In 2006, my hometown of Ipswich was catapulted into the global media by a serial killer preying on the working girls of the red light district. In 2011, Ipswich Zero 6 was published, a personal and factual mix of real-life documentation, poetry, filmscape and scintillating records of conversations with the police, the media and the girls themselves.

Ipswich Zero 6 was born out of Ray Hollingsworth’s original idea for a screenplay–part fact, part fiction–set in the Ipswich underworld. For accuracy, Ray spoke with the women and, from the excerpts in his book, they were honest and willing to talk, and didn’t seem to mind that Ray was basing his writings on them.

I read Ipswich Zero 6, along with Ray’s previous book of poetry (Dirty Blonde at the Cash Machine) and although I’d followed the tragedy on the news when it was happening, I discovered a lot more from the book and my subsequent conversations with Ray. It portrays these women as human beings, not simply prostitutes. The book goes straight to the heart of the story, beginning with the realisation that girls were going missing, some of whom Ray had gotten to know on a personal level. It narrates how Ray, at one point a low-key suspect, offered his help to the police as, from his research and subsequent friendship with them, he now knew these people and the area very well, and becoming almost a regular on Sky News as an on-the-scene correspondent.

Interestingly, the book is broken up into 6 parts. ‘Mediascape’, a general background as to what was happening in and around Ipswich in December 2006, Ray’s interviews and correspondence with the media, the arrests that were made and the subsequent charges brought against Steve Wright. The second part, ‘Voices’, includes conversations with the girls, mostly between the summer of 2005 and spring 2006; a collection of interviews which are sometimes humorous, some frightening, some touching but each brutally honest about the lifestyle these girls have chosen. The ‘Soundscape’ section is an eclectic mix of thoughts and poetry set against a backdrop of audio, which one must imagine and embrace when reading this part of the book. For example, the sounds range from an amusement arcade and police sirens to heart monitors in a hospital. ‘Poetics’ was written between the summer of 2005 through to 2007–a collection of poetry, again, very honest and beautifully written.

‘Soundscape’ is probably the section that captured me most of all. At Ray’s own admission, the idea for the film was born out of a failed relationship that made him turn to the twilight underworld of Ipswich, a deliberate form of escapism on his part, and one that he described as becoming almost an addiction. It is very clear at this stage that the line between the film and reality blurred somewhat, and it is hard to tell at points which is real and which is the fantasy. This however, makes reading all the more compelling. The final instalment of the book, ‘Reflections’, is just that: reflecting. Ray’s ideas on how some of the lives of these women could have been saved are especially poignant.

I met with Ray a few weeks after reading the book. For authenticity and to set the scene, we arranged to meet outside the convicted killer’s former home. Steve Wright’s old house is in the heart of what was the Ipswich red light district. It is now, I’m assured, defunct. Ray’s interest in crime scenes was apparent immediately, as he asked me if I would like to look behind the house, the car park area, which had been cordoned off on his previous visits around the time of the murders. As we surveyed the area and discussed what Ipswich was like at that time, Ray talked animatedly about his involvement with the girls. He was very much a friend to them, at a point in his life where I deduced he also needed a friend. Some of them stayed at his home, although never for longer than about eight hours, he pointed out, as this was when their drugs would begin to wear off and they would need to hunt again. Sometimes he looked after them in an almost fatherly way, washing their hair, feeding them and sometimes there was sex. Although Ray freely admitted to having sexual relations with the women, I got the impression this was not first on his list of priorities. These women were people first in his eyes, prostitutes to him almost as an afterthought.

Ipswich Zero 6, like all of Ray’s previous five books, is self-published. Prior to our interview, I read that Ray received one rejection and never tried again. As somebody who kept battering at the publisher’s doors for almost ten years before my work was accepted, this difference of opinion interested me. I asked Ray why he had not pursued more publishing houses. His answer was that he “doesn’t like the publishing industry”. As Ray is more centred towards poetry, he confessed that he found the British poetry industry rather political and, as his work is quite edgy, he felt he wouldn’t stand a chance at getting his foot in the door and being accepted. Rather than waste time, he simply published his works himself, which I found refreshingly honest and true to oneself. I also asked Ray if he had to seek permission for the use of the content in Ipswich Zero 6 or whether he had a free reign on it. He didn’t know, and didn’t much care!

As we spoke, I discovered that Ray has a passion for crime scenes, in particular those that are unsolved, or where a miscarriage of justice has occurred. He told me of extensive research that he has done on the case of Madeleine McCann and Jeremy Bamber among others. We discussed theories and case points in great detail covering a lot of subjects, most of which Ray still has a hand in.

What impressed me most is Ray’s drive and determination. If he wants something, he goes after it with a vengeance. After completing Dirty Blonde at the Cash Machine, for example, he was in London with a friend, when he saw a woman walk past and knew instantly she was the model that he wanted to portray the ‘blonde’ in his book. He followed her, waiting whilst she went into MacDonald’s and when she emerged, he approached her, telling her that he had followed her and explaining his interest in her. Some young women would have run at this point, but Ray has a direct, honest way of speaking, getting straight to the point and posing no threat whatsoever. This lady, Julie Patterson, was the model featured in the photo shoots for Dirty Blonde. Another example of Ray’s persistence is his marketing of his book. By telephoning Waterstone’s himself and delivering stock, he succeeded in having the major book retailer stock Ipswich Zero 6.

There are many adjectives that one could use to describe Ray and his slightly off key-style of existing both in life and in his words: crazy fool, fearless, determined, passionate, admirable. Take your pick. My conclusion is that more of us might learn to live like him.

Further Resources:

• Interview with Ray Hollingsworth for the BBC

Crossing into similar territory to Cormac McCarthy’s No Country For Old Men, The Terror of Living offers more than just plot twists and cliff-hangers–although there plenty of those. It also explores the lengths that people will go to when thrust into unfamiliar circumstances, and the unlikely heroism that can emerge from pain and suffering. If it’s starting to sound more like a literary novel than a genre thriller, that’s no coincidence–The Terror of Living is one of those rare books that transcends its genre with every page. Stephen King recently called it “one of those books you start at one in the afternoon and put down, winded, after midnight”.

Its author isn’t exactly what you’d expect, either. For a young man who’s written about organized crime, shootouts and extreme physical torture, Urban Waite is surprisingly laid back and amiable. You’d never guess that his calm, smiling exterior hides the gloomy depths that he sometimes reveals on the page. Currently living in Seattle, the setting for The Terror of Living, Waite has given the city–and the entire Pacific Northwest–a new voice for its dark places and hidden secrets.

