Mixing with a Master

When you’ve banged on about a fine Southern California writer like John Shannon as many times as I have, you’re bound to find yourself making the same points and/or jokes on occasion. Some editors (you know who you are) worry about such things. Get over it.

For example, I think that first time I delivered this particular line was in The Rap Sheet:

In 1999, some silly bastard wrote: “The hands-down winner in the ‘Where Is the Next Raymond Chandler Coming From?’ sweepstakes--[this honor belongs] to The Cracked Earth, by John Shannon ...”

That silly bastard was me, of course. But was I writing for the august digital journal you’re now reading? Or was it maybe for my own humble blog, or for the Chicago Tribune or the Los Angeles Times, before they became bound at the bum?

No matter. The point is that I’ve reveled ever since in the skills--wit, action, acid humor, heartbreaking characters--on full display in Shannon’s books about Jack Liffey, the aerospace writer turned Los Angeles private detective and finder of lost children. The first few installments of that series (beginning with 1998’s The Concrete River) were Berkley paperback originals of an unusually high literary caliber, which opened my eyes and provoked me to arrange a breakfast interview with the author at the Firehouse restaurant on Main Street in Santa Monica. Out of that exchange evolved the Suicide Club (named after a cycle of Robert Louis Stevenson short stories), whose members met at the Farmers Market in downtown Los Angeles on Saturday mornings, our ranks eventually growing to include Dick Lochte, Richard Brewer, Tom Nolan, Gary Phillips, the late and much-missed Bruce Cook (aka Bruce Alexander), and our most gorgeous member, Twist Phelan.

Now comes the 13th entry in the Liffey series, A Little Too Much, just out from that smart British publisher, Severn House. Here’s some of what Booklist’s Bill Ott had to say about the novel in a starred review:

It starts out as a simple missing-persons case--find a marquee-caliber but notoriously troublesome African-American actor who has disappeared in the middle of a shoot. But soon enough L.A. private investigator Jack Liffey is doing what he always does, trying desperately to help set the world right: “He wished he were three of four different people so he could watch over everything that needed watching over.” Maybe five or six would be good this time, as the watching over includes not only the actor, who is suffering from schizophrenia while trying to find his father, a former ’60s radical turned drug dealer who is also in desperate need of help. Also in jeopardy are Jack’s daughter, Maeve, now a UCLA student; his live-in lover, Gloria, who is undergoing a midlife crisis that has landed her in the bed of a detective friend of Jack’s; and a good-hearted Jamaican who has fallen into the employ of a drug kingpin.

“I’m not much of a detective,” says Jack at one point, “but I keep coming. That’s my virtue ...”

Since my own first piece about Liffey, I have been joined by a ragtag bunch of reviewers in praising Shannon’s work--everyone from Michael Connelly and Kent Anderson to Mike Davis and Clancy Sigal. Shannon was also the first author I knew personally who made the daunting jump from writing paperback originals to being published in hardcover. Other Liffey titles include Palos Verdes Blue, The Devils of Bakersfield, The Dark Streets, City of Strangers, and Terminal Island.

It’s hard not to become fond of somebody like Liffey, whose life has taken some substantial turns since he gave up penning technical manuals, fell into the private-eye game, and began building a new relationship with the daughter separated from him by divorce. “His satisfactions now,” writes Shannon, “lay in disdain and self-control, in his resistance to all the easy compensations that had once sustained him--cigarettes or drugs or drink or even the tough, edgy novels he had once read endlessly and that now seemed to be weirdly leaking back into his world.”

But let’s hear a few words from Jack himself.

About a South American drug-runner named Jhon Orteguaza: “Jhon had been her only child, an accident of religious intoxication from dancing too near a tall, handsome Colombian wrestler.”

