Anodyne
Thursday, August 31, 2006
 
New Kem Nunn interview -- one of my faves, author of The Dogs of Winter, Unassigned Territory, the Wild Things screenplay, and numerous Deadwood episodes...

"Q: Something I've thought about, and it seems almost particular to California novels, if you read something like Nathanael West's Day of the Locust, Horace McCoy's They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, What Makes Sammy Run?; they're not 'crime' novels, but they're 'California' novels, and they seem to have sort of a 'crime' edge to them without formally being genre novels.

KEM NUNN: Yeah. One of the novels we talked about tonight (at the Q&A after the reading), [Newton Thornburg's] Cutter and Bone gets into that. John Fante, some of his work… Some of that comes, I think, out of this desire to write against the myth of California. California has always trafficked in its own myth. You know, from early on, with books like Ramona by Helen Hunt Jackson, with its idyllic vision of the Indians and the padres. The mission life - there was a whole 'mission style' that grew out of that.

Some of the early noir writers, guys like James M. Cain, were guys that came to California to work for the studios, and became disillusioned with what they found here, and wanted to write against that myth. They came believing that everything would be great, and then discovered that there were shadows: discovered that in fact, L.A. was a rabidly anti-union town, that there was a lot of racism. You find that in Chandler - the corruption in the police force is something that always gets in there. So I think there's that desire to somehow write against the myth that's informed a lot of the noir writing, and accounts for some of the stuff you're talking about."
- posted by cjb @ 11:36 AM


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