Given that The Terror of Living is your debut, can you tell us a little about how you got to this point? What path led you to publication?

For about a third of my life I’ve been working to become a writer. I never thought it would turn out the way it has. I never thought I’d have a novel, or even a job that centred on putting words to paper. It was always just a hope, a sort of dream to aspire to. For the most part I really did think that my life would continue the way it had for so many years, working nights to pay my mortgage, while keeping up my hobby of writing during the day.

A few years ago that all changed. I’d been out of school for several years when things just started to click. The stories I wrote before heading off to work were starting to get picked up in small literary publications. As a result I started receiving summer fellowships, grants, and residencies, while the publications started to become larger and larger. All this attention soon led me to an agent. And while I was still so engrossed in publishing stories, I didn’t see that the opportunity to write a book had simply appeared as if from nowhere.

Perhaps that’s just how blinded I was at the time, not even able to see that everything I had been doing, publishing short stories, taking these fellowships and residencies, had led me to the perfect place. Where everything I needed to strike out, as an author, was right there in front of me. I never thought I’d publish a novel. The idea seemed too bold, but there it was in front of me, an opportunity to do just that.

Did you set out to write a crime thriller when you started The Terror of Living? Or did the characters lead you in that direction?

I started out with the character of Phil Hunt. At the time there was a lot I didn’t know about him that I wanted to know, while also there was a lot that I knew already. He was an ex con, released twenty years before, and in those twenty years he’d never really forgiven himself for the crimes he committed. In this way, as I was writing out his first few scenes, I was very much interested in trying to understand why a man like him was working such a ruinous living in order to get by.

Part of what I loved about writing Terror, was that as I went on I began to understand the characters better, the situations they inhabited and the circumstances that had brought them there. They opened up for me, revealing more and more as the pages went by. In this way, and with characters like these, I found much of what I was writing about did have to do with crime. Though I certainly didn’t intend to write a crime thriller, the characters began to lead me in that direction. The truth of it was that as I got deeper into the novel, the more I enjoyed what I was writing.

I know The Terror of Living has been published in several countries, and some seem to treat it as a genre crime novel, while others have given it a more literary treatment. How do you feel about the industry’s need to divide their ‘product’ into genres like this? Is there a point when a crime novel becomes so good that it transcends its genre, and becomes a literary work?

I really try not to pay much attention to things like this. I don’t really care all that much if my novels are placed in the genre category or the literary category. All I care about is if people will read them and, if they do, what their reactions to my work will be. I put my all into everything I do and I hope that comes across whether I’m waiting tables, writing books, or building a deck. Good writing is just good writing and it doesn’t matter what genre it comes in.

The title strikes me as interesting too. It perfectly conveys the thriller elements of the story, but at the same time it avoids the clichés, nursery rhymes and cheap puns of most crime fiction. Was this a conscious decision on your part?

Thanks for the compliment about the title. Sometimes I love it; sometimes I think I just went overboard. I don’t mean to throw myself under the bus here, but I also want to tell you that it was a very tough decision to go ahead with The Terror of Living as the title. At the time I had about 320 pages or so and I needed to present the manuscript to my agent. I didn’t have a title and I didn’t want to send him a nameless manuscript. While I felt the story and the characters within were well polished, I also felt I needed to present the novel in as finished a way as I possibly could.

The title, The Terror of Living, was a mix of a few things. It needed, at least for me, to be something that would link all the characters within. It needed to be strong and to infer the inherent danger of the lifestyles I was trying to convey. It also needed to be something that would catch the attention of a prospective reader, as the novel sat facing out at them from the shelf.

It was about a week or so before I was due to present the manuscript to my agent when by chance I happened to go to a poetry lecture. I was sitting in the audience listening as the speaker began to talk about the pain of the terminally ill, especially those that would die young. I listened, hanging on every word, wondering what I might have done in a similar situation. How I would react if someone were to tell me something like this, to give me the news that I would die of a disease that could not be averted. This moment haunted me for a time, and though I don’t like to dwell on it too much, it certainly stuck with me. Of course the thought that we all die is always there, it was the suddenness of that lecture and the ideas it stirred in me which truly led me to my title. Every character in The Terror of Living was running from that same inevitable problem. One we simply cannot outrun.

I want to ask you about your influences, as it seems that they’d be an unusual mix for someone who’s been published as a genre writer, but I don’t want to resort to the typical “which writers influenced you” question. So… which five people would you want to invite to a dinner party? Living or dead, writers or otherwise, the choice is yours.

I feel like I’m going to disappoint you on this one. I doubt very much there would be a single writer at this dinner party. The people I write about are not writers but people who usually are working some sort of blue-collar job, living pay check to pay check. Those are the types of people who influence what I write. And while I certainly learn a great deal from the books I read, I learn so much more from sitting back and having a conversation with someone about a subject I know nothing about.

I know you’ve been touring a lot with The Terror of Living. How daunting is this for a debut novelist? And how relevant is it in this age of blogging and online interviews?

Most of the promotional process I really don’t understand. There are authors who live for this sort of thing, for touring and shaking hands and telling jokes. Sometimes I wonder if those guys, the ones that almost seem like politicians, are even in the business of writing.

I guess what I mean to say is that I’m no socialite. I like having a beer every once in a while or telling some stories, but the whole business side of things is something I never even considered when writing Terror. The months leading up to publication and the touring that followed seemed more to me like work than anything I’d ever done before. It put me outside of what I was interested in, which in my case was writing.

I don’t mean to be so blunt about the business, but I do think that writers are artists and making art a commodity becomes tricky. It’s the reason why people like me have agents and publicists and people who know what they’re doing. Whose jobs centre on helping bungling shut-ins like myself get back to doing what we love.

To make a long answer short here, I don’t have a clue what I’m doing when it comes to touring, or blogging, or interviewing. I just try to make it up as I go along, and in that way it’s somewhat like writing. I’m just trying to make it up as I go, all the while hoping it all turns out okay.

Any crazy stories from your time on the road, promoting the book? Or has it all been cheap hotel rooms and early nights?

In Boston I worked in a restaurant waiting tables. I did it for five years and a few months after I left the restaurant went under. All of those people I worked with lost their jobs and a lot of them moved, some to other restaurants, some went back to school, or others still decided to go on and move into something else. Now, in every city I turn up in, there is an old friend I used to work with waiting to take me out for drinks, show me the city, and catch up.

