Crime Fiction Remembers Lou Reed

When Lou Reed died on October 27th, not only did musicians feel the loss, but just about anybody who has fearlessly created since the 1970s. He brought a darker, literary sensibility to rock n’ roll, as he explained in this interview on Night Flight:

It’s no surprise he had a lasting impact on those who write crime fiction.

On the day of his death, Reed Farrel Coleman, author of the Moe Prager series, posted this on facebook:

“Lou Reed taught me a lesson about art, though we never met. It was the mid-70s and I had played the shit out of Transformer and Rock and Roll Animal. I could not stop listening to the latter and thought that I had to go and see Lou Reed live and hear that kickass band of his. Well, when tickets came on sale to see him at what was then the Academy of Music on 14th Street, I got tickets with my friends. The concert was the most disappointing concert I had ever seen and, to this day, is the most disappointing. Lou Reed had completely changed his band. In Steve Hunter’s place was a sax player, not even another guitarist. Reed played almost none of his old music–his own or from the Velvet Undergound. What he did play was all slow tempo and utterly downbeat. Frankly, I hated it, but have thought more about that show than any other concert I have ever been at. I guess in some ways, it is the most memorable show I have ever been at. Art is not always meant to be pleasing to the audience.”

“I discovered Lou Reed as a teenager in a kind of backwards way, through R.E.M.’s covers of Velvet Underground’s ‘Femme Fatale’, ‘Ill Be Your Mirror’, and ‘Pale Blue Eyes’,” said Megan Abbott (Dare Me). “That sent me on a multi-year fixation with Lou Reed and VU–a writer’s dream, those albums, because they evoke whole, shimmering worlds. You listen to those albums and you are transported, in the truest sense. Every time, over the years, that I have listened to those songs, however dark (maybe especially the dark ones), I wanted “in.” His stories always felt true, earned, and beautiful.”

Josh Stallings, author or the Moses McGuire series, came of age during Reed’s rise as a solo artist. “As a teenager, Reed convinced me I could write about the world around me, the junkies and transvestites I knew had a place to be heard. He did for music what Mean Streets did for film. They spoke directly to me and said it was ok to tell the truth.”

Chandler wrote about LA in the ’30s and ’40s; Lou Reed’s territory was the New York of the ’70s and ’80s. The dangerous New York. Any of the people he sung about could have been questioned by Matthew Scudder, Lawerence Block’s private eye from that era. While using the same style and attitude as Chandler, it could be argued his influence had the inverse effect (like many original artists do). While Chandler looked under the the glossy sheen of his city, Reed looked at the damage and decay that littered New York and saw the poetry in it’s dark misfits.

“Lou Reed was the patron saint of freaks and weirdos. The poet laureate of those who walk margins and push boundaries,” said Chris F. Holm, author of The Collector series. Holm’s work is greatly influenced by the books, movies and music of Lou Reed’s era.

“I came to him from punk, following the smoke back through the decades to the folks who lit the spark.” Holms explained. “But discovering Reed’s work wasn’t a history lesson, so much as a revelation. He was more than simply a precursor or progenitor; his songs painted pictures of a world no one else dared sing about — pictures at once beautiful and grotesque, biting and achingly sympathetic. Reed had the rare gift of being able to simultaneously convey affection and contempt, honesty and artifice. His songs taught me how much weight a single phrase can carry. And they taught me there’s no subject matter so dark, something beautiful can’t be made of it.”

Tim Bryant, a Texas musician, publisher and author of the Dutch Curridge PI series, respected his clarity in the bleakness. “Lou became his character and spoke in a clear voice. You didn’t have to read between the lines or guess what he meant. I heard him mention at least once that he was attempting to bring a novelist’s eye to songwriting. I think he very much succeeded. (Only Warren Zevon comes anywhere close to matching him in this regard.) I likewise took his fearlessness, his willingness to look straight into the dark and not blink as a lesson in my fiction writing.”

Scott Adlerberg (Spiders and Flies) said, “He was fearless in what he chose to write his songs about, something to be admired and emulated. You know that he wrote songs he cared about and wanted to write, audience reaction be damned (a good lesson for writers ideally), and he developed the material in a lot of his songs as narratives, with an emphasis on the telling detail. Also, there’s emotion in his songs but not sentimentality, a distinction always to be remembered, I think, when writing.”

“I don’t know if you ever noticed, but Lou never sang. He spoke his lyrics as though they were short stories.” Tom Pitts (Piggyback) commented. “A song like ‘Walk On The Wild Side’ is a great example of encapsulating characters and delivering them with tight poetic verses. But for me, no song /story of his is as great as ‘Street Hassle’. Especially the version on Take No Prisoners. When he talks about dropping the overdose victim in the street, it pulls you right in to a place in time like no other .”

Jon Steele, author of the Angelus series agreed. “‘A Walk On The Wild Side’ is a novel”

Others mentioned their favorite song or record, as well.

“‘The Gift’ is a great horror story.” Liza Lutz said. “I loved Waldo Jeffers, but maybe because he sounded like John Cage. Now I have to listen to that again.”

