Back to the Badlands: Crime Writing in the USA

Citation

Hannabuss, S. (2007), "Back to the Badlands: Crime Writing in the USA", Library Review, Vol. 56 No. 8, pp. 755-757. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242530710818199

Crime writing as a genre that often evokes hard‐boiled American authors like Chandler and Hammett. Yet a lot has happened since, as a look at well‐stock bookshop and library shelves will reveal – Paretsky and Kellerman, Connolly and Coben, Evanovich and Deaver, and many others. Some of the most successful and influential (not always the same thing) practitioners today not only pay homage to them (think of Parker's extensions of Chandler) but they also set their own stories and heroes in the past – James Ellroy in the Los Angeles of the 1950s and some of the books of George Pelecanos. We cannot read novels by Gar Anthony Haywood or Daniel Woodrell without being aware of black social history in the USA.

This inter‐textuality extends to the relationship between such books and films and television: Ang Lee based Ride with the Devil on Woodrell's book Woe to Live On, the bar where William Hurt first saw Kathleen Turner in the film Body Heat still exists and forms part of the backdrop to the noir fiction of Vicki Hendricks, the film LA Confidential took the third of Ellroy's Los Angeles quartet and transformed his life commercially, and Oliver Stone's film Dog Soldiers shaped the early writing of Kem Nunn, who himself served as a marine in Vietnam. Links between books and characters on the one hand and actual places and the actual lives of writers on the other have always been fascinating to readers, and contribute to this inter‐textuality, above all when you visit the actual places.

This is what journalist and musician John Williams did for his book Into the Badlands, which came out in 1991. It was based on a series of visits to places in the USA – Miami, New Orleans, Los Angeles, Montana and Detroit – and a series of interviews with what he calls a generation of post‐Vietnam crime writers there – Carl Hiaasen, James Lee Burke, James Ellroy, Gar Anthony Haywood, James Crumley and Elmore Leonard, respectively. In each case the place is the backdrop to the writing, the interview takes place where the writer lives and works, and Williams reports on the streets and restaurants, music and social tensions there. Part gonzo commentary in the style of Hunter S. Thompson and travel narrative in the style of Jonathan Raban, part interview in the style of Vanity Fair, Williams's book tries to capture what makes these writers write and what they think. The interviews are revealing even if sometimes fragmentary.

Williams was 27 in 1989 when Into the Badlands was published. At 44 he rewrote the book, abridging the original part and adding a substantial section part. It is this new work, Back to the Badlands, that we have here. He has added Washington and George Pelecanos, Hollywood Beach Florida and Vicki Hendricks, Southern California and Kem Nunn, Austin Texas and Kinki Friedmann, and West Plains Missouri and Daniel Woodrell. There is the same mix of travel impressions and author interviews. In his turn, Williams is both looking back at the earlier experience and reflecting on how the writers and the genre have changed over the years, and how the USA itself has changed (something in the postmodern style of Pico Iyer).

On a literary level he argues that, while writers like Updike and Carver and Bellow are what people think of American writers, it is in crime writing that we touch the heart of social and cultural issues there. Like popular television series like Miami Vice, the work of writer‐journalist Carl Hiaasen, for instance, provides a critique of drugs and hypocrisy, and in Skin Tight of the risks of plastic surgery. Private investigator Robicheaux, the creation of James Lee Burke, is, like Chandler's Marlowe, a hero with bad luck as his middle name, cynical and disaffected, but with a deep persistent morality. Many crime writers are political – black politics is a recurring theme in Haywood and Pelecanos, Woodrell's Tomato Red and Give Us A Kiss about the human condition, while Friedman says he wants to get elected to put things right.

Much of their writing started out by being autobiographical. Most of them started writing crime at creative writing classes. Some like James Crumley wants to write his great novel, while others, like Kem Nunn, use writing for film and television as a way of supporting crime writing. Fact and fiction weave in and out in the genre and in the series of encounters Williams has, He raises some good questions about crime fiction – is it and should it be a form of social commentary? does it tell the truth, or entertain, or both (and can it do both)? is it merely formulaic and churned out? and what does it tell us about the USA today?

These are questions we can ask equally well of crime on film and television, and about cross‐overs between crime fiction and true crime. Williams also suggests that crime writing influences the mainstream – Martin Amis praises Elmore Leonard and James Ellroy praises Don DeLillo. Woodrell acknowledges his debt to Mark Twain. Quentin Tarantino's characters discuss cuisine and culture as they load and fire their guns, something we find in the Nick Stefanos novels of Pelecanos. Robert Parker's Spenser actually reads Pelecanos. Elmore Leonard's characters are decent men and women pushed too far, while Ellroy's obsessional characters live lives touched by horror comics. Music matters to most of them, as it does to Williams himself.

This impressionistic rewrite, then, will appeal to crime fiction addicts, above all those who like the postmodern noir style of modern US writers and who like to read the background to the authors, know something of where and how they live, and who also like a travelogue thrown in. A book‐list at the end sums things up bibliographically (many are publications from Serpents Tail and No Exit) and helps collection building, above all for lending libraries and leisure reading. A wider list of crime writers in general, above all for UK readers, can be obtained from the specialist bookshop Murder One in London. Williams refers to his associated website Backtothebadlands.com, but on a visit (November 2006) it proved ephemeral. The paperback itself is flimsy but Williams’ comes across as knowledgeable, plain‐speaking and entertaining. It is also a book readers would like to borrow and buy for themselves.

To purchase reprints of this article please e‐mail: reprints@emeraldinsight.com Or visit our web site for further details: www.emeraldinsight.com/reprints