A lot of them can’t believe this is what I do for a living now. Writing was always kind of a hobby, it was something I did with my alone time before I went to work. It wasn’t exactly who I was. I’d say it would be hard to define me by it. And so when I go to these cities on tour, I do my reading, I talk about books for a little, then I get back to life as I know it. A life where there aren’t readings or book discussions. There’s just a few old friends, a few drinks, and maybe some food. Pretty simple, but it seems to work out every time.

Real-life drug-busting narc Sonny Grosso was the inspiration for The French Connection, advised Coppola on The Godfather and cruised gay bars with Pacino. Story by Tina Bexson

A dozen or so shiny, black suits and their flashy women were enjoying the exotic floor show of Manhattan’s Copacabana nightclub, whilst the slick-haired man at the head of the table splashed the cash around. It was a sight that would change the lives of the two off-duty NYPD narcotics agents quietly sipping their drinks and surveying the scene from the terrace above.

The man with the dough was Pasquele “Patsy” Fuega, a major player in a Mafia-linked New York drugs ring. “I recognised a lot of the others as being dope pushers up in Harlem,” Detective Sonny Grosso recalls. “I told Egan and he wanted to put a tail of the Patsy at the end of the night.”

So Grosoo and partner Eddie Egan tailed Patsy and his bouffant blonde as they drove off on a stop-start tour of the Lower East Side, before heading across the East River and drawing up in front of a Brooklyn diner at 5am. Suspicion was aroused and they set up round-the-clock surveillance and wiretaps. That was just the beginning. During the next four months they uncovered an operation that had 50kg of heroin being smuggled from France to New York every six weeks for a quarter of a century.

The investigation culminated in one of the biggest drug hauls in American history, worth a mega ¢32m, all thanks to a chance encounter in a nightclub in 1961.

Shoot forward ten years, and chance changes Sonny Grosso’s life again. Up-and-coming filmmaker Phil D’Antoni and maverick director William Friedkin decide to turn the case into a film, The French Connection, based on Robin Moore’s factual book of the same name, and starring Gene Hackman and Roy Scheider as Egan and Grosso (renamed Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle and Buddy “Cloudy” Russo). Once released it became a worldwide box-office hit, winning five Oscars and beating A Clockwork Orange and The Last Picture Show for best film. It had it all: realistic locations, spontaneous camerawork, an unromantic portrayal of policing, and unbeatably pacey action. All of which proved ot be a major catalyst in the revival of the cop genre in the ‘70s, evident in movies such as Serpico and Dirty Harry.

The French Connection’s authenticity was down to advice from the experts. Friedkin immediately hired Egan (who died of cancer in 1995) and Grosso. Not only were they the film’s inspiration – both played small roles – but proved unbeatable technical advisors and location scouts. In fact, they were cinema’s first cop consultants, earning $150 each for working every day of the 60-day shoot as well as continuing 12-hour nightly shifts with the NYPD.

It wa the weeks in pre-production that helped dictate the raw undertones of Friedkin’s feature. Not only did Grosso and Egan grow up in East Harlem, it was also their beat, they knew the score. And in the weeks leading up to the shoot, Hackman, Scheider and Friedkin were taken on a journey they would never forget.

Grosso: “We let them run through the whole gambit with us: the investigations, arrests, even the paperwork and court appearances so they could see us testify. In the beginning they were all shocked by what they saw.

“The first time we hit a shooting gallery it was on 110th Street and 5th Avenue, that’s Harlem. There were about 20 people shooting p. One was a massive woman, about 260 pounds, with a tube around her arm and the needle still jabbed in a vein.

“They came with us when we hit the bars and interrogated people. No one knew they were actors and we let them question the dealers and addicts so they got to feel comfortable dealing with them as though they were policemen. That’s why the movie stands up so well, they’d done it for real.”

In one of two Harlem bar scenes, the extras were all cops posing as drug addicts and pushers. In the other, they were all off the street. “They were people Eddie and I had busted at one time or another. We went to see them at some centre where they were trying to re-habilitate themselves and when we asked if they wanted to be in the movie, they all jumped at the chance. It was that which gave it a real wild smell.”

There were a couple of gun-running scenes, so Grosso and Egan taught them exactly how to hold and fire the weapons during sessions at the police firing range. “They both used our guns in the film, too. Scheider also wore my watch and ring so he felt really comfortable. He wanted my shorts, but I wouldn’t let him have those.”

Scheider was, of course, an excellent choice to play Grosso – same build and colouration; and he hit the right note as the careful detective known for seeing the dark side to situations, hence the nickname “Cloudy” (given to him by Egan). Grosso was the perfect antidote to the flamboyant, risk-taking Egan who mastered disguises such as a hot dog vendor, a deaf mute and a priest. He was nicknamed “Popeye” for his constant “popeying” around Manhattan’s drinking holes. As Grosso says: “He was a real character, way out there, and a great cop.”

Egan’s idiosyncrasies are marked out early in the film. His bizarre method of confusing suspects during interrogation by asking them whether they “picked their feet in Poughkeepsie” is used in the scene when Hackman, dressed as Father Christmas, questions a young guy he and Scheider had chased through the streets. Grosso, having witnessed this so often during the ten years they worked together, hoped Friedkin wouldn’t use it. But he did. “Friedkin loved it. So did Hollywood. They lapped it up, so did the public,” he groans.

Hackman didn’t lap it up, however. Grosso: “Hackman got all disturbed the first time he saw us arrest and lock up a guy. He kept saying, ‘I’m not a copy, I shouldn’t be involved in this.’ Then, when we took the guy to court, he couldn’t wait to get him a hot dog when he was hungry, but Eddie was having none of it. I tried to explain that we had to arrest and bring to court 30 people a month, and bring in another 130 for questioning. If we bought everyone a hot dog, we’d be broke. About three weeks later, he saw the same guy in another shooting gallery. Then he started to get the idea.”

Hackman was far from ecstatic about portraying such an unconventional and sometimes prejudiced cop, and became increasingly irritated by Egan’s Irish “charm”, recalls Grosso: “Eddie was always teasing and chastising Gene. I think Gene had a bit of a problem with the character at the beginning. But as time went on I think he found that there were many similarities between them. When I saw the final cut I was amazed how much Hackman had become Eddie. It gives you the respect you have to have for actors who, with the proper research and direction, actually become the people they play, such as De Niro in Raging Bull.”

