Lou Berney reads tonight Wed. January 6 at 7 pm at Barnes & Noble Arboretum.
During the 100 days of the 2007—2008 Writers Guild of America strike, a lot of film, television and radio writers panicked to see their projects—and incomes—screech to a halt.
But screenwriter Lou Berney kept his cool.
Lou Berney wrote a noir novel.
Berney has “written feature screenplays and created TV pilots for, among others, Warner Brothers, Paramount, Focus Features, ABC and Fox.” But Gutshot Straight is his first book since his Pushcart Prize winning “ The Road to Bobby Joe and Other Stories,” debuted in 1991.
I have to admit I’d never read a single bit of noir-–no Dashiell Hammett, no Elmore Leonard–until National Book Award Winner Denis Johnson, serially published his first noir novel Nobody Move in Playboy in 2008.
On a recent visit with Denis, I asked him to tell me more about his understanding of the genre. He described noir as “the dark world, where there are no good characters. In noir, the closest thing to a good character is a character with a moral code.”
Berney’s Gutshot Straight takes the reader on a riveting adventure through this dark world full of strippers, ex-cons, mobsters and white collar criminals who, while not good in any traditional sense of the word, are endearing, fully formed and fun. Like Berney, they have a knack for taking a shitty situation and turning it into a wild, if fraught, endeavor. And as my second noir read, it’s convinced me that the genre, at least in such masterful hands, is a worthy one.
more at the jump…
The book kicks off with Shake, a “rangy white guy up on another” Grand Theft Auto who’s trying to make it through his last 68 hours in prison on a 15 month sentence without being eviscerated by a beast named Vader Wallace who’s doing time for a “first-degree-manslaughter charge, aggravated. Extremely aggravated, according to the rumors.”
By the novel’s 3rd page, Shake has—not entirely innocently—incurred Vader’s wrath.
And by the time Shake walks out of prison a free–and craftily uninjured—man on p. 8, the reader knows she’s in for one hell of a lively, well–plotted and fresh ride.
But I didn’t truly fall in love with the book until p. 42, when I realized that the female protagonist and her moral code were going to give Shake—and everyone else—a run for their ill-gotten money.
Publisher’s Weekly’s rave review of Gutshot Straight calls for a sequel. I’m hoping for the same. And if readers are lucky, it’ll happen before the next screenwriters’ strike.