Back to the Badlands: Crime Writing in the USA by
John Williams
pbk out November 06
(Serpent's Tail)
at £8.99
John Williams's Into the Badlands (1991), a book of in-place, in-person
interviews with key American crime-writers, was important for me, not as a
work of revelation (my UK paperback copies of Crumley's The Last Good
Kiss and Hammett by Joe Gores, for instance, are dated 1977 and 1984
respectively) but as a work of confirmation. In 240 indispensable pages, it
confirmed the USA as a hot-bed of intelligent, idiosyncratic crime-writing far
from the ethos of the New York Times best-seller lists. More, I was green with
envy as Williams, rented car at his beck and call, worked his way from Miami
to Louisiana, to New Mexico and Missoula Montana, Boston and Detroit, filling
me in on those places I had missed in my own 3-week (non-criminal)
Greyhound tour in the early 1970s.
I'm still green with envy this time as he works his way from Washington D.C.
to Florida, Austin Texas and West Plains, Missouri (how those place names
flow!). But if I was expecting revelation, or even
confirmation. I was to be largely disappointed. Not even a true second edition,
the book combines just five of the early interviews (with James Lee Burke,
James Crumley, James Ellroy, Gar Anthony Haywood and Elmore Leonard)
with five new ones. That they include excellent interviews with Kem Nunn,
Vicki Hendricks and Daniel Woodrell is most certainly to be applauded
(where, without recourse to the Net, material is rare). That they exclude the
southern California/Seattle of Robert Ferrigno, G.M Ford and, yes, Newton
Thornburg , is perhaps to be wondered at. Meanwhile those interviews
covering George Pelecanos and Kinky Friedman, well-covered in the UK
press recently, give us little more than the always valuable sense of location.
Then, tantalisingly, in the epilogue, we get a glimpse of what might have
been. Williams meets Terrill Lee Lankford, a writer (of 'smart, dark thrillers'),
of whom I would like to hear more, and spends a day in Hollywood with him.
Williams explains in his introduction that 'something baulked' at interviewing
writers younger than himself, and points to the Net as the saviour of those
looking for the new names. Yes. But. Surely there is still a place for the single,
critical intelligence (like Williams himself) to sort the meritorious from the
meretricious, especially when so much of the Net concentrates on the latter.
Sadly, an opportunity missed.
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Back to the Badlands: Crime Writing in the USA by
John Williams