It was a great true-life story for the big screen, but the mechanics of filmmaking meant artistic licence was employed to ensure optimum visual effect. The famous scene where Hackman chases an L train was based on an actual chase in which Egan and Grosso tried ot keep ahead of a subway train between Penn Station and Grand Central so they could catch the drug-dealing Frenchman as he got off. To make it more visual, D’Antoni and Friedkin got Hackman to chase an L train which ran above ground along an elevated railway line. A kamikaze stuntman drove the car, driving flat out whilst weaving through the traffic to keep up with the train. The inspired filmic version of this event makes a great action sequence and culminates with Hackman shooting the unarmed Frenchman in the back. Then there’s the ominous and frenzied climactic shoot-out, giving a suitably ambiguous ending to the complicated tale.

Grosso’s new vocation as technical advisor didn’t end here. While Friedkin was completing the final shoot of The French Connection on Wards Island, Francis Ford Coppola was preparing to shoot the interior scenes for The Godfather nearby. Friedkin took Grosso over to meet Coppola. “Friedkin told Coppola that he couldn’t make a movie in New York without ‘Grosso and his gorillas’, so I was hired on the spot. I found locations, showed them how to search, hammered the crowds, drove cars and provided 75 cops as extras as well as members of my family for the wedding scene.”

Grosso made two small appearances in The Godfather as Phil, one of Captain McClusky’s (Sterling Hayden) cops. The first was outside the hospital when McCluskey orders him to lock up Michael (Pacino) and he says: “Give him a break Captain, he’s a war hero. He’s not mixed up with the mob.” They had to do about 18 takes. “I wanted to kill myself,” laughs Grosso. “Because I was acting with Pacino and Hayden, my voice went up in the air like a woman being chased in a dark alley. I learned how difficult it is to be an actor.”

“Phil” was also one of the four guys who shot Sonny Corleone (James Caan) in his car by the tollbooth out on Long Island. “I said to Coppola, ‘If four buys are shooting at him with machine guns each holding 45 slugs, not only would you not find Jimmy Caan, you wouldn’t find the car. They’d all be completely blown away.’

“The next day Coppola called me over, he was such a gentleman, and said: ‘I thought about what you said Sonny, but Jimmy Caan is bigger than life in this movie and we’ve got to kill him bigger than life.’ I still thought he was making a tremendous mistake, but I was dealing with reality and he was dealing with movies. Not only did I learn that he was right, but I also learned that that scene ended up being one of the most memorable in movie history.”

It was on Cruising (1980) that Grosso really came into his own as a technical expert. Reunited with Friedkin, he worked with Al Pacino tracing an undercover cop’s troubled journey into Manhattan’s S&M gay underworld to fish out a crazed killer. Grosso had spent over five years working undercover on all kinds of cases, including a community of deaf mutes (for which he had to learn sign language) and homosexual rings. “We took Pacino out to the gay clubs in Greenwich Village to show him how to operate in that world, so he could observe and get a feeling for how people act.”

But just as Hackman and Scheider would never know what it was really like to work as a narcotics agent, to live immersed in the overlapping worlds of the cop and the mobster, Pacino would never experience the reality of undercover work. He would never know what it took to actually get results, nor would he ever have to master the psychological tactics, or experience the fear.

“Apart from mastering your cover story, the biggest thing is to know how to get information without anyone realising; also, to know how to remember faces, times, locations so you can go back and complete a report. You’ve got to remember to adopt all the characteristics, too. It’s stupid, but I was once trying to buy marijuana in East Harlem. I wasn’t smoking because I don’t smoke, and a guy came over and asked if I wanted a cigarette… I almost said ‘no’.”

Then there’s the decision on whether to take protection. “You’re often afraid to wear a wire or carry a gun into the bars because women will pat you down or touch you in all different places when they hug you – they’re told to do that to check if you’re carrying. So you need to be really creative about where you’re gonna carry a pistol.

“I was once searched when I was carrying a gun in my crotch, they never pulled my pants down, but it got pretty hairy. I don’t konw what they would have done if they’d found it. Same goes with a wire. I’d wear it in a real strategic spot running down the lining in the back of my jacket. They won’t always pursue a search if you have a good line of crap, but you’ve got to have the bravado to call their bluff. I don’t want to make out this is 007, but it’s a dangerous job.”

Grosso went on to advise on many other movies as well as being story consultant on numerous television projects, including Kojak, The Rockford Files and Baretta. He formed his own production company, Grosso-Jacobson Communications Corp, in 1980. They’ve produced some of the most successful TV movies and action series sold worldwide, starring big names such as Martin Sheen and Paul Sorvino.

Still, doesn’t he miss the danger of being a cop and the thrill of the chase? At least that dry sense of humour is still evident in his reply: “What I do is I go once a month to a precinct and the cops let me slam the cell door a few times. Every cop says you get an orgasm when you hear it close.”

This article originally appeared in Hotdog magazine. Many thanks to Tina Bexson for permission to republish.

Poet, author, artist, vocalist, and all-round force of nature Joolz Denby recently published her latest novel The Curious Mystery of Miss Larkin and the Widow Marvell. Though more playful than her other books, the story also deals with the harmful effects of a religious cult on a young boy’s life, and the attempts of a two strong Bradford women to help him out. Denby’s prolific output has gained just rewards, including an Honorary Doctorate at Bradford University and a Crime Writers’ Association award for Stone Baby. The third novel Billie Morgan lost out to Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin for the Orange Prize in 2005. Based on her own involvement at 19 with a biker gang, it was widely praised for the intimacy of its characters and sense of place (Bradford, both present day and during the 1970s). Despite the attributes, one senses that Joolz has found the strictures of publishing houses too limiting at times. Displaying a healthy sense of perspective, she told For Books’ Sake that learning to tattoo was a bigger challenge than writing novels – “you aren’t going to mutilate someone for life” – and also an honest way to support her other projects. This rejection of obstacles keeps her moving forward. Whilst previous work was put out by HarperCollins and Serpent’s Tail (most of her poetry has appeared via Bloodaxe), Jools decided to take the independent route this time. Miss Larkin and the Widow Marvell is the first title for the small-press Ignite Books. The venture was formed in late 2010 with Steve ‘Spot the Poet’ Pottinger, co-author of last year’s The Rest Is Propaganda, Steve Ignorant’s account of life with Crass. Spike spoke to them both on the eve of Ignite’s launch party.

Tell us the story so far of Ignite
Joolz Denby: I got totally bored and irritated by the complete lack of common sense, business acumen and complete disinterest in anything to do with the actual quality of writing by the major publishing house, who I have been published by and who came to make me despair of British publishing.

Steve Pottinger: It was kick-started through a series of conversations with Joolz, who was frustrated by the impasse she felt she’d reached with her then publishers. I’d just finished writing the Steve Ignorant autobiography and was itching for another project. I read the manuscript of The Curious Mystery…, loved it, and was confident other people would too. From there on, Ignite Books was the obvious way to go – the alternative would be to do nothing, and why do that when the opportunity’s there to give it a go?

