Snitch World (22 page)

Patrick:
I wanted to ask you about literary versus genre writing, you being known as a noirist. Don’t you think that writing is just writing?

Jim:
Oh yeah. But all genre guys say that. But hardly any writing is Richard Ford.

All:
U-uuuuu.

Jim:
You know, I ain’t got him from square one. I don’t get that guy. Except as a sleep aid.

Patrick:
You know I am expanding the Arcade a bit to have more fiction—hopefully not soporifics—and more noir.

Jim:
You have a lot of noir titles—you have a lot of great books in there.

Patrick:
In the old days of San Francisco, or maybe the medium-old days of San Francisco, the neighborhood around the store was called the hub. And actually, The Green Arcade was the Hub Tavern.

Jim:
No!

Patrick:
Yeah, baby.

Jim:
No wonder the vibes are so good in there.

Patrick:
So maybe the back of the store could be your Noir Hub.

Jim:
You have that urban theme thing going on—

Patrick:
The Noir Hub is the shadow cast by the Urban Studies section.

Jim:
You should be in marketing.

Patrick:
But like I was saying, it is kind of a contradiction saying “writing is writing” and then fencing off this area where the Jim Nisbet books go.

Jim:
Hey, fences were made for jumping. But you should look at the Black Lizard list.

Patrick:
You were a Black Lizard. I really miss the original Black Lizard. Tell me about it, the ye olde days.

Jim:
Barry Gifford curated this collection, brought back a lot of noir superstars, for lack of better term, beginning in the early eighties and it ran until 1990, when it sold out to Random House.

Patrick:
Jim Thompson was the biggie?

Jim:
When Jim Thompson died in the early ’70s, he was totally out of print, except for maybe
The Killer Inside Me
and
Pop. 1280
. As was David Goodis, as was Peter Rabe, as was Dan Marlowe—
The Name of the Game Is Death.
A great novel, just great. And there are a lot of them.
Violent Saturday
, you remember W.L. Heath? These cons show up in this little hick town and try to be inconspicuous for a week while they case the bank. And then they blow the job and kill a pregnant schoolteacher—

Patrick:
I
hate
when that happens. Hey, speaking of school, did you hear they paroled one of the Chowchilla kidnappers?

Jim:
Oh my god, I didn’t think those guys would ever get out.

Patrick:
I think they should have let him out.

Jim:
Was he the kid?

Patrick:
He was the younger brother. The mastermind will most likely never get out. Like my friend Sin Soracco [author of
Low Bite
] once said, “About five percent of those in prison ought to be in prison.”

Jim:
Still, that was an outrage, burying that school bus. And wasn’t it the teacher who escaped through the top of the bus?

Patrick:
No, it was the driver.

Gent:
I’m surprised they never made a movie out if it.

Patrick:
They did, with Karl Malden. But there was a book. Not Richard Ford, who’s the other one?

Jim:
Tom McGuane. [All laugh]

Patrick:
No, the other other one.

Jim:
“McGuane’s the name; writin’s the game.” Yeah, that and real estate.

Patrick:
Hey did you hear McMurtry just had this big sale out thar in Texas at his book town?

Jim:
Is he done? He said he was done.

Gent:
I think he was just reducing his stock.

Patrick:
I wish I could have gone.

Jim:
His store in DC was fabulous. I sat and talked with him. It was very interesting. There was a larger store with a little living room, a couple couches and tables. And then across the street, the door was open, was a little building that had all the art books in it, and the door was open and no one attended it. And he would sit in the living room, surrounded by books, and sort of keep an eye—very casual. And I went in there and said hello to him. Was I published yet? I don’t remember. This woman from England came in and had this list of American novels that some friend of her had recommended that she pick up when she was in America. And it was an amazing list. And Larry McMurtry knew every book on it. Like that guy Steele. He taught creative writing at the University of North Carolina, Max Steele. I never read any of his books, but Larry knew them. McMurtry knew who the guy was and had read the books.

Gent:
And he had all the books in the store?

Jim:
He didn’t have them all. Actually, we got completely
sidetracked talking about poetry—Gary Snyder was on the list. He had
Rip Rap
and
Cold Mountain Poems
in stock—nice clean, used copies. For a tasty price—not too bad. Point is he had ’em.

Patrick:
So what were we talking about?

Jim:
The noir section in the store. So you look at the Black Lizard list and see what’s still in print and you look for the others used and you get this tasty little section going. Curated strictly by quality.

Patrick:
Kayo Books is great—

Jim:
Just great. I went there with Dennis McMillan, the publisher. Dennis found very obscure stuff. Some of the books that are collectible are cheap, like Charles Williams, because no one knows what they are. And there are several black writers that did these tough books.

Patrick:
Gary Phillips is an expert on that.

Jim:
And Dennis McMillan knows all about it.

Patrick:
You seem to know all about the down-and-out world. In
Snitch World
, the main character Klinger gets screwed over—

Jim:
And snitched out. He is very busy screwing himself over.

Patrick:
I like all the San Francisco stuff.

Jim:
We have all been wandering around North Beach drunk in the middle of the night and found these strange places. That local stuff is wonderful because there’s a very interesting thing that happens when you ask, “What is this place really like? I don’t remember how I wound up on this corner.” Well, you got dipped on Broadway, and then they went down to the corner to divide the money. And in
Snitch World
it turned out, or course, that Frankie had lifted the guy’s phone. Which is the real issue. He didn’t give a shit about the money.

Patrick:
Which is this whole world of phones and apps.

Jim:
About which Klinger knows nothing.