About his latest assignment: “It was probably the strangest job that had ever swept Jack Liffey into its orbit, and that was saying a lot. His worries had begun in earnest just after his wife (his live-in womanfriend, to be accurate, though he had begged her many times to marry him) had taken herself off for a while with a lover, his daughter had just about got herself killed by L.A. SWAT as she was so characteristically trying to rescue a crazy armed kid at UCLA, and a Colombian drug-runner’s gang had dropped out of the blue and were running wild in town, shooting, bombing, and maiming so outrageously that they pushed the sexual scandals of a TV preacher right off the news.”

About his daughter: “Maeve came back and hugged her father more reticently than he was used to. He supposed that was just part of the long slow separation of the lander module from the main spacecraft. He knew, in fact, with great pride, that she was a far better human being in many ways than he was.”

And about the Hollywood studio bosses for whom he’s working:

“You probably never heard of it, but there’s this damn book by a guy named Chester Himes called If He Hollers Let Him Go ...”

Jack Liffey let out a slow breath. It was like being told they were making Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man. No sane Hollywood studio would try it. He couldn’t help saying it. “Yeah, I know the book. What were you people thinking? It’s the angriest book about the black American experience that’s ever been written.”

Last year, when Shannon’s On the Nickel was released by Severn House, I declared that it was the finest book he had published. Well, I have to amend that. We have a new champ in A Little Too Much.

Shannon Triumphant

A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned in my review of Gar Anthony Haywood’s Cemetery Road that his fellow Southern California author, John Shannon, has a new Jack Liffey detective novel due out from Britain’s Severn House. That book, On the Nickel, should arrive in stores next month--and it is one of the very best entries in a terrific series.

Booklist had this to say about On the Nickel:

Previous episodes in Shannon’s consistently engaging Jack Liffey series have moved about California, but this time the “finder of lost children” stays put--literally, at least in the beginning, as the trauma of being buried alive in a mudslide (Palos Verdes Blue, 2009) has left him without a voice and unable to use his legs (doctors feel the symptoms have a psychological basis). As in previous episodes, though, Jack’s high-school-age daughter, Maeve, steps in to help her dad (without telling him, of course).

Without giving away too much of Shannon’s great plot, I can say that it involves the search for a runaway 16-year-old, greedy downtown developers, and the conflict between Skid Row habitués who don’t have much money and thugs who haven’t much sympathy.

As usual, Liffey’s relationship with his daughter is a thing of beauty and anxiety--even though, throughout most of this new yarn, he can communicate with her only by the means of laborious printing.

Jack Liffey pointed to WHO CALLED on his master list. “Nothing important, Dad,” Maeve said. “You gotta get over thinking I’m always up to something.” It took him a while to scribble WHEN DID THE POPE STOP WEARING A DRESS?

To explain his new novel’s title, Shannon writes: “L.A.’s Skid Row is known locally as The Nickel because its east-west axis is Fifth Street. It’s a roughly fifty-block area of warehouses, missions, and nondescript brick buildings that in the late afternoon finds itself literally in the shadow of the modern glass-and-steel eighty-story skyline on Bunker Hill half a mile west. The Nickel has the largest concentration of homeless people in the United States: between 8,000 and 11,000 souls live here, many of them scrambling nightly for charity shelters, single-room-occupancy hotels or makeshift tents, plastic lean-tos and refrigerator boxes ...”

You can discover much more about this sad quarter of Southern California’s largest city, and about Liffey and his daughter, by taking a flyer on On the Nickel.

Pumping New Life into Liffey

John Shannon is probably the most underrated and unjustly unread crime-fiction writer in California. I’ve talked about him before on this page, and have mentioned that his publisher, Pegasus Books, unceremoniously dumped him--even though his last novel for Pegasus, Palos Verdes Blue, was one of his best Jack Liffey outings.

Then earlier today, I received the following e-mail message from Shannon, which I’m delighted to reprint here:

Jack Liffey Migrates to a New Publisher!