The project seems to focus on social media. Is this a deliberate policy to remove all barriers between you and the readers?
JD: It’s the best way to get actual readers to relate to a book. We cannot as the majors (see above) do and try to drag on in the past whilst trying to screw the last pitiful drops of cash out an industry they have virtually destroyed by their isolationism and incompetence. We both also work in the music industry and that’s the same.

SP: Yes. Like most people, I thrive on interaction and connection. So I want to hear from people who’ve read Joolz’s book, or who are interested in what we’re doing. I love that exchange of ideas. For me, that’s vital. Cut yourself off from that and the hard work involved in something like Ignite becomes a hundred times harder.

Something revolutionary seems to happen when clusters of people get together. Do you see this happening around books right now?
JD: About bloody time if it is.

SP: Let’s hear it for the cluster. When you’re sharing skills, enthusiasm, and knowledge, when you’re picking each others brains, then your perception of what’s possible gets well and truly shaken up. Why shouldn’t that be true in publishing too? Get your hands on the software, a modicum of enthusiasm, and a willingness to learn, and off you go…

You worked on the book with Steve Ignorant. For Crass there was a political dimension to their creative autonomy. Do you see much evidence of a political aspect to independent publishing?
SP: I think there can be. As soon as you do something as simple – and as profound – as taking control of the process of publishing your work, then everything changes. Beats the hell out of waiting for someone else to promise to do it for you and then screw it up. Ignite produces the books we want and that we know there’s an audience for. Any mistakes and fuck-ups we make are our responsibility, no-one else’s. I wouldn’t have it any other way. Is there a punk/ DIY/ obstinate and bloody-minded aspect to that? I think there may be!

Independent music labels have been common for over 30 years, why is it taking publishing so long to reach a similar acceptance?
JD: Because of their utter snobbery – they see themselves as a ‘cut above’ the music scummers. When I was published by HarperCollins, I suggested that as I was gigging at Glastonbury they could take an ad out ion the programme for the book or at least, flyer the festival. Their response was (and I’m not kidding) ‘Those people don’t read, it’s pointless’. And that with three fully-functioning bookstores on site and quarter of a million attendees. I did it myself in the end and sold about 50 or 60 books at the three gigs I did that year.

SP: Good question. Maybe the fact that writing is a solitary pursuit has something to do with it. Your work gets turned down, or you’re told there’s no market for it, and you just swallow the hurt. Rejected by experts – where do you go? A band – with four or five people to share the cost, and the workload – are more likely to reach that critical mass necessary to go “Stuff it. We’ll do it ourselves”. If publishing’s finally catching up, that’s good.

You must be learning a lot of new things. What have been the most exciting for you so far?
SP: Learning a whole set of new skills has been immensely satisfying. But what I’ve really been struck by is the generosity of people in sharing their knowledge and experience with someone who’s learning the ropes. Christian from Bracketpress (who typeset Steve’s book) couldn’t have been more helpful when I sent him a string of emails going “How do I do this…?” Getting Ignite off the ground would have been a lot harder without that kind of support.

Have you run against any obstacles?
JD: Not as far as I’m concerned but I wouldn’t pay attention if I did.

SP: Obstacles, no. Plenty of challenges, naturally. But then I knew we would! Given that this is our first book, I’m pretty happy with how things have gone. Second time round, it should all be a lot easier.

JD: I am a lazy, chaotic, arty type and Steve is a genius at organisation also he is a big nag and makes me do stuff. I admire him tremendously and am completely grateful for his efforts. Were it left up to me alone none of this would have happened.

What single myth about publishing (or creativity) do you think needs to be challenged?
JD: The one about major and imitation major publishing houses: ‘they know what they’re doing because they’re proper publishers’. It’s pants, they don’t.

SP: Myth: you can’t do it. Reality: you can. (But be prepared to graft.)

What would be your message to everybody affected by the arts cuts?
JD: I never had an arts grant in my life – I made a living out of my various art talents for over 30 years. Never depend on a government. Do it yourself.

SP: If you want to keep your local arts venue, get involved. You might just make the difference.

You work in so many different art forms, what ambitions do you still want to achieve?
JD: To get my own private art and tattoo studio – to write a great novel – to write a great poem – to finish the album I’m currently recording with members of New York Alcoholic Anxiety Attack – to tour with the band and live to tell the tale – to get Steve a new camper van – to live forever in order to finish all the projects I want to do – man, the list is endless.

SP: I’ve a couple more writing projects to dive into, for starters. I’m endlessly intrigued by people’s life stories – which is why the chance to write Steve Ignorant’s book was one I grabbed with both hands. And, of course, there’ll be the next Ignite publication to start work on…

Can you tell us a little about how this book came together?
JD: I just thought I’d like to write a light book about something amusing, as everyone in the publishing/media world said I couldn’t. They said I could ‘only’ do big heavy novels. When I do write big serious, exploratory, Urban Romantic novels like Billie Morgan and my latest, Wild Thing (as yet unpublished), they all go, “My god, the writing is superb but it’s not in genre so we can’t publish it, marketing would go mad”. So I thought I’d do it anyway. It would be a nice change and it was. I enjoy studying mythology, so I chose a take on that. I love the idea of Olympian gods living out their immortal years in modern, urban Britain and I put in lots of jokes about stuff like everyone knowing who Brad Pitt really is (guess).

The Curious Mystery of Miss Larkin and the Widow Marvell is available from www.newmodelarmy.org
Keep up to date with Ignite Books via Facebook and Twitter

“We’re not your ordinary tour company,” suggests the website of Los Angeles-based Esotouric. Indeed. Rather than curb crawling around Laurel Canyon squinting at George Clooney’s house through binoculars, Richard Schave and Kim Cooper offer tours the rest of us want to see. There’s a gritty double-header this month with ‘John Fante’s Dreams from Bunker Hill’ (9th April, advertised as a “once-a-year bus adventure”), followed by ‘Haunts of a Dirty Old Man: Charles Bukowski’s LA Bus Tour’ (12noon-4pm, 10th April). The tour kicks off at Philippe the Original, Bukowski’s lunchtime hangout opposite Terminal Annex, the inspiration for Post Office, and includes coffee and donuts at the Pink Elephant Liquor Store (“many riders also pick up a little something stronger for the road,” counsels the press release). Schave’s narration takes in the sights, smells, and Barfly locales, relating the geography of Bukowski’s life back to his singular writing style. Esotouric round off the month with ‘In a Lonely Place: Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles’ (23rd April).

