Family Noir

I will read anything by Ross MacDonald.

He was a US/Canadian citizen by the name of Kenneth Millar who wrote the best Noir Detective stories about The Sins of the Fathers (and Families) that carried through the generations and caused Mayhem and Murder for the next generation or two.

His landscape was California of the Post WWII and the Korean Conflict and the Vietnam War Times. People go to the wars and come back altered and bearing bad fruit that will disturb and molest and deform the next generation. The Beauty of California countryside will always slide into ranging and out of control fires and mudslides inland and rip tides along the coast. Beauty hides the motives of a Harsh Mistress of Nature, both natural and human.

The plots of the novels are as convoluted as are the motives and anxieties of the characters. The characters are not the most introspective or self aware people, the hero detective, Lew Archer, supplies that in "Spades". The characters are bewildered by the supposed Good Fortune of California, because that Fortune goes Bad for them because of their deals with the Devil of American Prosperity and Pursuit of Happiness.

I've just finished re-reading all the novels. And now I wish I could do it again. When I read other detective fiction, it all goes flat and stale for me. No one else has Mr. MacDonald's terse yet poetically precise turn of phrase to describe his characters and their dilemmas. No one else can bring the Horror of bad actions and motives in a Family and make them so tragic and appalling. Everyone else thinks that they just have to describe the bad acts (child molestation, abuse) in details to catch their readers. Mr. MacDonald doesn't do that, he describes the consequences and there are no rampaging and fake serial killers who kill for a spree and who are geniuses begging for some appreciation of their talents. Mr. MacDonald's characters are people who are silly and stupid and naive and unknowing. The Kill is a moment of panic and desperation or a moment of Temporary Madness and the rest of their lives are the Big Cover-up for that Sin.

Is there any detective novelist today who has this depth? I haven't been able to find one. Let me know if you have.

I want to read Good Trash Detective Novels that remind me of Greek Tragedy. I want a detective novel that is close to me, not some fantastic S&M dream of some great human hunt.

Why Examine Life?

Full Service by Scotty Bowers with Lionel Friedberg

Mr. Bowers was a happy-go-lucky Marine freshly discharged after World War II which he spent in the Pacific when he got a job at a Gas Station in Hollywood. Back then, Gas Stations were full service where attendants pumped the gas, checked the oil, checked the fluids, and washed the windshield of nasty bug bodies. The Gas Station attendants met and served all kinds of people who had cars.

Mr. Bowers went from one service (of cars) to another (of people). He pumped the patrons, male or female, and somehow kept from catching any of those nasty STD bugs. Mr. Bowers got the side eye of "you got some time and the inclination?" look from a middle aged man who looked familiar and for a twenty buck tip, Mr. Bowers looked under the hood of Walter Pidgeon. Mr. Bowers used his day job as a gas station attendant to make extra money tricking and pimping for the people (mostly Hollywood types) who came by the Gas Station. Mr. Bowers had a lot of good looking Marine buddies who needed the extra money too.

Mr. Pidgeon preferred to perform fellatio on his partner and be the Top. Mr. Bowers should have just published a spread sheet on the sexual mores and preferences of the Old Hollywood Stars. That and a brief tally of Mr. Bowers' life (he is eighty nine now) is what this book consists of.

Mr. Bowers assures the reader that he was a happy hooker who liked to make people happy when he hooked and pimped. That was all there was to it. Mr. Bowers later moved on from the Gas Station because it did limit his outside activities, to catering and bar-tending where he could get closer and more intimate (in their houses) with his customers.

That maybe what Mr. Bowers lulls himself to sleep with every night, but his life story tells the tale of Mr. Bowers' sexual molestation by his best friend's father at the age of seven. Later when his parents divorced, Mr. Bowers never mentions his father again, and earned extra money for his mother and his sister and brother by selling newspapers and shoeshines and himself through elementary, middle, and high school in Chicago. Mr. Bowers did not just fall into pimping and hooking in Hollywood, he had been doing it  since the age of seven. Hollywood just gave him celebrities to trick.

Mr. Bowers assures the reader that he is a happy man and content in his lifestyle, and he doesn't appear to be a man of much introspection. If he were, he would have considered the implications of his childhood or the lack thereof much more closely on his later life. But Mr. Bower assures the reader that his lifestyle was just in his genes or jeans.

Southern Musings

Imperial

by William T. Vollman

I really didn't read this book, I looked at the pictures. Mr. Vollman has a companion book, Imperial, that tells about the history of the Imperial Valley in California and Mexico. I've got a request in at the library for that one.

The Imperial Valley is an area in southern California and northern Baja Mexico that includes the border between the two nations and the Salton Sea and Colorado River. I don't know anything about the area but what I can see in the pictures that Mr. Vollman took and placed in this book.

Looking at the pictures, this is an agricultural area with some manufacturing gone very wrong areas (high lead contamination from an abandoned lead smelting facility and polluted waterways and canals). It is a poor area (people and environment) and contains the corrugated tin sided nightclubs and lap dancers and strippers and beer options along dusty roads that provide poor entertainment for the poor.

The people are mainly descended from native Americans (on both sides of the border) and there are some Anglo farmers and eccentrics. As an aside, I have to say that most of the Mexicans and Mexican-Americans that I know are of Lebanese descent, so there is that qualification when I use the term "Mexican". Am I making any sense---nah, I don't think so either.

The pictures are in black and white and some are sepia tinted. Mr. Vollman takes the viewer directly into the Imperial Valley with his photos. He has no captions below the pictures and explains nothing. He lets the viewer just look and draw her own conclusions.

There are two essays by Mr. Vollman in the back of the book. One is babble worthy of Aleister Crowley about taking photographs and what they represent. Skip it. Mr. Vollman was high when he wrote it and it was a talkative, dis-associative high. Just like one of those endless and fruitless marijuana high discussions about the meaning of Plato. Yeah, Doobie Socrates.

The second essay is labeled Technical Notes and discusses camera lens apertures and film and photo development. I know nothing about the subject and really don't care to know about it, but this was interesting to me. I still don't know the difference between 35mm or 270mm and a Kodack or Wisner camera, but I did find that Mr. Vollman's technical discussion gave me an idea of the photographer and what he valued and what he wanted to capture when he took his pictures. It gave me a better understanding and a viewpoint for his pictures.

There are also very brief and non-discursive photo captions in the back of the book. They were very informative for me, because when I was looking at a picture of a corrugated tin fence (corrugated tin is the main building block in this valley) with a tire placed high on the wall, I thought that it was the playground for some sort of ball game. Get the ball in the tire. When I finally read Mr. Vollman's caption, I found out that the wall was a border fence and that the tire was placed to aid the climber to get over the fence to the other side. That is a different sort of ball game scoring and refereeing and is much more crucial for the players and the spectator (me).