Jimmy Callaway writes cutting edge crime stories that are always readable and lack all pretension. Go to A Twist of Noir for a selection. He also writes prose dipped in humour and you can tell a Callaway story as soon as you begin reading it. He is highly individual. He is a connoisseur of comics and the lead singer of Slab City. He is a strange hybrid of music, subculture and wit. His prose always entertains. He blogs with irreverence at ‘Attention Children. Sequential Art’, one stop shopping for everything Callaway. He met me at The Slaughterhouse and we talked about comics and comedy.

The Silver Surfer is a Marvel Comics superhero who was created by Jack Kirby and first appeared in March 1966.  Do you think, given the fact that he has been exiled to earth as a semi-divine being, the Silver Surfer is a Messiah figure and what does Dr Doom represent?

Yeah, I absolutely think the character has that sub-text.  But I think if you cornered Kirby on the issue, he’d say it’s more like that science-fiction tack they often take, where the lone alien outsider is puzzled and perplexed by these humans, with their modern wars and modern parking meters.  Like, Jesus showed up and he was like, All right, everybody, hey, let’s be groovy to each other, okay?  But to me, the Surfer shows up and he’s more like, What the hell are you people on about down here?  I mean, it’s cool, but I just don’t get why you fight or listen to the radio or anything like that.

Dr. Doom represents the angry nerd, the guy who is smart enough to save the world, but a girl made fun of his overbite in junior high, and he’s been in a downward spiral ever since.  This has always been my favorite kind of villain, y’know, I can relate very well to guys who have been kicked around their whole lives and then begin to rationalize some pretty lousy behavior of their own.  As much as I liked Spider-Man 2, that always bothered me about what they did to Doctor Octopus’ character, that they made him a fairly normal, well-adjusted guy who got sort of possessed by his mechanical arms.  Magneto, of course, is the supreme example of this kind of villain, being that if you’re a concentration camp survivor, you have claim above all others to having been dealt a shitty hand.  Plus under the right writer, there is no topping Magneto’s purple soliloquies on the inferiority of the human race (something else I can very much relate to).

In Robert E Heinlein’s ‘Stranger In A Strange Land’ Valentine Michael Smith, a human raised by Martians, returns to Earth. In the novel he investigates the Fosterite Church of the New Revelation, where sex, gambling, drinking and other earthly pleasures are not considered sinful but encouraged, even within the church building. He gains a cult following. How easy do you think it is to start a religion?

Seems pretty easy to me.  Especially if there’s fucking.

The universe is a mind-bogglingly vast place, and the scope of that can be terrifying.  So anyone who can come along and make some sense of things, who can help give some people reassurance that everything is going to be A-OK, that person can pretty much write his or her own ticket, it would seem to me.  I pretty much go with the Freudian notion of religion, which (if I’m understanding it right) says that, when you’re a child, the whole universe revolves around you: when you sleep, when you eat, when you crap yourself, and so on, you decide all that.  And so you associate those feelings with the peace and joy of infancy.  When you get older, you want that “at one with the universe” feeling you got as a baby, so you basically regress your thinking to that point, with some kinda all-powerful God-parent figure who will pick you up and cuddle you when you’ve made a boom-boom.

Here’s another awkward analogy: when there’s a solar eclipse, you’re not supposed to watch it straight on, you’re supposed to poke a hole in a shoebox and watch it through there, with your back turned to the actual event.  That could be religion: a way to look at a vast cosmic event (in this case, your life)(which is actually, not unlike a solar eclipse, a fairly common scientific occurrence and not that big a deal, really, in the grand scheme of things) in such a way that your retinas don’t fry out.  Of course, with your back turned, someone can easily come along and steal your wallet, but some consider that a small price for peace of mind.  And to finish the metaphor, while everybody’s outside looking at holes in shoeboxes, I’ll be inside reading comics.  Thanks, anyway.

If you had a mint edition of the first ever Green Lantern today would you sell it or keep it? If you kept it why, and if you sold it, what band that would have been playing at the time would you cash in the money to go to see and what would you spend the rest of the money on?

I’ve always been much more of a Marvel guy, so I’d probably sell it.  I mean, I’d read it first, but then off it goes.  I could probably get upwards of 160 grand for it if it’s in near-mint, and honestly, I don’t really know what I’d do with that kind of scratch.  Probably a buncha boring stuff like paying off my student loans and getting my own place.  I’d probably go to the nudie bar a lot more often after quitting my day job.  What else?  I’d hire The Dwarves to play a party at my house.  Open up a line of credit at the comic shop.  And get a lot more writing done, that’s for sure.  If it wasn’t for this lousy need to feed myself, I wouldn’t even get out of bed, much less work for a living.