This is a brilliant idea, appropriate to a city saturated with cultural and seedy social history. In addition to the literary tours, there is a guide to Tom Waits’ creative life in LA (‘Crawling Down Cahuenga’, 28th May) and Esotouric does a nice line in architecture and true crime – in fact, their biggest coup may have been James Ellroy for Christmas 2007. Yes, the ‘demon dog’ himself with mic in hand, regaling a coach party with Grade A salaciousness. Other tour guides include social historian Joan ‘Red’ Renner (‘The Real Black Dahlia’) and Crimebo the Clown.

Esotouric mutated from Cooper and Schave’s online exploration of LA lore at the 1947project blog – a ‘crime-a-day time travel blog’. The couple decided to share these stories with others and hired a bus. After a few of these tours, they wanted to branch out according to their respective fascinations and the company was formally launched in May 2007. Both of them are involved in a bewildering range of interesting projects, most of which are collected under the umbrella of LAVA: the Los Angeles Visionaries Association. “Los Angeles is a city without a center, but with an unjustly bad reputation. It’s also home to fascinating people, places and happenings. But these wonders are dotted over a vast and confusing landscape, drowned out by media blare and corporate blather. You could easily spend years in hard searching to discover the real Los Angeles, those hidden gems and secret gatherings that give this city a soul.” LAVA aims to provide new ways of decoding this map.

For more info on Esotouric, visit www.esotouric.com

Tennessee Williams called it “Romanticized Melancholy”. William Faulkner called it “the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself”. Southern Gothic Literature has as many definitions as it does voices. It is not Gothic, nor should it be confused with the vampire fiction set in the South. But it can be surreal and grotesque. It is the raw open heart of the South, exposed by writers such as Williams, Faulkner, Carson McCullers, Truman Capote, Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, and many others. Its underlying pathos is tied to that of the South itself: the lingering stain of a slave-based economy and the indomitable memory of the Civil War; the sweltering climate and the religious and chivalric morality; and the tendency of creative spirits to inwardly rebel against a culture that often pretends to be something on its surface other than the truth of itself. That feeling of inward rebellion is not unique. But unless you are a child of the South, you will never fully know the sense of displacement that can exist there in the minds of those born to question, to challenge, and to create. And yet, that displacement is directly opposed by a strange and powerful sense of belonging to the South. It’s like hating an abusive father half your life, only to realize in adulthood that when he gave you your demons he was also giving you the strength to battle them.

All writers have something of this contradiction inside them. But in Southern Gothic, the voice is spawned in the crucible of Southern culture and the words are adorned by idioms borrowed from black Southerners. And then the stories emerge from an instinct honed at the pulpits of tent revivals, at the heads of finely appointed tables in antebellum plantation homes, around campfires in moss-draped swamps and pinewood forests, in slave shacks and on thousands of ordinary screen porches on balmy evenings.

Southern Gothic Literature is whisky as it catches in the throat. It is the bones left in the ground by a bloody embattled history. It is 90 degrees under a ceiling fan with 90 percent humidity. It’s the secrets on the bottom of the Mississippi River and the sweat that beads up on young skin in the backseat of a car on a gravel road. It is poker games that end in gunfire. It is voodoo brought from Africa and saints brought from France. It is football stars and town drunks and good men and women gone bad, and bad ones trying desperately to be good. If Bourbon is the only truly American libation, then Southern Gothic is the Bourbon of literature. It might have taken the bizarre, beautiful and terrible circumstances of the American South to bear such a fruit as Southern Gothic Literature. But its essence isn’t in its geography, but in the literary imperative of anyone, anywhere and at any point in time, who writes because they must. And who offers up their deepest vulnerabilities to us so that we might recognize them in ourselves.

–––––

Stinson Carter is a journalist, novelist, screenwriter, and playwright. He is a former editor-at-large for BlackBook magazine and a current contributor to Maxim and Huffington Post. Born and reared in Louisiana, Carter has since lived in Seattle, New York, Amsterdam, Los Angeles, and on a meditation commune in Iowa. He is a graduate of Vassar College.

About False River: “A silver-tongued bad boy from a blue-blood Southern family is framed for a bizarre crime and forced to live by his wits on the streets of New Orleans. After conning his way into high society, his path takes a dark turn when his charm fails him and tragedy propels him onto the difficult path to maturity that he’s been running from all his life”.

Watch the trailer: including a great moment from William Faulkner’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech and the painting The Poker Game by Louisiana artist Sam Rigling. Directed by Mark MacInnis:

For a chapter excerpt or to get the complete novel, go to www.stinsoncarter.com

Original interview with Ian Rankin on the publication of A Question of Blood and the re-issue of Watchman.

A Question of Blood – Ian Rankin

See all books by Ian Rankin at
Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

Not many punk rockers will tell you it was a copper that made them what they are today, but bestselling British author Ian Rankin is an exception to this rule. He owes his livelihood to one Detective Inspector John Rebus, a hard-nosed Edinburgh cop who works on instinct, plays by his own rules, and is the central character of Rankin’s novels.

With 23 books, sales well into the millions, and the 1997 Crime Writers’ Association Macallan Gold Dagger (the Oscar equivalent for crime fiction) for Black and Blue, under his belt, Rankin has come a long way from his childhood in a coal mining town in East-Central Scotland. In his first Thailand interview, the author tells New Arrivals of his long struggle for success. He explains how he created and developed Rebus’ character to portray the realities of contemporary Scotland, and discusses his latest books, A Question Of Blood and Watchman.

From an early age, reading and writing played an important part in Rankin’s life. First and foremost as a source of inspiration and escapism. “Reading helps nourish your mind and develop the intellect. It helps take you to other places,” he says. “I grew up in a place that didn’t have much hope about it. There wasn’t much happening in the economy, the shops were all closing down, but I could escape inside my head.

“I could become a pop star when I was writing song lyrics, and I could become a superhero by drawing cartoons. I could become anything I wanted to be. The problem with is that sometimes society tries to knock that creative stuff out of you. You’re told to stop, get a job, get married and die. I think that reading is part of the process of staying young.”

In his youth writing was a passion kept close to his chest, hidden behind the closed doors of his bedroom. It was only in the final year of school that he let the cat out of the bag.

“I came second in a national poetry competition. That was the first inkling that any of my classmates or teachers or my parents got that I was actually writing,” he says. “It was a bit embarrassing really, it wasn’t the sort of thing you were supposed to do with my background.”

Not one to be put off by such things, he moved to Edinburgh in 1978 to study English at university, and found instant satisfaction in his choice.