Patrick:
There seems to be a digital divide.

Jim:
Not really. Anybody can jump in and anybody can be left out. There are plenty of people who want to be left out. You know, we were talking about print versus tablet media. I have a cabinet shop, for many years, and one of the great things about having a cabinet shop is print catalogs that mean something, that have stuff in them that you actually need and want and buy. And some, like the Granger catalog is something like two thousand pages. It’s a brick.

Patrick:
I’m surprised they still make those.

Jim:
They stopped. Here’s the point. A couple of years went by after they stopped, I get this CD-ROM in the mail. And the assumption is you have a computer that will run the CD-ROM. And then if you wanted to browse the catalog, you’re clicking on the arrow and it’s not like sitting on the head with the Granger catalog, just flipping through it. So then they got rid of the CD-ROM and now they had e-catalogs. It’s all not-do-ably slow. It’s just a drag, no matter how you tart it up. So now, after ten years or so, all of a sudden, they are starting to come back with the catalogs.

Patrick:
From e-books to print!

Jim:
I think there’s a big possibility that the wave has crested and that it is going to recede. And what’s going to be left is independent bookstores and independent presses that know what they are doing. And the big publishers who have hedged their bets while dealing with Mister Bezos. Don’t forget, there was a time when Borders was the elephant of capitalism that was tromping on everybody. And why shouldn’t it happen to Amazon?

Patrick:
Too big to fail.

Jim:
Too big to not fail. So anyway, what does
Snitch World
have to do with this?

Patrick:
Well, you often concern your characters and plot
with technology, and there are some technological similarities between the two books we did together:
A Moment of Doubt
and
Snitch World,
although
A Moment of Doubt
was written in the ’80s and this book is from a year or so ago.

Jim:
A Moment of Doubt
was written in 1982, so thirty years ago. I don’t know where the subject matter comes from. And it’s hard not to read the technology as somewhat adversarial. Like there’s such a thing as being up against Stalin, although you’ll never meet him, and his machine will just crush you, or do whatever it wants to you. You’ll have that
1984
experience or even the Kafkaesque experience, where you don’t understand why it’s happening; you just understand that it is happening. You don’t know who is doing it or why. And technology is a similar thing. In its way, it is a force of history. Tolstoy made this argument, that humans are just helpless in the face of history. That long, insufferable last hundred pages of
War and Peace
. He calls it God, but the previous eleven hundred pages were about Napoleon. It’s like, hey, man, make up your mind! Is it Steve Jobs, or is it technology? And you know Bezos is not in my game. Although he’s fucking with me more than Steve ever did. Steve made my life interesting. I still have three Windows98 PCs that I do CAD and my accounting on. And if can, I have a DOS machine that I do my writing on. And I got reasons for all that stuff. But here’s an iBook right here.

Patrick:
You are a techy nerd. Let’s face it.

Jim:
I know about this stuff to a certain degree, it’s true. I’ve got way better reasons to be acting this way than they’re giving me to act some other way. Except the fact that I’m superannuated, which I am becoming anyway.

Patrick:
The technological aspect in your books is a dialectic.

Jim:
It’s the Other. I don’t approach it that way.

Patrick:
But there’s a process—

Jim:
That implies that they are talking to each another.

Patrick:
That happens, I hear I hear.

Jim:
Klinger’s not talking to it.

Patrick:
But he is determined by it.

Jim:
In spite of the fact that he doesn’t even know what’s happening.

Gent:
Is it appropriate to see the historical lines, like you were talking earlier? Klinger belongs to a world that has ceased to be, but he is still alive.

Patrick:
We are all part of some lost world, San Francisco or otherwise.

Gent:
Like you were talking earlier—

Jim:
Like Harry Bridges—San Francisco used to be a blue-collar town. Try to find a blue collar now.

Gent:
It disappears, but you are still here. I know so many people like that.

Jim:
Gent, I can so totally go down with that. Even a blue-collar criminal can’t make it in this town.

Patrick:
But you point out that a white-collar criminal is insanely successful.

Jim:
And sophisticated. Although the wire guy, the dipper, did okay. I’m speaking from experience. I’ve been dipped, on Broadway. I was carousing on Broadway with Andrei Codrescu, Barry Gifford, and Davia Nelson and was going from Tosca to that joint that was across from Enrico’s for a while.

Gent:
Swiss Louie’s.

Jim:
Nah nah nah, way after that; no one remembers Swiss Louie’s.

Patrick:
The Black Cat.

Jim:
Chat Noir. It lasted a couple years. They were all up there and had a bunch of booze and stuff and I lingered at Tosca over my martini. I still had a full martini and I was loaded and didn’t care about eating. I finished it off and
wandered up Broadway and there were various things that happened, but at some point a very nicely dressed little man came up behind me and brushed by me and said, “Oh, can you tell me how to get to the Ferry Building?” Just like in the book, except there weren’t two of them. I remember the moon rising up over the end of Broadway. I told him how to get there, and he said he had an appointment and he left. I had decided not to eat with my people and I had walked almost back to Columbus toward my truck when the light went on. I wasn’t that fuckin’ loaded. I had on a suit jacket and a sweater and jeans with a horizontal pocket. I went in my pocket and the two hundred bucks less some drinks was gone. Folded just like I always do. I couldn’t believe it. It was good. It was like magic. About a week or so later I was with my friend George Malone, Shanty Malone in the Herb Caen column. He used to own the River Inn in Big Sur. Longtime hustler, con man. A dear friend of mine. And I explained this to him and I asked him what had happened.