Being a lover of gritty, noir-inspired, pulpy detective stories, I was rather stoked by the prospect of reading Josh Stallings ‘Beautiful, Naked & Dead’.
Reading a bit about the novel online had set the seed that this book could be something rather tasty in terms of one of my favoured genres.
From Stallings’ website (www.joshstallings.net), “Beautiful, Naked & Dead is hard-boiled crime novel. Moses McGuire a suicidal strip club bouncer is out to avenge the death of one of his girls. From his East L.A. home, through the legal brothels of Nevada and finally to a battle with the mob in the mountains above Palo Alto, it is a sex soaked, rage driven, road trip from hell.”
That was enough for me to want to read the debut of Moses McGuire. I note debut because ‘Out There Bad’ and ‘One More Body’ have followed.
Now sometimes when your expectation bar gets set rather high, it only means a long fall into disappointment.
Well I will say 40, or so pages into ‘Beautiful, Naked & Dead’ I was not exactly disappointed, but I was sort of wondering at the pace of things.
There was a noir-ish mood to the story, but it was a bit slow out of the blocks, although as a first novel of a series, I do appreciate the need to establish some foundation.
And Stallings was doing that by painting his hero in dark hues of self-loathing. Early on McGuire offered little to like, but that was part of his dark charm too.
And in some respects it was a good tool for Stallings. If you tear down the eventual hero to the most basic shell, anything you do as a writer which gives him back some heart and soul will be appreciated all the more by the reader.
And the book gets into that after those first 40-pages, dragging McGuire out of his personal malaise by dragging him through the quagmire of someone else’s badly frayed life.
It is a journey through murder, mobsters, self-doubt, booze and bullets, and it is just so well done the reader freely bathes in it all.
So where does such raw-nerved writing come from?
Well Stallings said he has a number of writing idols as inspiration.
“James Crumley is for good or bad responsible for me picking up a typewriter and pounding out my first book,” said the author. “I loved (Raymond) Chandler, but it was Crumley with his wounded drunken drugged-out detectives and his breathtaking prose that screamed to me. “Modern life is warfare without end: take no prisoners, leave no wounded, eat the dead--that's environmentally sound.” Crumley ended Dancing Bear with that line.
“After him, I discover James Lee Burke with his emotionally deep brilliantly strung together truths.
“And to round the trinity out is the Irish master of noir Ken Bruen. He prunes sentences to the bone. He spills pain but never wallows.”
You can see flashes of Stallings idols in his works, not that he simply parrots them, but there are subtle moments of homage.
“Music also inspires me,” added Stallings. “When I first catch the whiff of a new novel I build a playlist, the sound track I will listen to for the next year while I chase the story down. The Moses McGuire books owe gratitude to The Clash, The Pogues and Tom Waits.”
So Stallings had mentioned Crumley leading him to his typewriter. I wondered what exactly he meant, expecting it to be a broadly metaphorical statement.
It proved to be more tangible in a sense.
“I was addicted to Crumley, the problem was he was publishing a new book every three or four years,” said Stallings. “I decided that if I wanted more of that flavour I’d have to write it myself. That gave me the vibe to go for, but I needed to find what made it mine and not just a pastiche or homage.
“The first thread I pulled was the name Moses McGuire. I had a pal named Dennis Michael Angelo O'Connor and he was a wild man with a monster heart.
Together we drank hard and snorted a bit too much of what Tony Montana called "llello." I loved his passion and flash temper. He was Irish Italian straight up. The name Moses McGuire vibed that way. As I sat down to write Beautiful, Naked & Dead this came out - “There is nothing quite like the cold taste of gun oil on a stainless steel barrel to bring your life into focus.” That made sense, Moses wasn’t the smartest or meanest man in the room, but what he was was dangerous - how do you threaten a suicidal man? His super power? He doesn’t give a rat’s ass what you do to him. From that line the novel unfolded. It wasn’t a bing bang boom deal. I wrote and rewrote it until I thought I had it. Then I gave it to fantasy writer Tad Williams, crime writer Charlie Huston and my wife/editor Erika. They took turns playing piñata with my ego. They challenged every word. I would have kicked their collective asses if they hadn’t been making it a better book.”