Poor Jack, I wish he’d settle down. First he starts out at John Brown Books, then Berkley Prime Crime, then Carroll & Graf, then Pegasus--and now, the British/American publisher Severn House. With whom Jack now has a two-book deal.

There was a word for this in Malawi English when I taught in the Peace Corps. When someone was restless or changed domicile a lot, he was called “movious.” Poor movious Jack. So let’s all rush out and buy the next one--an independent mystery bookstore or Amazon may be your best bet--and maybe Jack will stay put for a while.

And just to ice the cake, the next novel, On the Nickel (Jack Liffey No. 12), actually deals with homelessness: At the outset, laid-off aerospace worker Jack Liffey finds himself temporarily mute and wheelchair-bound, and his 18-year-old daughter, Maeve, tries to cheer him up by taking the first steps of a new case for him, to find the missing son of his old friend, Mike Lewis.

Unintentionally, Maeve embroils her father in a simmering fight on L.A.’s Skid Row (known locally as The Nickel because Fifth Street bisects the area). The fight is between the homeless, who desperately cling to the only shelter they know, and developers trying to upgrade the single-room-occupancy hotels into pricey lofts for urban gentrifiers.

Bully-boys for the developers toss Jack and his wheelchair into the hellish night streets of the Nickel. Some of the night denizens steal what they can--his chair, his wallet and watch and shoes, while others end up helping him out.

Eventually a chance encounter with an old girlfriend from the first Jack Liffey novel--The Concrete River [1996]--helps restore his speech and legs. Jack can now repay those who helped him, and everyone is driven to an embattled flophouse: Jack, his current girlfriend, a Latina cop, Maeve, the missing boy and a small group of determined down-and-out Yiddish workers. The bully-boys’ scheme to frighten them away touches off a conflagration that drives them all up to the rooftop for a touch-and-go rescue, as flames eat up through the tarpaper.

Personally, I can’t wait to get my hands on On the Nickel. It is supposed to reach bookstores this coming summer. Severn has also signed up another great mystery writer, Gar Anthony Haywood (All the Lucky Ones Are Dead, Firecracker). Good on you, mates.

The Book You Have to Read: “The Cracked Earth,” by John Shannon

(Editor’s note: This is the 66th installment of our ongoing Friday blog series highlighting great but forgotten books. Picking today’s must-read crime novel is Dick Adler, a regular Rap Sheet contributor and a reviewer for both the Chicago Tribune and The Barnes & Noble Review. He previously wrote in this series about Lawrence Block’s When the Sacred Gin Mill Closes.)

In 1999, some silly bastard wrote: “The hands-down winner in the ‘Where Is the Next Raymond Chandler Coming From?’ sweepstakes--[this honor belongs] to The Cracked Earth, by John Shannon ...” That silly bastard was me, of course, and since then I’ve been joined by a ragtag bunch of reviewers in praising Shannon’s Jack Liffey books, everyone from Michael Connelly and Kent Anderson (whose own 1996 novel, Night Dogs, is another forgotten crime-fiction classic) to Mike Davis and Clancy Sigal. Even Marilyn Stasio of The New York Times has awarded Shannon an accolade or two.

The Cracked Earth was in fact the second novel in the Liffey series, after 1998’s The Concrete River. Both were original Berkley paperbacks of unusually high literary quality, which opened my eyes and caused me to arrange a breakfast interview with Shannon at the Firehouse on Main Street in Santa Monica. Out of that exchange evolved the Suicide Club (named after a cycle of Robert Louis Stevenson short stories), whose members met at the Farmers’ Market in downtown L.A. on Saturday mornings, our ranks growing to include Dick Lochte, Richard Brewer, Tom Nolan, Gary Phillips, the late and much-missed Bruce Cook (aka Bruce Alexander), and our most gorgeous member, Twist Phelan.

