $30
The novel is a case history; a case history of the writer, and it is honestly written, with cunning, and it is drenched with the sweat and tears of the artist. "Artist" is a word seldom seen in The Writer’s Digest. Like the plots of the popular, large circulation magazines, the success stories appearing monthly in WD are almost identical. A housewife, a barber, a dental assistant, tells of early struggles – the aim at a particular market, the bombardment of a certain magazine with story after rejected story until the editor (in desperation) begins to add notes to the rejection slips. By continued plugging, by following every precious suggestion, the novice sells his first story. After that, he sells five out of ten, seven out of ten, and then with his new power secure, he branches out and sells to other, similar magazines. In a way, it is easy: pick the magazine you like, study it, write for it, sell it.
These are the writers who are artists in the same sense that a manufacturer of girdles is an artist. If you order ten girdles, the manufacturer will send you ten. If an editor orders a story 3,000 words long on a young-love theme from a competent craftsman, he knows he will get it. The better the craftsman, the more the editor has to pay, of course. The craftsman receives money, a bit of fame, and he is pointed out in the neighborhood as a writer; as a person who doesn’t have to work for a living. For this money, this fame, this word manufacture, the writer gives up his trade as a barber, dental assistant or housewife. the rest of the essay
Kent Harrington
"Kent Harrington writes with the ghost of Jim Thompson looking over his shoulder. Dia de los Muertos is a brutal punch-in-the-mouth story set in a moral no-man's land. Harrington is one writer who can walk that line. Too bad Sam Peckinpah isn't around anymore to put this one on film."
Dustjacket by Scott Musgrove. 244 page hardcover. ISBN 0-939767-30-9 $30 Signed Copies Available
Dia de los Muertos, Chapter Seven
Hotel Cuauhtemoc -- 8:25 A.M.
The Hotel Cuauhtemoc's wide arcade shaded the rooms against a savage morning sun. The hotel was from another era, when Tijuana was a small desert town.
Across the dirt street were the last few hovels in Tijuana's worst neighborhood, La Cumbre, and beyond that, a thousand miles of empty Sonoran desert. One of the many lizards that lived in the lobby started to move. Like a windup toy, it crossed the red and white tile floor making a horrible, sentient, dragging sound. Oblivious to people, it crept over Calhoun's shoe while he was talking to the desk clerk, its tail slipping back and forth, knocking him in the ankle.
The night clerk had never asked what went on in room twelve. He wasn't going to ask why Calhoun's suit was stained red, either. He pretended there was nothing wrong. Calhoun had his gun out at his side. They used the Cuauhtemoc as a safe house. The clerk would clean the room himself as soon as they left, and it would be ready again in a few hours if they needed it. The clerk had taken to keeping the key in his pocket. He hadn't told his wife about the hundred dollar bills he'd been collecting all summer. She'd asked once who the men were who came from downtown, and he'd said they were old amigos and left it at that.
Read the rest of Chapter Seven
Kent Anderson
"I want
to know if Kent Anderson thinks Hell has a bottom." -- A. A. Attanasio
"The short essays about horses in the first section of the book speak volumes about pain and memory and Vietnam in staccato-like flashbacks that haunted me for days....this guy is so good he's dangerous." -- Jesse Sublett, The Austin Chronicle
With the publication of only two autobiographical novels, Sympathy for the Devil (1987) and Night Dogs (1997), Kent Anderson has claimed his place at the forefront of naturalistic writers of the postwar era. He has brought to both the literary and popular reading publics the most lyrically crafted and agonizingly truthful accounts of both the Vietnam conflict (in Sympathy) and the war that rages on the mean streets of the homefront (in Night Dogs), as confronted by an Army Special Forces sergeant and a beat cop in the Portland, Oregon ghetto.
Liquor, Guns & Ammo brings together a diverse group of Anderson's writings: previously unpublished chapters from both Sympathy and Night Dogs, non-fiction articles on blood sports and blood-thirsty men (cock-fighting, bull-fighting, outlaw motorcycle gangs, soldiers of fortune, right-wing "Christian" militia groups), as well as an award-winning travel piece on Mexico's Copper Canyon, the screenplay Shank, and finally, notes towards a novel-in-progress, the third volume of the trilogy that includes Sympathy for the Devil and Night Dogs.
296 page hardcover. ISBN 0-939767-29-5 $30 Signed Copies Available. To Order
a brief biography of Mr. Anderson
From Liquor, Guns & Ammo, a Night Dogs outtake:
Hanson had agreed to work the day for the Vice Division, arresting prostitutes. He’d done it once before, when he was a rookie, and he’d almost gotten shot.