And then there is the part of ‘Beautiful, Naked & Dead’ which came from the author’s willingness to unveil pieces of his past, something he said was the hardest part of writing the book.
“Remaining honest is hard, not caring what people might think of me,” he said. “I did my share of thuggery as a youth, was friends with strippers and druggies, scammers and punks. I owe it to their memories to tell it straight. I have two rules as a writer, tell the truth at all costs, and never bore the readers.
“Every other rule is there to be broken.”
That is where the grittiness comes from as well.
“It comes from the streets. I never went to university. So everything I know about this craft I learned from reading and more importantly from listening,” said Stallings. “To write this book I spent countless hours listening to bored strippers in empty clubs telling stories that they wished were true. I talked to bouncers as they smoked and fought to drain the adrenaline built up from confronting drunk gang-bangers. I read books written by sex workers in the legal brothels of Nevada. The grit in the writing comes from all of them and my memories of harder times.”
So as Stallings looks back on McGuire’s debut, what does he think?
“What has surprised me is how many female fans Moses has,” he said. “When writing it I guess I assumed it would be a guy’s book. I was dead wrong. This may be because I used the plot like a Trojan Horse. On the surface it’s a sexy thrill-ride of a crime novel. But underneath I tell my truths. Feeling lonely in a crowd. The price we exact from women for the simple crime of being beautiful, young and poor. The price men pay for objectifying women. But shhhh, let’s keep that a secret.”
The overall response to the book has been good though.
“I’ve been stunned by the love reviewers and readers have given it,” said Stallings. “It wound up on something like fourteen ‘best of’ lists the year it came out. Even more gratifying has been the reaction from my fellow crime writers. To have them dig what I do is about as good as it gets,” he said, offering up a couple of examples.
“This is one of the best books that I've read this year. No question. Lean, but with depth. Violent, yet human.” - Johnny Shaw (Dove Season, Big Maria, Plaster City).
“Stallings has this way of writing, this brutally stunning way with words that rips a character right open in front of you - shows you it all - blood dripping, heart beating, the darkness aflame.” - Ian Ayris (Abide With Me, One Day In The Life Of Jason Dean).
Not surprisingly as I read Stallings works, and his answers here, as much as I liked ‘Beautiful, Naked & Dead’ he would still tweak things.
“Truth is I’m never satisfied,” he said. “‘Beautiful, Naked & Dead’ is the best book I could write at the time. With each book I write I grow and hopefully get better.
There’s a point where you say, this is as good as I know how to write it, and let it go. I will always love it as my first novel and will always see things I could do better if I wrote it today.”
So I ended up loving ‘Beautiful, Naked & Dead’. Its rawness was refreshing. It’s nod to the pulps gratifying. It’s characters flawed, but the key ones ultimately understandable, if not completely likeable.
So the aforementioned follow-up books are a good thing.
"There are two more Moses McGuire books in the series, Out There Bad and One More Body,” offered Stallings.
“My memoir All The Wild Children was nominated for a Anthony Award this year.
“I have two more novels in various stages of completion.
“What’s up for me? Soon as I’m done here I’m going to make a fresh pot of coffee and dig into a short story I’m writing for a new anthology to benefit PROTECT: The National Association to Protect Children. It is being edited by Thomas Pluck. The one he published in 2012 included stories by George Pelecanos, Andrew Vachss, Joe R. Lansdale, Ken Bruen, and a whole bunch of other great writers. My story Wooden Bullets was in it, and Pluck asked me back this year. It’s a great cause and I would march into hell if Pluck said he needed me to. Funny, you start out alone in a room typing your dreams, never knowing that the writer’s life will lead you to meet so many wonderful folks. In the crime community I have found my tribe. And any way you chop it that ain’t a bad deal.”
