JAMES SALLIS' WILLNOT

The success of the movie Drive has brought new attention to James Sallis' writing, which is a good thing, because as good as the pulpy Fifties-style narrative drive of Drive was, Sallis is a versatile writer whose strongest talent may be his subtlety, the way he can build a narrative through a circling oblique approach which reveals more on each circle, opening up ideas and observations which have been planted at earlier stages.

Willnot does exactly that, and it's so skillfully done the reader might forget that this is, in genre terms still a crime novel, though it's never really obvious what the actual crime might be. Lamar Hale is a doctor in the small town of Willnot, an oasis for eccentrics, as most small towns are when you look closely enough. It seems to be somewhere we you live among 'the squirrel eaters' but you're never quite sure where, and as the story begins, a pile of bodies are uncovered in a gravel pit outside of town.

Soon the FBI is on the scene, but not interested in the bodies as much as in the whereabouts of Bobby Lowndes, a troubled boy Lamar had tried to help, and who is AWOL from his job as a sniper in the military. Clever readers might suspect the stories are related, but that's not necessarily so, and events proceed in a small-town pace that intersects repeatedly with the activity of small town life, which, as a doctor, puts Lamar right in the centre.

Really, however, this is a story about belonging, and about aging. Lamar was first brought to Willnot by his father, a peripatetic pulp science fiction writer--which gives Sallis an opportunity to inject little stories about the greats from the Fifties and Sixties, Theodore Stugeon, Robert Silverberg, Kate Wilhelm and the like, and their perceptions of our reality in a time when reality seemed to be changing quickly. Lamar also spent a year in a coma when he was a child, out of which he awoke to see, in some cloudy ways, the future: bits of life presented as if through the imagination of an sf writer. The book is about aging, and the passage of time, but it's also, like sf, about the way the past and the future are really just parts of our present, because our present is what we have, and our present will not (so to speak) escape the memories and anticipations we bring to it.

Lamar is also living with his male partner, another bit of small town life which makes little difference one way or the other, except that Richard is a committed teacher, struggling to tread water under the tidal wave of modern education. Like Lamar's medical practice, it is something that puts him into the middle of small town life, leaving him opportunity to influence at least of his neighbours on their way. Not all of whom are snipers returned to their own pasts to escape their own futures.

This is a richly quilted collage of quiet writing which deftly puts you into Lamar's slow-paced point of view, and reminds you gently to take his history into account as you are contemplating the scene. It ends much as it began, in a moment of violence or its aftermath, and picks up its vision and it's purpose from there. It's a wonderfully understated piece of writing, one where every word seems to count, in an almost offhandedly casual way. Wonderful.

Willnot by James Sallis
No Exit Press, £7.99, ISBN 9781843446699

NOTE: This review will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

THE INCOMPLEAT PULP ANGLER

Encyclopedia Of Pulp Fiction Writers
Lee Server
Checkmark $19.95 ISBN 081604578X

Lee Server's definition of 'pulp fiction', at least for the purposes of this book, extends all the way from the dime novels of the 19^th century to contemporary best-sellers as diverse as Jackie Collins, Mario Puzo, and Pauline Reage. What links them has nothing to do with pulp magazines, or even the pulp magazine ethos. Rather, Server here seems to be defining 'pulp' as an attempt to reach the mass market with material pounded out with the suitably hackish intent of making money.

It's not that this approach couldn't work, but that once you get beyond the realm of the actual pulps themselves, even allowing for their dime-novel precursors and paperback successors, it does become pretty damn arbitrary, far too arbitrary to fit any definition of an 'encyclopedia'. This may seem picky of me, but it's one thing to define 'pulp fiction' casually, if at all; it can be whatever the marketeers want to call it, but we all know what an encyclopedia ought to be, and that's complete.

Server serves up some anomalies. Elinor Glyn for example, whose short story in Cosmopolitan created the 'It Girl,' was a lot closer to Margaret Dumont than Margaret Brundage, and would been horrified to have her name even mentioned in a pulp context. Having said that, the linkage Server makes between writers not generally grouped together is interesting, and sometimes provokes some unique reappraisals. As when Paul Cain shares the page with Barbara Cartland. Or Mickey Spillane gets followed by Ted Sturgeon. And it's worth the price of admission to catch up with such once-major figures as Arthur Guy Empey or Richard Sale, and forgotten minor modern stars like Don Tracy. But why Don Tracy, say, and not Dan Sherman? Why Richard E Geis but not his own favorite pulpster, Charles Runyon? One assumes that some of these people are Server's own favourites, or that occasionally he is doing some well-thought out slumming. And why is Dick Francis here at all? To appeal to the British market? Or just because he fits that most general definition up above? Why why why? My advice is, don't worry about answering such questions, just read, enjoy, and follow the linkage.