Barry Graham: Illusory Flowers in an Empty Sky
Novelist, journalist, poet and Zen teacher from Glasgow, Scotland, now based in Portland, OR, USA
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The French magazine Marianne recently described Larry Fondation as “the Raymond Carver of Roman Noir.” I think the comparison flatters Carver.
Fondation’s new story collection, Martys and Holymen, was published this month. To coincide with that, I republished his earlier collection, Common Criminals, which was first published in 2003 and had been out of print for some years.
There are also stories by Tony Mason and Joe Clifford and an (online only) essay by Tom Piccirilli, who’s recovering from brain cancer. Go get it, and, better yet, subscribe. It’s one of the best magazines out there.
Here’s what super-agent Donald Maas says about the book:
The clear winner for this reviewer is Kelly’s highly engaging historical mystery set in 1917 New York, featuring the crusading and already-famous female attorney and detective Mrs. Grace Humiston, whose derring-do in a case of abduction and white slavery is narrated by her earthy Transylvanian sidekick, an ex-Federal Department of Justice agent known as Kron.
This year’s Spinetingler Awards winners have been announced.
My novel The Wrong Thing was nominated in the Best Novel - Legend category, which was won by Lawrence Block’s A Drop of the Hard Stuff. I’m happy to be in such fine company.
I’m also happy that the award for Best Crime Fiction Publisher went to New Pulp Press, who published Jake Hinkson’s brilliant novel Hell on Church Street, a book that seems to be getting no attention at all.
Congratulations to all the other nominees and winners.
It begins with the narrator trying to rob a morbidly obese man at gunpoint outside a convenience store. They take a short road trip together, and the man tells his would-be captor the story of how he was once a youth minister in Arkansas, and how his obsession with a preacher’s teenage daughter led to a battle to the death with a drug-dealing sheriff and his violent, incestuous hillbilly clan. When the ride ends, the narrator learns the truth about himself - that he is only a normal person pretending to be bad, but that he has met an evil person who pretends to be good.
Steve Shadow Schwartz posted this review of the book on The Poisoned Pen website:
Barry Graham has written another strong and affecting novel. After last summer’s brilliant The Wrong Thing, he is back with a new book that is both short and immensely powerful. This is a love-hate hymn to Phoenix, Arizona and a truly intense story of love and forgiveness. Laura Ponto, an investigator for the public defender’s office in Phoenix is at the prison release of Frank Del Rio, a sexual predator and murderer. When she threatens him and subsequently assaults another person in the course of her work, she loses her job. This brings her into contact with David Regier, a reporter whom she loathes but somehow finds herself becoming involved with. As the story of their respective lives unfurl, to us and to each other, we learn what led them to the relationship they pursue.
The accretion of quotidian detail belies the constant tension that drives the characters and their search for acceptance of themselves and each other. We see the struggle that Frank goes through in trying to control his urges and the response of Laura, whose involvement in Frank’s life is spelled out in a stunning series of scenes. These red-hot words could only be written by Barry Graham as he is someone who has worked these stories and lived these nightmares.
Graham shows us how much can be put into a short novel; his take on Phoenix and all its problems serves as background to a story of breathtaking intensity. As both an ex-professional prize fighter and a Zen monk, his perspective on the moral dilemmas we all face is unique
That love and compassion is the answer seems to be a given. However it is the questions that often seem muddled and inchoate. This engrossing and heartbreaking novel is a must read.
Barry Graham will be at the Poisoned Pen on Tuesday, February 28th. He will discuss and sign his novel. He will also recite, from memory, passages from the book. This a unique talent and a rare treat.
Almost two decades after his death, Melville House has published all five of his “Factory series” or “black novels” in the U.S. Mulholland Books’ website has a remembrance of Raymond by his friend Maxim Jakubowski, and the Los Angeles Times will soon publish a fine essay on Raymond’s life and work by Patrick Millikin.