Now, if we’re talking a copy of Incredible Hulk #181 or The Amazing Spider-Man #129, I’d never let either one of those out of my sight.

Roland Barthes viewed myth, journalism, advertising and comics as part of an ongoing cultural narrative. To what extent do you think comics can be read as part of our cultural discourse and are they as relevant as other works of literature?

I think comics can be read as part of our cultural discourse to the fullest extent.  This may be because they pretty much represent the sum and substance of all my cultural discourse these days.  Movies are too expensive, and TV tends to ramp up my already alarmingly high suicidal tendencies.  So comics remain my main avenue into the American experience, such as it is.  And though I don’t know if Barthes was ever into comics, I would be willing to bet he’d dig them as well.

Although I think comics are the superior medium of expression, they still have a ways to go.

I work one day a week in a comic shop, and I can tell you for certain that Sturgeon’s Law is as in effect as it ever was.  I love superhero comics, but if another one is never produced, I think we’ll all be fine.  When comics are opened to the myriad other emotions and experiences of human life, when they are produced with an eye towards something in addition to escapism, there is no alternative in my mind to the levels of art achieved.  Comics are relatively cheap to produce, but the format really is only limited by the imaginations of the creators involved.  It’s like the best of high and low art: nobody’s really paying attention, so you can experiment and do all sorts of crazy shit they’d only let you get away with in art school, but at the same time, anybody can walk into a comic shop and pick up your latest efforts.

Comics are better now than they ever have been, and they only continue to get better, to achieve more relevance, to attract more intelligent audiences.  The States are always going to be a little behind in these sorts of things, but I am optimistic that comics will one day be considered as valid an art-form here as they already are in France and Japan and other more receptive cultures.  And we’ll never be short of superheroes, either, so best of both worlds there.

If comics appeal to our need for heroism what do you think we are avoiding about ourselves?

Well, I hate to speak for anybody else on this, but I can say personally that at the age of 11, which was when I became enamored of superhero comics, I was attempting to avoid my incoming adolescence and all of its accompanying hormones and bad fashion choices.  I failed, of course, but I certainly can’t argue with my motives.  Generally speaking, I find the workaday world to be, at best, mind-numbingly dull, and at worst, mind-numbingly dull.  Superhero comics still represent a very necessary alternative for me to things like coffee klatches and babies being thrown into dumpsters.  For one thing, superheroes are done a lot better than they were when I was younger, so they already have more depth and meaning than mere adolescent male-power fantasies.  Yet they are still able to tap a well of 11-year-old excitement in me.  So it’s another nice “best of both worlds” situation.

I think it’s safe to say that everybody has aspects of their lives and/or personalities that they are trying to avoid.  And I like to think that I have, in regards to my own lifestyle, elevated that somewhat to a point where all I’m really trying to avoid is boredom. Things like love, acceptance, security, those are still fairly important to me.  But what I’ve come to realize over the past year or so is that for the most part, those needs are met, and all I’m really doing is fretting away time worrying about whether I have enough or if what I do have will one day vanish.  I mean, it’s all really silly.  So now that I feel a lot more stable, mentally and emotionally, than I have in a long time (if not ever), I find my focus to be on writing, reading, and all the other intellectual pursuits I’ve taken up over the years to keep from pitching myself off a high rooftop.  So far, so good.

Imagine you are commissioned to create a new superhero. Someone you care about is about to be killed and your comic character needs to save their life, what attributes do you give them and how do they resolve the situation?

The sad fact about my beloved friends is that the mortality rate among them tends to increase in direct proportion to their alcohol intake.  So I’d create a superhero who could hear BAC levels rising across town, and then his superpower could be diffusing the situation without being a total buzzkill.  In fact, that could be his code name: Total Buzzkill.  Able to impersonate irate neighbors on the phone to the police in a single bound.  The innate ability to hide sets of car keys.  A bottomless supply of cash for sobering, late-night burritos.

It’s a pretty stupid answer, I know, but the fact of the matter is a) I don’t care about that many people beyond my group of friends and b) all the good superheroes have already been created.

Do you think that comedy is a mask and if so what do you think it is hiding?