“It was such an exciting place to be, because you were surrounded by writers, people who wanted to be writers, and people who were excited by literature,” he says.

Music is Rankin’s other passion, and his knowledge of it is evident in the eclectic tastes of the characters he creates. This, combined with his natural flair for writing, didn’t translate into successful musical accomplishments of his own though.

“I was in a punk band for about six months, and we were about the second worst punk band you’d ever seen. I was on vocals. I didn’t actually play an instrument, and singing would be putting it too strongly,” he laughs.

Putting music aside, Rankin focussed on his studies and, after graduation, took up a PhD on Edinburgh writer Muriel Spark, author of The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie. At this time Rankin had started writing his own fiction and after two years of research found himself in a quandary.

“I asked myself, ‘What would she [Spark] want?’ Would she want just another little red thesis that would sit in a dusty library, or would she want me to write books?”

Opting for the latter, he ditched his studies and penned three novels in three years. The first, a dark comedy set in a Scottish hotel was never published. The second, The Flood, a story about his background, was printed by a local publisher. An agent who picked up one of the few hundred copies sought Rankin out and landed him a contract with a London publisher for his third book Knots and Crosses, marking the arrival of Rebus.

With this Rankin took the first steps on a long road to literary success that would eventually place him alongside the likes of Iain Banks and Irving Welsh, as one of Scotland’s leading contemporary authors.

Back then the wheels of the gravy train were turning rather slowly. “I had one of the longest apprenticeships in fiction,” he says, adding that it took a number of years and five or six Rebus books before he started earning a crust.

Despite years on the breadline, being supported by his wife while he tried to balance a career as an author with fathering a young family, Rankin has done all right. A darling of the British fiction scene, he is on numerous web and radio interviews and Rebus is now a popular television character.

His new home in South Edinburgh, where authors JK Rowling and Alexander McCall Smith are neighbours, is a testament to this success. But he tries to keep his feet firmly on the ground, taking joy in the fact that the success of Scottish authors like himself provides an inspiriation for a new generation.

“There’s a new generation of Scottish writers who have seen through people like me, that you can actually earn a living from writing. The also realise they don’t have to write like Muriel Spark or Irving Welsh. My next door neighbour [McCall Smith] writes crime fiction set in Botswana.”

Today, 13 novels on and 15 years older, Rebus has developed too. He still lives in the same flat in Arden Street that he did in the beginning, and readers have become attuned to the foibles of a cop who doesn’t mind riding roughshod over other peoples emotions in order to get what he wants. Each novel sheds more light on the unknown areas of his life, and at the same time, his friend and colleague, Siobahn Clarke, becomes a stronger, more prominent feature in the novels.

“Rebus is a kind of dinosaur. He’s one of the old school of cops who worked by instinct and were given a free reign to investigate a case as they saw fit. He really feels that he is the last of a dying breed. He’s surrounded by people who are younger and university educated, people who know how to operate computers.”

“However, the things that make him a good detective make him a very bad social human being, because he investigates other people’s lives like a voyeur. He does that as a defence, because then he doesn’t have to look at the problems in his own life.

“But that’s just the kind of person he is and it makes him a very good cop because once he gets involved in a case he won’t give up until he’s worked it out. But a lot of his friends and family have been pushed away over the years because the job gets in the way.”

Even creating Rebus had its problems for Rankin. Wanting to learn more about the machinations of policework, he sought advice from Edinburgh’s chief constable and was told to visit a police station and talk to a couple of detectives. However, in a bizarre twist of fate, this made him the prime suspect in an ongoing investigation.

“The detectives asked what the book was about. I gave them the story which was about a kid being abducted. It turns out they were investigating the abduction of a child, so I became a suspect. They thought I’d come in with a spurious story and that I was the person who’d actualy done it.

“I was the only suspect for while. I was probably too young and naive to be worried, but they eventually got the guy for seven murders. I was glad I wasn’t fitted up for that one, but I’m probably still on file somewhere.”

Nowadays Rankin boasts a large number of the boys in blue as avid fans, and he’s more likely to be pulled over by police wanting an autograph than an arrest. He puts his popularity down to getting the office politics right. “There’s a lot of bitching and backstabbing,” he says. “It’s a real ‘us versus them’ mentality.”

However, Rankin says that the greatest compliment was from a copper who couldn’t read his books. “He said it was no fun reading my books, because it was too much like work. I was really pleased by that.”

While he doesn’t want to get too close to the police and have his books seem like a PR exercise for them, Rankin wants Rebus to be a believeable, realistic character. Compliments from the law enforcement profession reinforce that he has succeeded at this.

“I think they like the fact that Rebus isn’t some kind of superman who flies in, solves the case, then flies out again. The cases have repercussions for him.

“If you investigate a murder, it stays with you. You don’t bounce from one murder case to the next unchanged by what you do.”

Rebus also breaks through the stereotypes that Scotland is all about malt whiskey, tartan and bagpipes, and portrays a realistic, earthy view of modern day Edinburgh.

“What interested me was the Jekyll and Hyde nature of the place. The fact that to the casual visitor it was a place of tradition and culture.

“They’d come to Edinburgh and see the castles and museums, but they wouldn’t see the run down housing estates, or the problems of drugs, prostitution and crime rings.

“There was this other side to the city that people weren’t writing about in the days before Trainspotting. My plan was to show this side of Edinburgh, to look at a living breathing contemporary city with contemporary problems.”

While Rankin made Rebus’ address real, choosing the flat across the road from his student house, he did encounter problems from fictionalising parts of the city.

“I had to decide early on just how real the city was going to be. In the early books I fictionalised a lot of places. A lot of the bars and areas have fictional names and Rebus works in a fictional police station.

“After four or five books I decided to burn down his fictional police station and put him in a real one. The Oxford Bar [Rebus’ local in the books] came into it solely because that’s where I drank anyway,” he says, adding that he has been given a few free beers by the bar’s landlord ever since.

The early Rebus books were sold with the kicker “Unlikely to be recommended by the chief constable or the Tourist Board”. Rankin’s war to put Edinburgh on the map has paid off.

Far from complaining that the books portray a dark urban underbelly that damages the city’s image, the Tourist Board has come on-side and now runs ‘Rebus Tours’ — where fans can be guided around key sites and scenes from the book. Furthermore, the current chief constable has gone as far as putting in print that he could do “with one Rebus on the force”.

Both Rebus and Rankin have come a long way in the past 15 years or so. However, with Rebus only five years away from retirement, what will happen when he reaches 60?

