A Moment of Doubt (13 page)

One evening in the summer of 2010, Patrick Marks, the proprietor of The Green Arcade in San Francisco, sat down with Jim Nisbet and artist Gent Sturgeon, who did the cover of
A Moment of Doubt
, to nourish a few cocktails and chat about writing and other matters.

Patrick:
So besides a wordsmith you are another kind of smith?

Jim:
Well, I'm a cabinet maker, a carpenter, a construction type of guy. I've been doing it since I was a kid.

Patrick:
You wrote
A Moment of Doubt
in the eighties. When did you last read it?

Jim:
An hour ago, in a panic because I knew you were coming over. Actually, I last read it in the eighties, when I proofed and put it bed; probably around 1985.

Patrick:
So where does that come in your oeuvre?

Jim:
Good question. My first novel to get published was
The Gourmet,
in 1980
.
(Later
The
Damned Don't Die,
retitled
by Barry Gifford when he published it at Black Lizard in 1984 or '85). It was the old days: I sold the book and then two years went by before it came out. Galleys brayed o? the pan of inked type, like that. In '80 I wrote a sequel,
Ulysses' Dog,
just in case
The Gourmet
rang the gong, you know. Outside chance, to say the least, but one feels that one must be ready
.
Stupid, too. What if it had actually happened? And then I girded my loins and wrote a novel that has never been published,
Jolan
, a “straight”
novel. And then, caught between wavering and conflicting ambitions and a highly literate girlfriend, with whom I shared a suspicion of the detective novel, I wrote
A Moment of Doubt
. All three, note, might be construed as “Martin Windrow” novels. In fact, I was very disgusted by detective writing. It was too easy, it was too dumb, it was too clichéd. The first one I wrote twisted the clichés, the second one I wrote just pulled them out by the roots, and the third one gave it implants and extensions. Bottom line,
A Moment of Doubt
says, “I can't do this genre.” And I probably could have been one of those guys, a Robert Parker kind of guy, not to denigrate Robert Parker—

Patrick:
So it all comes to a head in
A Moment of Doubt
.

Jim:
It's that writer guy going nuts writing detective fiction. Going way nuts. And while he was going way nuts, I was having way fun. All of a sudden stuff was available to me that hadn't been available—satire, pornography, obscenity, social issues—fun!

Patrick:
In the dedication of the book you mention, in 1985, Kevin Killian.

Jim:
Kevin Killian is one of the very few who read the manuscript and he was very complimentary about it. It would be interesting to see if he remembers it that way, or at all, for that matter. The way I recall his reaction, 25 years down the line, is, he laughed his ass o?. You might want to check with him on that.

Patrick:
It's insanely funny.

Jim:
Well, I was really constrained by the so-called clichés of detective fiction. I trashed them out—and then what? I had a precedent. I saw Chandler, one of the originals of the genre—but that was thirty or forty years before— and he just became this hopeless drunk, who had all this attitude about other kinds of writing and really couldn't stomach Faulkner and, to me, writers that are extremely
important. Chandler's not important—he's fun, and he was good, but he was not important.

Patrick:
What about Dashiell Hammett?

Jim:
I feel that Hammett was imprisoned by what he invented, too. Have you ever seen an unfinished novel of his called
Tulip
? It's a hundred pages of dialogue between two guys sitting around a kitchen table. It's really good dialogue, too. But nothing happens. It doesn't go anywhere, and he can't figure out what to do—he doesn't have Nick and Nora, and Asta and gin fizzes and dead bodies. It's really sad.

Patrick:
Red Harvest
is brilliant. In
A Moment of Doubt
, it seems to me that the characters in the novel within the novel seem to be taken out of Hammett, in a certain way.

Jim:
Sure, there's a goof on him—you can't get away from that stuff. It permeates the entire genre.

Patrick:
When did
Lethal Injection
come out?

Jim:
That was next.

Patrick:
One of the main characters in both
Lethal Injection
and
A Moment of Doubt
is the needle. I wondered if you wanted to talk about that at all.

Jim:
Oh, God. [We all laugh.] Sure. Have I been a junkie— no. Have I shot dope—yes.

Patrick:
I wasn't going to ask you if you were a junkie, I—

Jim:
I never was. I was never interested in a trip down that mineshaft.

Patrick:
Beyond the personal, there is this object, the needle that threads its way through and over the text, like the eye in the
Story of the Eye
.
Lethal Injection
is the most ‘needle-ly' book there is.

Jim:
What happened to William Burroughs?

Patrick:
I was going to mention William Burroughs. [Jim laughs] In
Cities of the Red
Night
—

Jim:
I never read that.

Patrick:
I think that is his best book.

Jim:
Really? Not
The Wild Boys
, not
Naked Lunch
?

Patrick:
No. I think
Naked Lunch
is kind of a farce. A lucky accident.

Jim:
I agree. And of course it is a farce.

Patrick:
But I bring up
Cities of the Red Night
because it also has a kind of science fiction element that you also partake in—you forgot about that genre.