Shannon went on to write many more books about Liffey, a former aerospace writer who now works as a Los Angeles private detective specializing in finding lost children. He became the first author I knew of to make the big jump from paperback originals to hardcover. His most recent series installment was this year’s Palos Verdes Blue, preceded by last year’s The Devils of Bakersfield. Other Liffey titles include The Poison Sky, The Orange Curtain, City of Strangers, Terminal Island, and The Dark Streets.

But for me, The Cracked Earth is the book you really should read to get an idea of what an original character Jack Liffey is--and what a fine, mordantly funny writer Shannon is. Jack’s client in this story, referred by a friendly lawyer, is a former movie star justly famed for performances in such screen classics as A Weekend in Palm Springs, in which she lounged in a bathtub while an aging and flustered Cary Grant tried to find her a suitably revealing towel.

“He couldn’t help staring at the woman,” Shannon writes. “‘Yes, I’m Lori Bright. ... I’m shorter than you thought ... And older.’”

“Hell, I’m older than I thought,” Liffey responds, trying to keep his eyes from making an unguided tour or her still-fine form. The detective, who has an active if often bizarre sex life, is hooked: he’ll do anything Lori Bright asks of him.

What she does ask of our man Jack is that he find her daughter, Lee (“fifteen going on twenty-five”), who has disappeared from her expensive boarding school. Was she kidnapped and held for ransom? (Her father is a former ace film director, who’s now doing killer-robot movies.) Has she run off with a serial murderer, or perhaps with her boyfriend, a black football player? And when a ransom note finally appears, why does it have a British phrase in it and demand a measly $50,000?

Shannon is such a good writer, that he can even bring life to the oldest of noir clichés--the burnt-out private eye. Once Liffey had a good job writing technical manuals and a daughter, Maeve (whose part grows as the series progresses). All of that, however, has flown the coop. “His satisfactions now lay in disdain and self-control,” explains Shannon, “in his resistance to all the easy compensations that had once sustained him--cigarettes or drugs or drink or even the tough, edgy novels he had once read endlessly and that now seemed to be weirdly leaking back into his world.”

Pegasus, Shannon’s most recent publisher, has just brought out a handsome trade paperback edition of The Cracked Earth. Get it. Read it. You’ll be glad you did.

Who’s Afraid of Big Bad Jack?

The private eye, at his best, is and always has been a man (or woman) of his times and his world. And you can’t get much more man-of-his-times than John Shannon’s Jack Liffey, who makes his 11th appearance in the just-released novel Palos Verdes Blue.

Me, personally, I think this is one of the finest, most sustained, and boldest detective series to ever be set in Los Angeles--an extended valentine to a battered, tattered City of Angels and its citizens that never fails to entertain and challenge. But imaginative plots, rock-solid writing, living, breathing characters, and an unwavering intelligence and compassion evidently aren’t enough for mystery readers these days.

What more do they want?

Tits? Beheadings? Torture?

Maybe Shannon isn’t quite the man of his times I thought he was, because if there’s one recurring theme in the reviews of his last few books, it’s the nagging mystery that keeps turning up. As a recent Booklist review (starred, of course) so succinctly put it, “With a hero as brainy, compassionate, and conflicted as this, the only real mystery is why these books aren’t bestsellers.”

Even I’m getting a little cranky waving the flag here. My guess is that, in an increasingly polarized cultural and political landscape where opposing political, cultural, and social philosophies are too often endlessly smacked together for simple entertainment value under the guise of “news,” and the “analysis” offered is really just a dumbed down demolition derby, Jack Liffey scares people.

I mean, the United States is a nation in which a large segment of its citizens, if they even care about the news at all, turn on the boob tube to hear the president referred to as “Hitler” by camera-sucking “patriots”; where a beloved commentator publicly hopes the entire country’s economy will crash and burn to prove some dubious political point; and where name-calling and bullying have replaced rational debate. So, a series that dares to ask people to think for themselves, to not jump to conclusions, to look at multiple sides of an issue instead of jumping on the bandwagon du jour--yeah, I guess I can see how that might unsettle people. I guess, for some people, Jack is downright scary.

