A Moment of Doubt (15 page)

Patrick:
I love that.

Jim:
Oh, god it was fabulous. All these sweating writers milling around with a glass of white wine in the Mediterranean heat, trying to figure out who at this event was important for them to schmooze, and by the way they should be learning some French, and here I was, as usual, with my nose up against the vitrine of greatness.
[Major laughter all around]

Patrick:
I have read a lot of Simenon in the past years.

Jim:
I like the stuffwithout his cop, the
romans durs
.

Patrick:
Romans durs
. Great.

Jim:
Listen, I am a carpenter. I can look at this wall. I can tell you—actually I built this house, but let's say it's your house and it's the first time I've been here. I can tell you that that wall is original, it's balloon framed, sixteen inches on center, of rough-cut two by fours. I can tell where they are, where the blocking is, why it didn't have any insulation, where there's some plumbing, over here. I can just look at this wall, and I can see through it. And I have that problem with most thrillers—especially cop novels and detective novels. Until I get to someone like Robin Cook—Derek Raymond, who is so strong; or Patrick Manchette, who was so tricky and funny, and right on and doing the same thing, twisting all the clichés—and also
being trapped by them. Manchette, I think, was as buffaloed by the whole thing as anybody. But getting buffaloed was not Simenon's problem, although he wound up all alone in a big chateau in Switzerland, old and rich and out of his mind. Like, uh, I can't think of his name—the only book I ever liked of his was
Stiletto
.

Gent:
Harold Robbins.

Jim:
Damn, Gent! Exact! Harold Robbins was taken off his yacht in Nice or Cap d'Antibes or someplace, semi-comatose on cocaine, gibbering to the ambulance attendants, who have had to strap him into the stretcher and speak no English, “Don't you know who I am? I'm the greatest writer in the world . . .” Out of his fucking mind. Have you seen a Harold Robbins novel lately? Gone. In the landfill. Munificent cash bovinity incarnate, those books, while he was alive. Sold millions. Poof.

Patrick:
But we have wandered from you and your work. I think you are saved from these grisly fates by your incredible dark humor—in life and in your writing.

Jim:
Humor, black, dark. Lucia Berlin, you may remember her, a great short story writer, and though she had a lot of trouble with alcohol her whole life, she told me once that in
Lethal Injection
, at that moment when the doctor pulls his truck into his yard, after the prison death chamber scene, in the beginning, after he puts down the inmate, he pulls into his yard and gently crushes the taillights of his wife's Mercedes. Then he gets out of his truck, and it's Texas, and it's night and there's all these stars up there, and the crickets are going, and he starts thinking about the stars and the crickets, and they say, he says to himself, they say that the breedle of the cricket, the frequency of the breedle of the cricket is directly proportional to ambient temperature, and is it possible to get so fucking hot that the crickets might explode? [All laugh.] Lucia
said she read that and had to put the book down, she was laughing so hard. Because it seemed to her to be a really typical drunken chain of thought. Completely alcoholic, off the charts, drunken chain of thought. I wasn't necessarily thinking about it that way when I wrote it but—

Patrick:
But you were so drunk when you wrote it that—

Jim:
No. I go to writing at nine in the morning with a cup of coffee—I don't ever drink when I'm writing. I don't drink when I work—too many power tools. Including the mind. You can get hurt.

1
A Panorama of American Film Noir (1941–1953)
, by Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton. City Lights 2002.