“When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand” – so said Raymond Chandler, doyen in his day of the hard-boiled detective fiction short story and novel, many of which were made into films.
The Big Sleep, Farewell, My Lovely and The Lady in the Lake are perhaps three of the better known novels which made it to the big screen. He also wrote the screenplay for the original Blue Dahlia.
Sneered at by literary critics who looked down their noses at what they termed “pulp fiction” Chandler, a highly educated man, strongly defended the genre thus: “When a book, any sort of book, reaches a certain intensity of artistic performance, it becomes literature. That intensity may be a matter of style, situation, character, emotional tone, or idea, or half a dozen other things. It may also be a perfection of control over the movement of a story similar to the control a great pitcher has over the ball.”
Now the classic hard-boiled detective novel is usually a gritty detective story with a street smart professional investigator at its core and generally set in a world permeated by violence and corruption. Hard core biker fiction is much less formulaic, but the better stories are always gritty, with violence and corruption never far away.
However, if instead of having a trench coat and hat wearing detective as the protagonist, you have a chopper rider, “… a life-long biker. He wore Wrangler jeans and shit-brown Justin cowboy boots with ‘In The Wind’ stitched in the oil stained flanks and a weakness for redheads”, you have a central character sure to stir the blood of any biker worth his salt.
Now put him in a fast paced tale involving murder, treachery, questionable cops and more than a few fast and loose women ready to abandon sexual restraint in order to please their man, and you have a read that is damned difficult to put down. From its opening pages to the twisted climax this book will keep you guessing as you take a loud and fast ride through the violent underworld inhabited by Chance Hogan.
To write truly, you have to really know your subject and location. Keith Ball has spent a lifetime as a hard-core biker, most of it in Los Angeles and nearby states. His scenes ring as true as his characters and, if at times they seem larger than life, we should remember that, when compared with the average ‘citizen’, so does Ball.
Here’s Chandler on LA. “When I got home I mixed a stiff one and stood by the open window in the living room and sipped it and listened to the groundswell of traffic on Laurel Canyon Boulevard and looked at the glare of the big angry city hanging over the shoulder of the hills through which the boulevard had been cut. Far off the banshee wail of police or fire sirens rose and fell, never for very long completely silent. Twenty four hours a day somebody is running, somebody else is trying to catch him. Out there in the night of a thousand crimes, people were dying, being maimed, cut by flying glass, crushed against steering wheels or under heavy tires. People were being beaten, robbed, strangled, raped, and murdered. People were hungry, sick; bored, desperate with loneliness or remorse or fear, angry, cruel, feverish, shaken by sobs. A city no worse than others, a city rich and vigorous and full of pride, a city lost and beaten and full of emptiness. It all depends on where you sit and what your own private score is. I didn't have one.”
Here’s Ball. “Los Angeles, a sea of lights from the splashing Long Beach coastline, to the Malibu hills bordering Ventura County. It's a 13-million-plus sprawl of humanity and concrete, with congested lines everywhere, from airliners jammed in a long elevated corridor entering LAX. There are lines at movie premieres, on the freeways, restaurants, theaters, at Disneyland and at the city's 4,000 Jack in the Box restaurants. Not to mention the white lines on glass mirrors in the Hollywood hills, lines of cars in the streets, and lines of carts in the supermarkets. But the worst line for Chance Hogan was in the massive art deco San Pedro Post Office where he lived from a small P.O. Box. Standing on the granite floor of the '30s-era, five-story building, he towered above the others in line. He stood 6-foot-4 and weighed 228 pounds. His sandy blond hair and chiseled features, coupled with a week of stubble, made his appearance questionable. Was he a seaside bum or cool? In Los Angeles his appearance could mark him a writer or park-living homeless. Smell would answer the question and he didn’t stink.”
What’s my point? My point is that Ball can paint a word picture of the contemporary City of Angels as gripping and vibrant as the great Raymond Chandler did back in 1954, in another era entirely. Times have changed. The City of Los Angeles has changed. But what is unlikely to change, is the fact that a good writer can bring a character and a place to life so vividly that the willing suspension of disbelief necessary to enjoy good fiction comes effortlessly. Harbor Town Seduction does just that.
