HOWLS OF AGONY AND CALLS FOR RETRIBUTION

The List is a monthly round-up of music, movies, books, vibes, and oddities. There’s no structure or hierarchy. If you’re new to the to list, this is coming to you from crime novelist IAIN RYAN and he says hello.

1. James Ellroy as Richard Nixon

2. Mark Fisher vs James Ellroy vs David Peace

3. Short remarks about Widow’s Bay

4. Christine Gregory’s Book Launch

5. The Trouble with Men and Publishing

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James Ellroy has a new book out. It’s called Red Sheet. I haven’t read it yet, but apparently Richard Nixon appears as a character. I’m such a Ellroy nerd that I remember him talking about Nixon while promoting the previous novel.

When asked why Nixon is his favourite president, Ellroy made a direct comparison:

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I’ve been reading Ghosts of My Life by Mark Fisher. I knew Fisher had read British neo-noir author David Peace, but I had no idea that an entire chapter of this book is about Peace.

Fisher writes:

Peace has often been compared to James Ellroy –indeed, he called the experience of reading the American crime writer’s White Jazz (1992) his ‘Sex Pistols moment’. But Peace builds upon what Ellroy achieved in the way that the post-punk groups worked in the space that the Pistols had blown open, developing a pulp modernist poetics from Ellroy’s experiments in compression. While Ellroy’s pugilistic prose has a pump-action amphetamine rhythm, Peace’s writing is hypnotic and oneiric; its incantatory repetitions delaying and veiling plot revelations rather than rushing towards resolution. Despite presenting seemingly similar worlds – in which the police are routinely corrupt, journalists are venal and co-optable, and the wealthy are vampiric exploiters – the writers’ political orientations are very different. Ellroy is a Hobbesian conservative, who evinces a macho pragmatism that accepts violence, exploitation and betrayal as inevitable. While the same phenomena are oppressively omnipresent in Peace’s world, there is no sense of acceptance: his novels read like howls of agony and calls for retribution – divine or otherwise.

Fisher is underselling Ellroy here. The analysis of Ellroy’s style feels correct —who wouldn’t want to read pump-action amphetamine crime fiction— and, yes, the story worlds are similar, but Ellroy’s politics are more complicated on the page than Fisher gives him credit. Ellroy’s books are thorough explorations of corruption, with domination arriving from both the left and right. This is easier to spot in his more recent work, but his overarching thesis seems to be that ordinary men and women find themselves ensnared in vast conspiracies (a Hobbesian evil), and need to take dramatic, often-violent action to save themselves.

Meanwhile, everyone in power is unerringly corrupt in Peace’s Red Riding quartet. There’s a suffocating dankess to it. There is no escape. In this way, Peace is much, much darker than Ellroy, despite the prevailing critical opinion to the contrary. For Fisher, it is Ellroy who is casting around in the pitch-black dark1, while Peace represents the howls of agony and calls for retribution.

I guess, but…

In the Red Riding quartet, Peace’s tone is that of the depressive, and in Ghosts of My Life his work is taken up by another depressive. As Fisher himself points out earlier in the book, “The depressive experiences himself as walled off from the lifeworld, so that his own frozen inner life –or inner death– overwhelms everything.” I can’t think of a better description of the Red Riding Quartet.

Not a dis.

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Widow’s Bay is a great compilation tape: beautifully filmed, acted, and scripted. It asks a strange question I think, What if a genre show is not a singular exercise in particular tropes, but an anthology studying all of them in succession?

And I’ve been a bit obsessed with tropes lately.

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I’ll be helping Christine Gregory launch her new book The Informant next week (Thursday 18th) at Readings Carlton, here in Melbourne. I liked Christine’s book a great deal. She has a very clipped, matter-of-fact style (always a plus for me) and her second crime novel really steps into the crime genre more squarely than her debut —which she readily admits started out as a literary story.

We’re both Queensland ex-pats, and we both write about the Queensland coast: she writes about Sunshine Coast (beautiful; where I holiday with my family) and I cover the Goldie, to the south. Both of us are with Ultimo Press, so they have all of south-east Queensland covered for coastal crime fiction. It’s a one-stop shop.

RSVP here if you’d like to come along. It’s free.

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There’s a lot of chatter about men and fiction in recent months, and despite being involved in both pursuits, I have never really entered the fray on this topic. From my vantage point, a lot of the men-can’t-get-published rhetoric seems confined to literary fiction, which is none of my business.

In crime fiction, there are men everywhere. Our biggest sellers are Jane Harper and Chris Hammer. And while the field probably skews toward women, I have not faced a lot of hardship myself.

Where it can be tricky, is in promoting the work, where I’m just not as saleable as many of the women around me. I can’t slip into those book clubs as smoothly, nor provide diversity to awards short-lists (awards are promotion) or festival panels (likewise). This is compounded by the fact that there is virtually no critical apparatus left in crime fiction, only the attribution of success via sales. So these levers of promotion are very important. They’re not totalising —I’ve sold books without them— but they definitely factor into the business of signing authors.

In a recent post, Michael Church zeroed right in on this:

“There’s no conspiracy to drive white men out of publishing; it’s just commercial optimization. And it is absurd to suggest that racial minorities are privileged in publishing across the board, when it is only wealthy and extremely well-connected people in those groups who benefit from publishing’s diversity initiatives. A black American at the median income has the same chance of signing a literary agent as an average white man: clap-ass zero.”

It’s from this:

Commercial optimisation is the key here, I think.

There’s been murmurings of fixing this —no doubt in response to the growing tide of think-pieces— but nothing will change until the money starts to come in behind the sentiment. In short, men have to start selling books again, one way or another. This is not an impossible vibe shift. My fellow dudes can be pretty tenacious in alternative media, for example, and publishers are paying attention to Substack, where all the men are.

There is one very serious hurdle, though.

Short story collections.

This is where I have actual advice for the fellas. I see a lot of upset dudes on my Substack feed who are taking fair (and unfair) shots at the literary establishment, but their evidence of exclusion is a fucking short story collection.

A few years ago, a friend of mine had the highest-selling single-author short story collection in Australia.

It sold about 1,000 copies. That’s the ceiling of commercial success on those things, for everyone.

Meanwhile, Chris Hammer has sold over 1,000,000 copies of his crime novels.

Dudes, I’m not trying to discourage you.

I’m pitching you: JOIN ME!

Buy my books in stores everywhere or here, or on Amazon if you’re overseas.