Vice gave him twenty dollars out of their petty cash fund so he could pay for drinks in bars. But like most of the uniformed guys who worked a day for Vice, he planned to just arrest them on the street. All he had to do was pull alongside the curb when he saw a prostitute and talk to her until they agreed on "an act and a price," and then tell her she was under arrest. There was usually time to take the first prostitute back to the station and do the paperwork on her, then make one more pass down the Avenue for another arrest. After that, word would be out on the street, his cover would be blown, and no one else would talk to him. Then he’d have the rest of the day and night off, with Vice’s twenty bucks to spend however he wanted to. Continue
Kent Anderson and Dennis in front of a store in which you will never find the latter's books remaindered.
Jon A. Jackson
"A fascinating tapestry of time, place, atmosphere, and
character." -Booklist
Go By Go, by Jon A. Jackson. Butte, Montana, in the Year of Our Lord 1917, saw things start to go awry. Events had happened that year in Russia that, if transplanted to American soil, could seriously compromise the financial empires built by Marcus Daly, William Randolph Hearst, Sr., and other Copper Kings of the intermountain West. Frank Little, one of the most volatile I. W. W. (Wobbly) organizers, had come to Butte to preach his brand of social enlightenment to the striking miners, who had spontaneously walked out a month earlier after the catastrophic explosion of the Speculator mine, which killed 162 men. Go By Go is the story of a young Pinkerton agent from "back East" who is thrust upon the violent streets of Butte - a pawn initially kept in the dark with regard to the machinations of even his own immediate supervisors. As he becomes acquainted and engaged with the players on both sides, however, his role is transformed into the most key of all - where a man's life is weighed in the balance, and he is forced to confront the consequences of his actions and non-actions throughout the next four decades, into the era of the McCarthy communist witch-hunts.
278 page hardcover. ISBN 0-939767-31-7
$30 Signed Copies Available. To Order
Jon A. Jackson, Dennis, the Bitterroot, and a stirring rendition of "Fly Me To The Moon"
Go By Go, Chapter One
Butte, Montana -- 1917
"Bee-yoot!" That was how the conductor had shouted the name of the next station, last night as we came over the pass and started our descent into Butte. I was demonstrating it for the benefit of the lone breakfaster in the dining room of the Big Ship.
The Big Ship was a three-storey square brick apartment building, but in those days Butte called it a boarding house. It stood a few blocks from downtown, in Finntown, and I'd rolled in there late in the night, off the Milwaukee Road's "Hiawatha." I guess it was normally chock full of men, mostly miners, but the strike had thinned the guest list. There was only one man in the dining room when I came down and he looked up from his bowl of porridge and sized me up with a low whistle.
"Lemme guess," he said, "yer wid da troupe. You must be da leadin' man."
I laughed and slouched into the nearest chair and lit a cigarette. "What do they call that?" I asked, meaning the goop he was shoveling in his yap.
"Stirabout. It's good fuh ya. It'll stick widja aw day."
"It looks like wet cement," I said. "No offense, but I think I'll pass. Say, what is this 'Bee-yoot' gag?" I explained to the guy where I'd heard it. He laughed.
Mangrove Mama and Other Tropical Tales of Terror
Janwillem Van de Wetering
"A superlative mystery writer." -Time
"Mr. Van de Wetering's policemen are just as likely to marvel at human nature as to shoot it down." -The New York Times
From the pen of the man who is "doing what Simenon might have done if Albert Camus had sublet his skull" (according to literary critic John Leonard), comes a collection of 17 short stories set in the 10 countries where the author has lived. Many are set in tropical climes, (Colombia, Florida, South Africa, New Guinea), while several feature his famed Zen-minded Amsterdam homicide detectives, and several take place in Japan.
289 page hardcover, bound in full Brillianta cloth. Dustjacket design by the author. ISBN 0-939767-23-6 $30
The Green-Haired Suspect, from Mangrove Mama:
Algar was a well behaved boy until he grew into a well behaved man. The process could have taken no other way. His mother, a devout Christian, lost her husband, then lived on his pension, supplementing that meager income by babysitting and scrubbing floors in church. Algar became her little man.
He learned diligently at school, greeted his authorities politely, picked up firewood from the streets, did most of the shopping, and said his prayers before going to bed. He also mowed lawns. His mother included Algar's earnings on her tax forms.
God was Algar's father. Algar showed him his school reports, holding them up against the panes of his attic windows. Algar never failed his exams.
Read the rest of The Green-Haired Suspect
Janwillem Van de Wetering on an obscure Maine reach
Visit a page concerned with the existence of Mr. Van de Wetering.