Yeah, I’d say so.  It could be hiding any number of things, really.  I know I often use humor to relieve tense situations, often times situations so tense, one shouldn’t be cracking jokes.  Which just makes doing so all the more irresistible to me.  But I’m kind of an asshole sometimes.

Comedy can be a lot like religion in that camera obscura way I was talking about earlier.  The world, as I mostly see it, is a really sad, miserable chunk of mud, floating around in the vast chaos of it all.  So it really becomes a laugh or cry situation.  And to make fun of something, to exercise that power over it, can be very cathartic, even if it is simply hiding one’s true feelings.

I dunno, y’know, it’s something I’ve given a lot of thought, over the years as well as just for this question.  But I’m finding the right words eluding me.  But basically, yeah, comedy is a mask a lot of the time, and what it’s usually hiding is all the other gross and icky emotions and reactions we have in this mostly pointless and vain existence.  That sounds like a bummer answer, but really, I think it’s the best possible system.  Sorta like the post office.

Your stories are cutting edge and often feature lonely guys leaning on the paid services of sex workers. In ‘Night Train To Mundo Fine’ the protagonist is carrying some raw pain. The sexual acting out you describe seems to resonate with his rawness, his usedness. Does your character operate from his wound and does that make him another loser or do you think he is typical of humanity as a whole?

Man, do I really have that many lonely-guy-and-sex-worker stories?  I mean, it’s not a real surprise, I guess.  Sex is on my mind often enough, there’s a good chance it’ll work its way into anything I write and I won’t even notice it.

Anyway, yeah, that story is definitely in that vein.  To be fair to that protagonist, he has just lived through the end of the world.  So yeah, that particular wound is pretty all-consuming, and he’s definitely working from that, although I’d say in a positive way.  I think that story is very much an affirmation of natural impulses, in the name of existentialism.  Basically, we’re all gonna die, so let’s just have a good time.

So, no, I wouldn’t say he’s just another loser.  Frankly, I’m pretty fed up with distinctions like that.  The terms “winner” and “loser” in this context imply that there’s somebody keeping score, who we can probably call “God” for lack of a better term.  I’ve probably made my feelings for this “God” character fairly clear by now, but lest some confusion remains, there ain’t no God, and if there is, I wouldn’t trust Him/Her/It to buy a program, much less keep score.  On top of that, my characters (and their creator, for that matter) could pretty easily be categorized as losers, and that’s because a lot of times folks want the easy categorizations, so they don’t have to think too hard.  That’s certainly an impulse I can relate to, but at the same time, I’ve got little patience for it.

As far as this particular character being typical of humanity, that’s hard to say.  The “end of the world” angle in that story works pretty well as a metaphor for how I see the general state of things, which is pretty much a shambles.  This character manages to persevere and overcome these obstacles and then set himself down a track to take it easy, a vacation well deserved.  I don’t really think I’d be able to pull that off, and for a lot of humanity that I’ve come into contact with, I remain dubious on that as well.  But it’s certainly not impossible.

Do you think God is sick?

Hoo boy, what a loaded question.

I think it would be a wee bit more accurate to say that people are sick, and God is one of the major symptoms.

Even as a fairly avowed atheist, who will sometimes go over the line into aggravated anti-theism, the best I can really say with any conviction is that the existence of some sort of supreme being doesn’t make any sense to me, that I don’t see how such a thing is possible (This includes the western Judeo-Christian God with which I am most familiar, as well as the deities of any other religion, even if those ones tend to dress cooler and fuck more often).  And even I am not so full of myself as to think that my reluctance (or inability, if you’d rather) to believe in such a thing automatically disproves its existence.  Basically, if there is a God, well, then, you coulda fooled me.

Now, when it comes to others’ beliefs, far be it from me to deny them anything.  The only belief I can deny others is the belief that they can take my stuff or otherwise violate my person.  But if I had to guess at this persistence of many others in religious belief is that it works as kind of a rationale.  A lot of the time, to be fair, this can be a really good thing.  If a raging drunk or a convicted felon or just somebody who’s got a pretty rough life is brought some comfort and salvation by belief in God(s), then it’s really kinda difficult to argue that religion is a bad thing.

But speaking for myself here, whenever life’s demons are nipping at my heels, I turn to other, more concrete rationales.  Art, literature, philosophy, and good ol’ psychotherapy have got a lot of answers to a lot of my questions, as well as plenty of ointment to salve over whatever infections may have occurred.  True, none of these claim to provide all the answers, but what am I, fuckin’ greedy?