Todd Robinson (The Hard Bounce) played him while writing, at times. “I wrote the entirety of my short story Peaches listening to Lou Reed and Velvet Underground to get my mind in a specific New York time and place.

“I did the same with my book The Forty-Two,” said Ed Kurtz. “Loads of Lou, especially New York and ‘Set the Twilight Reeling.'”

The person I knew I absolutely had to ask about Lou Reed was musician and hard boiled author Jesse Sublett, whose book Grave Digger Blues has the edges, satire, darkness, and don’t-give-a-damn attitude of Lou Reed’s work.

“For me, writing and music have always been jumbled up together, so from the first pages of the first detective story I ever wrote, Lou Reed was in there. For starters, there’s the alienation thing, where the detective or the criminal or the victim, take your pick, feels outside of the everyday world, like a fugitive or a stalker or the tarnished knight on everybody’s hit list. And for that, you don’t have to be on drugs, or a criminal, you just have to have stumbled out onto the twilight edge of experience. Since Lou died, I’ve heard from a number of people who knew me right after my girlfriend was murdered in 1976, and they remember me playing Lou Reed’s Transformer 24/7. When I was diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer in 1997 and also, one morning after sitting with my dad in the hospital as he was dying and he had morphine hallucinations and said, “The ceiling is on fire, flames shooting out of the wall, and it’s dripping down on your head,” I walked outside, as I have many times in such situations, and the birds are singing and leaves on trees are glowing with chlorophyll, and I’m thinking, Wow, the world is so beautiful. That’s what I mean by the twilight edge of experience. Lou got that so well. If you’ve been there, you understand. I’ve played “Sister Ray” probably 500 times on stage, “Waiting for my Man” even more, and a dozen other songs. Lou’s songs aren’t all about transvestites and shooting drugs any more than Raymond Chandler is about murder and perversion. And by the way, LouReed was a big Raymond Chandler fan, and when I saw Lou saying something about that, then I saw Bryan Ferry say the same thing, I said to myself, I ought to check out this Chandler guy. Goodnight, Lou. Goodnight.”

MP Q&A: JON STEELE

Jon Steele, a former news cameraman, combines the real life turmoil of our world with the fantastical in his Angelus trilogy; the story of a high-end call girl and a British tough guy who find themselves in a war between angels and demons. Mr. Steele will be at BookPeople on June 12th with author Taylor Stevens (The Doll) to discuss writing the modern thriller. We caught up with him on the road to answer a few early questions.

MP: While The Watchers had something of a slow burn build up, since you had to establish the world and its characters, Angel City hits the ground running and never stops, starting with an epic battle in Paris. Do you prefer to dive right in as an author?

JS: The Watchers took its time getting started because of two things: first, I wanted the reader to be transposed to the cathedral town of Lausanne, an almost idyllic town on the shore of Lake Geneva in Switzerland.  Let them settle in, feel comfortable in what appears to be a very charming place.  Second, and more importantly, I wanted the reader to establish an emotional relationship with Harper, Katherine and, especially, Marc Rochat…a brain injured young man who lives in the belfry of Lausanne Cathedral where he calls the hour through the night and imagines his cathedral to be a hiding place for lost angels.  As the characters are introduced in the story, they have no real awareness of each other.  Slowly, as the story unfolds, the reader comes to know that Harper, Katherine and Rochat are trapped in a predestined and murderous fate.  And as the unseen walls of that fate begin to close in on them, and the action begins to build, the reader feels a sense of panic…then, in the end, heartbreak.

Setting out on the trail to Angel City, I open with a prologue that suggests AC is to be another story with a slow build to an action-packed climax, then a calming resolution to the story.  Instead, from the first sentence of chapter one, the reader (through Jay Harper) is dropped headfirst into the middle of a bloody terrorist attack in Paris.  And yes, the action never stops…all the way to the most brutal and unimaginable of cliffhangers, where the reader is left with a sense of, “No!  God, no!”  TW, AC and The Way of Sorrows is one, continuous tale.  The arc of the story and pacing of action is deliberate and follows the path I envisioned before I wrote the first word of the first book.
MP: It was great to see Katherine was still her brassy self even after giving birth. Do you think motherhood has changed her in any way?

JS: I heard from some readers that they thought Katherine somewhat shallow in the The Watchers.  And whenever I heard it, I was pleased.  It’s exactly the impression I wished to suggest.  Katherine, more than any character, is like the rest of us…someone trying to make it through the world as best she can.  And as the story continues over three books, and there needs to be room for her to learn about herself and grow as a human being.  I gave a huge clue as to how Kat’s personality would develop in TW in one scene I loved writing.  As the shadows of evil close in on Lausanne Cathedral, Katherine holds a battered Marc Rochat in her arms to comfort him.  When I wrote the scene, I had Michelangelo’s Pieta in mind; in fact, Katherine holds Marc Rochat in the same manner that Mary held Jesus.  It is a glimpse not only into Katherine’s fate, but her truest self.  She is loving and caring, supremely protective of the helpless bit of life in her arms.  In Angel City, motherhood hasn’t so much changed Katherine as it has brought her closer to an awareness of who she is as a person…and more, her place in the mysterious revelations of The Angelus Trilogy.