Which is a laugh. Jack’s probably one of the most soft-spoken and least threatening private eyes around. Not that he’s a wimp, or that he doesn’t display rather amazing resilience at times, but this Los Angeles-based finder of lost children has never met a one-sided argument in his life.

For some readers--particularly those accustomed to having their opinions (and their crime fiction) pre-digested and spoon-fed to them--that can be heady stuff. And possibly a little bewildering.

So maybe it’s simply commercial frustration, but in Palos Verdes Blue Shannon pulls out all the stops. Everything that is wonderful about this series is cranked up a notch here--there are even more memorable characters, even more SoCal weirdness, even more of L.A.’s endless subcultures to explore, even more ideas fleshed out and stamped with a human face. Shannon doesn’t so much offer talking points as thinking points.

As a favor to his ex-wife, Kathy, Jack reluctantly agrees to look for her best friend’s precocious, idealistic teenage daughter. But what at first seems like just another wandering-daughter job soon has the detective bumping up against the spoiled, territorial surfer brats of the swanky Palos Verdes enclave, not to mention cranked-up white supremacists, burnt-out cops, the obscenely rich, and the murky world of illegal immigrants who serve them--including a young Mexican day-laborer who just wants to hang 10. Meanwhile, Jack’s own precocious, idealistic teenage daughter, Maeve, hits another speed bump on her ongoing journey to define herself. That the author is growing impatient (critical acclaim and rave reviews don’t pay the rent) might be guessed by the defiant, almost surreal, and even more audacious than usual, vaguely apocalyptic conclusion with which he wraps things up. But somehow, Shannon manages again to pull it off with his by now trademark wit and compassion.

Scary stuff, indeed.

READ MORE: Click here to enjoy an excerpt from John Shannon’s new novel, Palos Verdes Blue.

Win a Free Copy of “Palos Verdes Blue”

We said, after last week’s contest to win free copies of Jeremy Duns’ new Free Agent, that Rap Sheet followers who missed out on that book could take solace in the fact that another contest was in the offing. And here it is.

Through the generosity of its author, we now have three free signed copies of John Shannon’s new Jack Liffey novel, Palos Verdes Blue, to give away to astute Rap Sheet readers. To enter our competition, all you have to do is correctly answer one simple question:

John Shannon was born in Detroit, but after World War II his family moved to a major seaport neighborhood in Los Angeles. What’s the name of that neighborhood?

If you need a clue, click here or here.

Send your response, along with your mailing address, to: jpwrites@wordcuts.org. And be sure to write “John Shannon Contest” in the subject line.

Submissions will be accepted between now and midnight on this coming Saturday, May 16. The winners will be chosen at random from among the correct entries, and their names announced on this page the following day.

This contest is open to readers from anywhere in the world, not just those living in the United States.

One final thing: Have you won one of The Rap Sheet’s contests within the last six months? Then why don’t you sit this one out, and let others enjoy the spoils.

“L.A. Belongs to John Shannon”

It’s very easy to become enthusiastic about Los Angeles writer John Shannon’s work, and critic Kevin Burton Smith does just that in a review of The Dark Streets, posted earlier today in January Magazine. Smith begins:

What does John Shannon have to do to get some love from book buyers?

Sing on American Idol?

Punch Oprah in the nose?

Start dating Paris Hilton?

He’s going to have to do something, because clearly writing the finest series of detective novels currently set in Los Angeles isn't enough.

These books aren’t merely good reads. That they are, undeniably. But they’re also hard-edged, action-packed, character-driven thrillers that aren’t afraid to entertain. And they're not afraid, either, to be smart. Even better, though, is that Shannon is not afraid to be angry. His novels should be read not just by the huffing, puffing suits-and-ties that pretend to be our leaders, but by every single American with half a clue who has ever despaired about the state of this Union.

You can read the whole energetically composed review here.