Humanity is sick, and I am no less afflicted than anybody else.  But I like to think that my attempts at a self-cure will eventually get me to a better place here on this mortal coil, instead of some pie in the sky.  And if I’m wrong, well, then so what.  I gave it my best, coach.

You’re the lead singer for Slab City, who remind me of the Ramones and the Stooges. How big an influence is music for you and what lies behind the masked beast?

Yeah, music has been a very big part of my life since junior high, although my passion for it may have cooled considerably over the last decade or so.  No reason, really, I don’t think.  But long gone are the days where I’d blow my paycheck at the record store on a weekly basis.

I don’t always have music playing when I write, but when I do, it’s usually for a good reason.  I was working on a thing where the main characters listened to a lot of rap, so I did as well.  By the time I was done with that project, I don’t think rap was mentioned once, but it was a quality of the characters, so to have it playing as I worked with them was indispensible.  Some projects have themes of a sort; Cheap Trick’s live album at Budokan is the background to the novel project I’m currently working on.  Music has found its way into lots of my stuff: the title “All the Smart Boys Know Why” is from a Johnny Thunders song.  The Dwarves’ “Saturday Night” was the inspiration for my story “Your Own Saturday Night.”  Little things like that.  I don’t like to make my pop references, muscial or otherwise, too overt, as I feel that sort of thing calls undue attention to itself.  Y’know, like if I write a half-assed story, oh, I’ll slap an obscure Monkees reference on it, and that’ll make it cool.  I used to think that way, which is all the more reason to not get cute like that anymore.

Funny, isn’t it, Richard, how these masks keep coming up?  Yeah, when we play live, I often play in some sorta goofy get-up, like an ill-fitting dress or a cape or something, and a lot of the time, a mask of some kind.  For one thing, I think that sorta thing is funny, but it’s also fairly liberating, creatively speaking.  Without my glasses on and with a bandana over my eyes, I can’t see what an asshole I’m making out of myself, or the looks of horror mingled with disgust on the faces of the crowd, so I’m a lot less likely to hold back.  I’ve been asked after shows, when I’m back in my civvies, if that was my secret identity up onstage there.  To which I’ll reply, no, actually, this disguise I’m wearing, your average joe, this is my secret identity.  That guy on stage in his tighty-whiteys dipping his balls in your drink, that’s the real me.

Thank you for giving a candid and entertaining interview Jimmy.

Hey, thank you, Richard, and to anyone out there reading this, thank all of you for your interest in my fever dreams.  Seriously, it’s very nice and flattering to know that people enjoy my work, and it makes the whole thing that much more fun for me.  So thank you again.

Jason Michel is an outsider. He has exiled himself from his home country and travelled the world extensively and he is a true original. He is the editor of Pulp Metal Magazine and spotter of new talent. He has not been corrupted by the mercenary wiles of multinationalism or the meretricious ruses of profit seeking touts.

He is a deep thinker, an eclectic individual who knows many necessary and esoteric lores. He is a talented individual and a great guy.

In addition to his services as an editor he has written unique fiction that escapes definition.

If you haven’t read ‘Confessions Of A Black Dog’ do so now.

Jason inhabits the position in literature vacated by the demise of authors such as Burroughs and Celine.

He met me at The Slaughterhouse and we talked about Magic and Cults.

Scroll to the end of the interview for more links.

When you lived in Morocco how much daily practise of Magic did you see and to what extent do you think it differentiates their culture to that of Europe’s?

Well, that depends on your definition of Magic, really.

If you’re talking about so-called folk magic then, of course, they have the hand of Fatima to combat against the Evil Eye, a belief which stretches as far as parts of Greece & Italy (Are you looking at me?) but I didn’t see much evidence of it on a daily basis. But their beliefs in things such as Djinn actually originate in their pre-Islamic animism, which some of the Berber tribes still manage to get away with in an Islamified form. You have to remember that we still “knock on” or “touch wood” for luck, which comes directly from the Pre-Christian belief in tree worship. Same instinct.

Oh yeah, & there was that time bumping into the Fish Women at the corner shop. But that’s another story.

If, on the other hand, like Crowley you think that magic is “the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will” then, I would say that comes down to altering perception & you could definitely see that in the most mundane of situations. I lived in Melilla, which is a shitty Spanish enclave on Moroccan soil. The end of “civilisation”, if you will.