I ordered his most infamous novel, I Was Dora Suarez, a grotesque masterpiece that is said to have made his editor vomit. I read it when it was first published, but hadn’t read it since then until now, and on re-reading it I was struck not by how shocking it is, but by how innocent, and deeply romantic, it is.
The protagonist of the Factory novels is an unnamed detective sergeant. In this book, he investigates the murder of Dora Suarez, a gentle, wounded prostitute who was dying of A.I.D.S. Along the way to finding her killer, he discovers that a London club has been deliberately infecting prostitutes with H.I.V. so that, having nothing to lose, they would have sex with the club’s wealthy, H.I.V.-infected customers.
The most shocking thing about this is that Raymond does not actually realize how evil people can be, as evidenced by his naive belief that rich people with H.I.V. would only have sex with other infected people, when of course the reality is that many of them would just fuck as usual without concern for whom they might infect. Raymond claimed this was based on fact, but it and other details of the brothel strike me as too folkloric. Also, I was in the U.K. and working as a journalist during this period, and am certain I would have heard about such a thing had it actually happened.
The detective - whose child was murdered by his wife - believes that he loves Dora Suarez, whom he never met while she was alive. Of course he is in love with someone he has imagined, based on his readings of her journal, but it is his romantic yearning for her that drives him to find her killer. The detective might be insane, but he is the sanest person in the world he inhabits.
Raymond’s brilliance seems to have been willed into existence. It is astounding that such a bad writer was able to write so many good books. At its best, his prose is clumsy. More often it is amateurish and packed with cliches. I estimate that at least a quarter of this novel consists of the detective’s threatening colleagues with violence and suspects with prison, repeated so many times that it could be mistaken for a parody by Stewart Home. It could make for a drinking game - take a sip every time the detective repeats a threat and you’ll be drunk long before you finish the novel. True, this is a realistic depiction of police behavior, but it makes for tedious reading.
But there is a sincerity to Raymond’s writing that makes its faults almost irrelevant. While Patrick Millikin was writing his article on Raymond, he remarked to me that he saw some Zen in the detective sergeant. I replied, “There’s a lot of Zen in Raymond’s work. No turning away from suffering, but finding compassion in the most horrific scenarios, and recognizing the unreliability of perspective.” The detective’s rage and compassion violently drag the reader through the meandering prose to a place where truth and beauty and love are not ideals but the only enduring actualities.
One reason that great noir stories endure is that they are truthful. Most books and films are about characters who are extraordinarily normal, and so they are perpetuating a fantasy that the audience buys into, tries to emulate, and fails. The dark, open secret of human life is that few of us are sane, and, as we get to know one another, our pretense of sanity becomes harder to keep up. How many relationships begin with idealization and end with a declaration that the other person or people are crazy? This is the way of romantic relationships, friendships and business relationships.
At the beginning of Good Neighbors, we meet the three leads, played by Scott Speedman, Emily Hampshire and Jay Baruchel, who seem to be competing to see who can overact the most. All three seem like stereotypes, but, as their relationship develops, it turns out that their different masks cover what might be the same madness.
I say “might be,” because we never really find out. I figured who the killer was within ten minutes, and, though things take a different, Jim Thompson-esque, turn, that turn leads to a dead end. Writer and director Jacob Tierney has skill, but he seems uncertain about what to do with it.
Good Neighbors brings to mind another, far superior, Canadian film, Love and Human Remains (1993), which has a story so similar I can’t imagine that it wasn’t an influence. But, for all its inferiority, Good Neighbors has something honest and compelling to say about who we are as opposed to who we think we should be that gives it an eerie, lasting resonance. While I’m reluctant to praise it, I also reluctantly recommend it.
Now Frank is being released on parole, and they both learn that their lives are still intertwined. Their story will end in a place even darker than it began. This shattering noir tale of suspense, sex, violence, love and death in the urban desert of Phoenix, Arizona, has been called “one of the great post-realist novels” by the French magazine Transfuge. It is Barry Graham’s most uncompromising novel to date, and Laura Ponto is his most unforgettable protagonist.
— Elliott Swanson, Booklist