MP: As somebody who has a journalism background, what drew you to writing a trilogy that borders on the fantastic?

JS: My twenty-five years as a television news cameraman and writing a story that borders on the fantastic are not exclusive of each other   Trust me, finding yourself in a ditch with bullets flying overhead, or trapped in a truck surrounded by jacked-up Hutu tribesman with machetes who want to cut off your head, is fantastically surreal and murderously real at the same time.  I worked through wars, revolutions, famine and other bringers of mass death.  Each time, each place, it was as if I was working on the frontline of a Good and Evil.  There, I witnessed the slaughter of the innocent and the images haunt me still.  And it was in those places of suffering and death that The Angelus Trilogy was born.

MP: Do you have any influences as a writer?

JS: Top of the pack would be Raymond Chandler.  He wrote literature disguised as detective fiction.  Chandler’s The Long Goodbye, (considered by some to be one of his lesser works, but the book I consider to be his masterpiece) is the well from which I drew the character of Jay Harper in The Angelus Triology.  Next would be the complete works of Robertson Davies, especially The Deptford Trilogy, which I recommend to anyone who wishes to write.  Davies’ mastery of the English language and his ability it to take the reader to another place is beyond compare.  I rate Jack London very much above Hemingway, but I reread both their works often to study their method of description.  And I reread Sam Shepard’s plays and PG Wodehouse’s very funny novels often, to remind myself what good dialogue looks like on a page.  Finally, Phillip K Dick’s Ubik and Neil Gaiman’s American Gods never cease to amaze me.  And though I have only read translations, I often return to Mario Vargas Llosa’s Conversations in the Cathedral and Mikhial Bulgakov’s Mater and Margarita because I love their writing so.  I think I’d better stop, because I could go on till the cows come home.

MP: What makes Harper and Katherine great characters to write?

JS: My writing method is never to write the first sentence of a book till I know the last, then I fill in the middle bit.  Thus, my characters are condemned to a preordained fate from which there is no way of escape.  The characters, however, are free to do and say as they please within the boundaries of their individual fates.  In my mind, writing dialogue is the best part of penning a book because the words seem to spring from the personality of characters, not me.  Sometimes I’m gobsmacked with the words that spill from their mouths.  I’ll stop, reread lines of dialogue and wonder, ‘Where the hell did that come from?’  In truth, all through The Angelus Trilogy, I’m not sure I write about Harper and Katherine (or Marc Rochat, or anyone in the books) at all.  It’s more a process of the characters revealing themselves (and the story) to me through their dialogue.  I’m nothing but the scribe in the shadows, writing down their words as spoken.

MP: Can you say anything about the final installment of the trilogy?

JS: The title is The Way of Sorrows.  The story begins and ends in Jerusalem.  I could tell you more, but then I’d have to shoot you.

MP Review: THE DOLL by TAYLOR STEVENS

Taylor Stevens’ Vanessa Michael Munroe is an informationist, able to obtain the information you need, no matter how clandestine, if the price is right. If you haven’t read about her you’re missing out. Steven’s has a knack for placing her protagonists in plots that challenge their internal conflicts as well as their physical, like no other in the field. Her latest, The Doll, is further proof of her talent.

The book hits the round running when she is kidnapped from the Dallas streets and taken to Croatia. There she is brought before a creepy shadowy white slaver, The Doll Maker, who feels Munroe owes him for something she did in her past and must deliver one of his “dolls”, Neeva, to a client in France. If she doesn’t take the assignment they will torture and kill Logan, her lover whom they have also kidnapped, who runs Capstone, a Black Water type organization

The book skillfully follows two story lines. The main one has Munroe on her road trip with Neeva, that includes many action packed stops as she tries to figure out a way of being in a situation that goes against her principals, and why she was picked to do it in the first place. She uses the gritty side of the European locales to ground the story with skill. We also get the Capstone team in their search for Logan, giving Stevens a broader canvas to work with. Usually regulated to her lone wolf character, she seems to relish sketching out the characters that work as a team. It also allows her to use her sense of humor more often.

That said, as always, it is Munroe who makes these books tick and Stevens pushes her further than ever before. Vanessa has always had the ability to shut down her emotions to do the job with cold professionalism, but here she is given a moral dilemma where she must deal with them. She’s forced to really think about how much Logan means to her, and if loving Logan is right for her. All of this is expressed through action and terse dialogue; like the fantastic discussion Munroe has with Neeva on how to survive.

The Doll builds on a body of works that puts Taylor Stevens in the company of Jeff Abbott, Lee Child, and her hero Robert Ludlum. She knows how to turn a phrase, whether it is Munroe’s actions or speech, entwining her in a well-paced plot that challenges her on all levels. With Vanessa Michael Munroe, Stevens has given us an unpredictable heroine who goes places we never imagined. The only thing you can be sure of, it won’t be boring.

Taylor Stevens will be speaking and signing copies of The Doll on Wednesday June 12th at 7pm at BookPeople. Stevens will be joined by Jon Steele, author of Angel City.