If you take people who have a poor but basically content life where they know their place in society & have the support system of family & culture to lean back on & then they throw themselves into a society looking for the myth of the Good Life (TM) where the initial burst of culture shock is that values are just down to the bottom dollar & their senses are assaulted with the magic images that we call advertisments & billboards showing women in lingerie & rolexes (Saatchi & Saatchi, the greatest mages since Goebbels) that tell us that life is for buying things & you can only buy with cash in your sticky fingers. How else could you expect them to react but in an extremely schizophrenic fashion? We are told that we should “Just Do It” & that “You’re worth it”. You have to admit that advertisers certainly know their magic.

But Asia is place for the mysterious side of life.

For example, everybody believes in ghosts. No question. In Thailand, they say that only “Good” people can see ghosts, so, of course, everyone’s seen one & they leave offerings in little spirit houses out for the spirits of the land where their houses rest. I met a lass from Sumatra who swears blind to not only have seen this Indonesian evil spirit with hanging entrails but who had also been witness to an exorcism of sorts in her village where the shaman/witch doctor blokey placed a dagger on the chest of the possessed unfortunate & it rose spun hurtled into a tree.

Strange stuff, indeed.

I, myself, have been right in the middle of a Hindu festival on the island of Pulau Pankgor in Malaysia where the guru & others was sticking metal skewers & hooks of various sizes into the devotees & you would see the eyes roll back & they … would … change. Physically. Some had skewers in their tongues or cheeks, others had hooks in their backs & they were pulling little chariots & one guy was suspended on hooks with paper maché butterfly wings. As I said they changed, they looked, for the want of a better word, “possessed”. Have you ever seen the old pictures of the Hindu/Buddhist angel & demons, the Devas & Asuras? Well, that’s what they became.

It was the whole shebang, the way they moved, the eyes, the works.

Very strange thing for a “rational” Westerner to behold.

Pulp Metal Magazine paraphrases Aleister Crowley’s dictum ‘Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law’, Hassan-i Sabbah was the Persian leader of the Assassins, an Islamic mystery cult, and is reputed to have said ‘Nothing is true, everything is permitted’, to what extent do you think they were saying the same thing?

Actually, “Do What Thou Wilt …” was originally written by Rabelais in his “Abbey of Thélème” of which Crowley half-inched both the catchphrase & the word Thelema, Greek for WISDOM. Crowley used it in his usurping of the Western Mystery Tradition from a Christian based system into a more paganistic, & in his mind, libertarian system. He never truly managed it, of course. His system was rife with Christian & Jewish symbolism. He called himself The Mega Therion (Great Beast) 666, for Pan’s sake!

When Crowley uses the “Thou”, he was not talking of being overly egotistical (although, the man was not a modest lamb, was he? To call yourself The Great Beast is hardly timid), but about doing the Will of your True Self, a tenet of occultism. The True Self was the genius or daemon that guided Socrates & the Guardian Angel of the Christians. In fact, in the Seventies there was a series of books by Julian Jaynes that suggested that the human psyche had been, in some way, “divided” in the past & even the Arch-Atheist Richard Dawkins has said the book was “either genius or utter madness”. The closest I have ever felt with this idea has been those moments of writing when the story seems to be writing itself, when it seems to come alive from outside of one’s own perceived self.

A big part of Crowley’s mojo was derived from the idea of taboo breaking to transcendence which leads us to dear old Hassan. The man from who we supposedly get both the word for assassin & hashish. Holy Warriors & Holy Herb for some. He was, by some accounts, a bit of lad himself.

The saying “Nothing is true, everything is permitted” seems to me to tell us to figure it all out for ourselves. It became the catchphrase for the Discordians & a group of occultist upstarts in the seventies that became known as Chaos Magicians. They were as influenced by Austin Osman Spare & his anarchic & independent view of magic(k) as much as Crowley’s caddish pomp & circumstance.

So, maybe both sayings lead to the same thing. A momentary death of the “little” self & a glimpse of the “bigger” self. “The Law” being the one “Thou” discover yourself, beyond Good & Evil.

But then, a good old fashioned heavy guffaw or/& wank’ll do the same thing.

“La petite mort”, as our gallic chums like to say. Which, of course, is why sex plays such a big part in Magic(k), especially since Al, the old deviant. Bless ‘im.