Purnell Christian & Joe Servello
This large-sized trade paperback graphic short story collection showcases five works by the writer who most easily shoulders the mantle of the late Charles Bukowski - Purnell Christian. Four of the stories are taken from his hilarious hardcover, Modern Physics & Other Tales (Watermark Press, 1991), while one is new to this volume. Well-known illustrator Joe Servello, working as his alter-ego - perhaps alter-id would be more appropriate - "Joe Service," does exquisite, noir justice to Christian's tales of hilarious absurdity in a large, unnamed mid-western city (a thinly fictionalized Wichita, Kansas). Christian's minimalist texts are presented unaltered, and their marriage to Servello's black-humored graphic images outdoes even R. Crumb's Kafka.
112 pages 9 x 12 trade paperback ISBN 0-939767-25-2 $12.95 To Order
The elusive Purnell Christian with the enigmatic Janwillem Van de Wetering at Yuma Territorial Prison
A. A. Attanasio
Attanasio ghost-wrote this modern re-telling of the Iliad for his late friend Robert Henderson, an ex-biker and heroin addict from the Roxbury section of Boston who had cleaned himself up, moved to Hawaii and become a bookseller. Incorporating many incidents from Henderson's life, Silent is a fiercely lyrical novel of illicit love, treachery, and brutal warfare between an outlaw biker gang, the Street Gypsies, and the Mafia. When one of the Gypsies' members, silent, falls in love with Billie, the wife of a Mafia warlord, the stage is set for a hellish ride through Boston's underworld, eluding mob soldiers and wreaking havoc with rival gangs and the law. Silent is the only crime novel by the author the Los Angeles Times has called "a truly amazing, original, towering talent."
Dustjacket by Joe Servello. 296 pages, bound in full Brillianta cloth. ISBN 0-939767-24-4 $30 To Order
Silent, Chapter One:
Wrath darkened Manuel Hellas' face. The men around him - burly, crooked-faced men in expensive suits - fidgeted and looked out nervously toward the dunes and the foaming breakers at the edge of the night sea. But the woman stared back defiantly. In the soft light of the paper lanterns, her hair floated in an upsweep of feathered fire and her skin shone like marble.
"Bee-you-tiful," said Hank Nalone and nudged the thick-shouldered man beside him. "What a squeeze. Manny's wife. He calls her Billie, but that don't sound pretty enough."
Silent ignored him. He kept his full attention on the slenderthroated woman with the bright, layered hair and the clustered gempoints dangling from her small ears. Her posture fascinated him, because she stood casually, with no hint of fear from her bare shoulders down the curved length of her exposed back to where her evening gown shimmered red across her hips and
thighs. Highheels hung from one hand, and she stood barefoot in the sand, legs long and easy. Couldn't she read the violence in Manuel's face? They were too distant for their voices to be heard against the thunder of the breakers, but Manuel's clenched face, open stance and cocked shoulder promised abuse.
A. A. Attanasio, as seen by his brother.
Don Herron
The
first extensive critical appreciation of the life and writing of Charles Willeford
(1919-1988), author of Miami Blues, The Burnt Orange Heresy and Cockfighter.
From his early Depression-era experiences as a teenage hobo, through his twenty-year
enlistment in the Army and Air Force (including his role as a tank commander with Patton's
Third Army, fighting in the Battle of the Bulge), his years of struggle in the paperback
original jungle, to a final triumph with his series of crime novels about Miami homicide
inspector Hoke Moseley, this books tells his story. Don Herron provides the fascinating
background to all of Willeford's nooks, from Proletarian Laughter (1948) through
the fifth Hoke Moseley novel, left unfinished at the time of his death. The stories behind
High Priest of California, Pick-up, Wild Wives, Lust Is a Woman, The Hombre From
Sonora, and Off The Wall are detailed here for the first time. Herron
includes much previously unknown information on "lost" books such as The
Whip Hand, and on the unpublished novels which Willeford turned to for the substance
of the Hoke Moseley series. Lesser-known literary facts of Willeford's forty-year career
are also chronicled; from his assistant-editorship of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery
Magazine, to a twenty-year stint as mystery reviewer for the Miami Herald.
Willeford's other artistic endeavors are treated in depth, including his acting career,
starting with stage plays in the late 1940s, and culminating in a major part in his movie Cockfighter,
directed by Monte Hellman and starring Warren Oates and Harry Dean Stanton. Willeford
features the most complete bibliography of Willeford's work ever assembled, as well as his
longest interview - over one hundred pages of never-before-published conversation with the
author of Miami Blues.
470 page hardcover. ISBN 0-939767-26-0 $30 To Order
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