“Rebus exists in real time,” says Rankin. “In book one he was 40, now he’s 55. In Scotland, police have to retire at the age of 60, but I don’t know what I’m going to do.

“I could end it all, I could carry on with Siobahn as the main character. I could stop the clock and carry on with Rebus, or go back and investigate his early years.”

While Rankin professes no “grand plan” for Rebus, he does admit to having a guiding principle for determining. whether it’s time to give the cop the chop. “I come to each new book and think, ‘Have I still got his voice in my head, have I got anything new to say about him or Scotland through him?’“If any of these cease to be the case, then it’s time to stop right there.”

The books:
A Question Of Blood
Tragedy strikes when ex-soldier Lee Herdman enters a local school, shoots two students dead, injures another, then turns the gun on himself. Rebus is intent on finding out why the murders took place, convinced that it wasn’t just another squaddie gone postal. He’s also dodging questions about why he just left hopsital with bandaged hands and the con who was stalking Siobahn Clarke turns up dead in a fire.
Rebus discovers he’s personally attached to the killings, and in unearthing Herdman’s past in the SAS, he’s haunted by his own army experiences — something the military investigators who turn up on the scene are happy to play on.
Rankin explains the motivation behind the novel. “A lot of soldiers came back from the first Gulf War changed men. Wife beaters, murderers, and some suicide cases. Part of the book is about this. How the army trains men to kill, and then sends them back home without switching them off.
“But I also had this general theme of outsiders and the periphery of society: teenagers who don’t want to fit in, they take the extremes just to be different; other people like these disaffected soldiers; and even Rebus himself. I wanted to look at how these people are viewed. ”

Watchman
Welcome to the world of British intelligence officer Miles Flint in this fast-paced thriller originally penned by Rankin in 1986.
Flint operates as a surveillance officer for British intelligence. However, his life as a voyeur is drastically changed when a suspected assassin slips his net and knocks off an Israeli businessman.
Set amidst an Irish Republican Army (IRA) bombing campaign in London, our Scottish-born protagonist suspects foul play and makes his own investigations into the possibility of a mole or double agent. However, in the world of intelligence paranoia is the name of the game, and he himself is hauled in for questioning by his superiors. With each step Flint is further drawn into a dark conspiracy. One more operational cock-up lands him with a final chance to to redeem himself, taking him into the lion’s den itself — Northern Ireland.
“I was living in London when the bombings were going on. It was really quite terrifying, ” says Rankin. “But it provided the background for the story. “Flint is quite like a writer, insofar as he watches other people, records what they do, and writes it up in a report. It was really interesting transforming his life as a voyeur into something more active, and much more dangerous. ”

Originally published inAsia Books Magazine ,January 2004

American Tabloid – James Ellroy

See all books by James Ellroy at
Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

The reader always mainlined crime fiction in front of the TV. He picked up the book. He rubbed his chin. The bristle made a noise like the crackle of fire spreading through a condo in the background . The reader said "It’s American Tabloid. It’s by James Ellroy." Cynical reader said it was just a violent re-working of Raymond Chandler. Inquisitive reader said there was more to it. He slumped into the armchair where he had whacked an American Psycho a couple of years ago. Opening the first page, he reached for a shot of bourbon and said "Impress me, Jimbo."

Such is life across the Ellroy page. Stark, occasionally violent and with a world weary smile. We’re still in America, still caught between the twilight of the fifties and the dawn of the sixties, but this time we’re at a more exalted level. American Tabloid sees Ellroy detailing the lives of the men in the background during the Kennedy years. As these men are mostly agents, shakedown men and bent politicians led with amoral example by John F. himself, they afford Ellroy plenty of opportunity to exercise his preoccupation with human frailty. If the publishers were looking for a quote for the back cover, they’d probably opt for "a conspiracy theory on speed", which would do injustice to a book whose simplicity flatters to deceive.

The figures picking their way through this network of conflicting allegiances are characteristic Ellroy anti-heroes. Boyd, Littell and Bondurant begin the narrative with clearly defined positions that gradually bleed into each other until all are on the same side. There are no good guys / bad guys here to give a moral locus – only the ones in seersucker suits who stay in expensive hotel suites, and the rest. The rest are defined by cursory but damning references to white socks, bad breath and cheap summer suits. The closest American Tabloid comes to a hero is Bobby Kennedy, and once Boyd has described him as a "chaste little piece of dogshit", you suspect where Ellroy’s true loyalties lie.

The climax is inevitable, as all are drawn in to the network of smaller conspiracies that build to create the greatest conspiracy of all ­ to bring the Kennedy administration to an abrupt end – but Ellroy ensures that the fates of his three fictional protagonists are not resolved until the last page. Loyalties change as fast as Boyd can change into successively sharper suits, shifting from FBI, to CIA to the Mob and back again as the competing factions jockey for power. It sounds like a bewildering Oliver Stone theorem, which it isn’t. The minimalism of the dialogue extends to the plot, and unlike JFK, it’s possible to follow events in American Tabloid without pen, paper and secondary source material.

With fiction as stylised as this, it is tempting to look for precedents elsewhere. You could find parallels with the casual violence of Bret Easton Ellis or the stylised minimalism of Raymond Chandler, but the raw power of Littell, Bondurant and Boyd could only be Ellroy. And his greatest achievement is to capture the prevailing sense of corruption seeping from all levels of society. There is a dizzying sense that you are adrift in a world where everything is remorselessly off-kilter. It has the same sensibility as the scene at the end of American Psycho where Ronald Reagan spouts banalities over the mantra "this is not an exit" – in this case, the banalities are those of Kennedy’s "New Frontier" programme.

The spare style does mean that Ellroy has created problems for himself when he needs to explain finer points of the plot without resorting to leading questions and huge chunks of cumbersome explanatory dialogue ­ "you mean J Edgar Hoover is in league with organised crime? Really? Tell me about it" ­ although the solution is equally unsatisfactory. The use of mock-official "document inserts" ­ clumsily presented in a typewriter font so you know that the credulous know that they are different to the rest of the book ­ quickly begins to grate. It seems oddly self-defeating to spend chapters immersing the reader in the stylish sleaze of Kennedy’s America only to yank them out of it abruptly with tape transcripts and interviews.

Although its simple, aggressive prose and lack of any paragraph longer than ten lines make it easy to dismiss American Tabloid with a derisory leer as lightweight, it is harder to dismiss once you’ve reached the end. Because by the time that Kennedy’s 1000 days in office have drawn to an end, it has seduced you. It has made you believe that you were reading some nice simple schlock-horror crime fiction while all the time you were reading a carefully enumerated rendering of the most complex and involving era in American history.