Jim:
Hey,
Windward Passage
won the San Francisco Book Festival science fiction award! So now Barry Gifford gets to say, “Jim, that's great you won that award, but it's kind of too bad because I never read science fiction, so now I don't have to read you anymore.” I doubt he's ever read me anyway. Well, he did publish
Lethal Injection
. And
Death Puppet
. And
The Damned Don't Die
. So I presume he read them. It [Black Lizard] was a small house so it's hard to believe you could get a way without doing that.

Patrick:
I am reading
Windward Passage
right now and I can see the science fiction element but it's—

Jim:
Bogus. I got a letter from someone and they wrote, “This isn't science fiction this is social fiction.” Is that like fiction fiction? Help me out, here.

Patrick:
I think that your writing is about writing, so often. In
A Moment of Doubt
, the computer plays a big part—do you remember that?

Jim:
Absolutely. The problem is CPM. Who remembers CPM?

Patrick:
Tech nostalgia. You know, the first book from The Green Arcade is
Low Bite
by Sin Soracco, which was fun to read, for many reasons, but I like it for its eighties quality. And
A Moment of Doubt
is really an amazing time capsule, with the computer terms, the gender issues— and the fear and the fun. The tech thing seems very pertinent today.

Jim:
Well, here's a story. I had a big pile of Stendhal books, and I knew the period I was after—the time he spent in Naples—he was writing about Naples. There was a point at which Stendhal stopped keeping his journals and started writing novels. It's all very interesting to me and I just fail to see how I could have figured that out by just being on the Internet, if only because a lot of what you find on Wikipedia and the balance of the swarming id that is the idernet is unreliable. Just like the real id.

Patrick:
And it's also very truncated. People fool themselves—they're mimicking—

Jim:
They're mimicking scholarship. They're writing their term papers and they're wimping—they get little factoids and they salt them in there and it looks like they know what they're doing. And it's acceptable. The knowledge is not deep at all.

Patrick:
There is also this cognitive problem, which I have been thinking about and seemed to come into high relief with Bush being re-elected. It seems that in certain dialogues, if you expressed ideas out of the scope of the predominant discourse people would look at you like you were crazy: if they hadn't heard it already, it didn't exist.

Jim:
It's like those Republican talking points. The Bush administration was so good at that. They developed a message, boiled it town to a tag line or two, and then they would not deviate. They'd have everybody in the administration on all these different talk shows saying exactly the same thing. To the point where the Republicans who wanted to believe it were mouthing it and even the
New York Times
, like Judith Miller—the snake in the wood-pile—made it seem like they weren't reading their own goddamn newspapers. They're going with the administration's message—don't get me started.

Patrick:
And short term memory is another truncation, as well as the response in print—.

Jim:
There's a lot of shoal sailing out there. But books are always there to be had and always will be there to be had. I don't think books are going to be replaced in my lifetime.

Patrick:
Well, one of the funny things about the Kindle, which may be doomed because of other players and platforms—

Jim:
Because of Apple? Because Apple exists. [Laughs]

Patrick:
Really. I was going to say that I can take this book [I pick a book from a stack on a small table in Jim's living room], this Ettore Sottsass book and you can lend it to me, and I can borrow it and I might even forget to give it back to you, and you might get pissed off —

Jim:
If I remember.

Patrick:
“Who did I give that damned book to?”

Jim:
“Who did I give that book to after the third gin and tonic?”

Patrick:
But, at this time, if you have a Kindle you can't do that.

Jim:
You can't zap a novel, that you paid $9.95 for, over to your buddy's Kindle, not like you can “bump” your business profile. Which, after all, might be worth something to the guy who wants to vend you a single malt scotch or a time-share in Cabo, or something.

Patrick:
He has to pay $9.95, too.

Jim:
It's fucked. The whole copy ethic and ethos—you can dub direct onto cds some great Coltrane album or this fabulous Jim Nisbet interview and hand it off to Gent or someone, and no one's paying for anything. But there is a point at which you say, “Hey, I bought this thing in the store and it's my right to do with this thing what I want.” Everybody knows the copy's inferior—which is now an unreasonable argument, because even the originals suck,
by the way—mp3s and cds and such. The audio quality is so bad, it's discouraging. Maybe they'll solve that problem, too. It doesn't sound like vinyl. God, we do bitch and moan like FM radio in the middle of the night.

Patrick:
Technology may save us, but it may not.

Jim:
It's not going to save us; it's all petroleum based.

Patrick:
Your old Coltrane albums certainly are.

Jim:
At least they did something right with that petroleum.

Patrick:
But I also wanted to mention that fact that in 2009 Amazon deleted copies of
1984
from some people's Kindles, albeit over a copyright issue, and issued refunds and that just seems funny that in the analog world, the equivalent would be a corporation entering your home, rifling through your bookshelf and leaving a $11.07 on your nightstand. What have we gained—what are we giving up?

Jim:
On that note, well, another round?

Patrick:
I must have another question for you. Yes, I wanted to ask you about genre writing.