Julian Jaynes heard a voice say ‘include the knower in the known’ when writing ‘The Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind’, which postulated the theory that ancient civilisations could not introspect. While many artists and writers are highly aware, do you think that creativity is sourced from the subconscious?

That’s the biggie, isn’t it? Where the bejeesus does this creativity come from? Will we ever know?

In Corpus Christi college on Oxford, there is a carving of a scribe & behind him stands the god Apollo holding the severed head of Orpheus who is whispering in the scribe’s ear. The Greeks had a fascinating take on life & death. They saw humans as empty vessels to a certain extent that were filled by the “gods” (emotions) & even their word for “god” or “divinity” meant an event or sensation that was out of ordinary experience. Whether it was an earthquake or the madness of a mid-life crisis after years of drudgery in accountacy. It was divine. It was why the gods were feared & placated as well as worshipped. One ancient scribe said a life without the gods was one not worth living, yet be prepared to pay the price for their intervention.

I quite like this idea. Gives the writer or artist a sense of sanctuary from the ever-present feeling of preciousness of their work, doesn’t it?

That story was a piece of literary gold … don’t take all the credit, buddy boy!

That story was a mediocre pile of shit … damn that sodding useless daemon!

Maybe, that view’ll relieve some of the arrogance that comes from the obligatory ego-masturbation of seeing one’s work published. Hubris was the greatest crime for the Greeks.

I heard a story that Tom Wait’s was driving his car in L.A. on some freeway or other, when this music just comes flowing into his head & he can’t, of course, stop the car. & this music is getting more & more vivid & in the end the simian-like growler just screams, “OKAY, YOU BASTARD! WHY NOW?”

Thinking of Tom Waits’s observation that ‘there ain’t no devil there’s just God when he’s drunk’ music and sexual ecstasy have been linked since the Dionysian frenzies of the Greeks. George Clinton of Funkadelic, as well as Marianne Faithfull and Mick Jagger participated in publications of The Process Church Of Final Judgement, which was an offshoot of Scientology. Vincent Bugliosi, the prosecutor of the Charles Manson family trial said Manson may have borrowed philosophically from the Process Church. Do you think that the use musicians make of ritual and sexual rebellion is a modern version of the cult of Dionysus?

Yeah, The Process was one of the more bizarre cults connected to the Sixties, wasn’t it? All that Satan/Christ/Jehovah profiling. But then, hey, who’d have guessed Scientology would be the Hollywood cult-de-jour that it has become. Wish I’d thought of that bloody idea.

Job description – cult leader/bad Sci-Fi writer. Classic. There’s still hope for me.

Incidently,I believe Hubbard was a member of the OTO initially & even had a hand in the rocket scientist Jack Parson’s famous Babablon Working, then he legged it with all Parson’s cash & after that Parson blew himself up by accident. What a bummer.

I would say that you’re correct about Dionysus being quite a Rock N Roll god. Sex, Drugs & Rock N Roll, baby. Losing oneself in the ectasy of the moment. Which is why all the best of them died. As I said before you have to pay the price for all that debauchery. I saw enough of that when I lived in Bangkok, people dying, lives getting lost, liver’s destroyed. We used to call the seedier parts of town The Valley Of Death. Fun, fun, fun …

&, of course, Nietzsche heralded his return into the Western mind with the brazen loudhailer of a circus ringmaster. He saw Dionysus as the way beyond Schopenhauer’s pessimism, an archetype of losing all to create something new. & then, ironically, he lost his mind & began hugging horses.

The rock musician Julian Cope (of The Teardrop Explodes & books on megaliths fame) has an interesting take on this. For him it is not Dionysus but Odin that is the Rocker of the pantheon. Another god of ritual ecstasy & something Dionysus doesn’t do – language. The cross dressing god of writers, the mind, magic & bloodletting. A Heavy Metal god attacking his audience with no mercy. Do not fuck with him!

The worship of Odin may date to proto-Germanic paganism. Thailand as a Buddhist country views much of our inherited religious beliefs as dualistic. We are perpetually caught up in the struggle between good and evil. Nietzsche, who advocated going beyond that, is a cited influence on Anton La Vey, who founded the Church of Satan, and shaved his head one Walpurgisnacht in the tradition of ancient executioners. To what extent you think these forms of paganism are connected and if so are they perpetually in conflict with monotheism?

Nietzsche was indeed an influence on the COS, which I see as a very American religion (not a bad thing). Fiercely individualistic. LaVey was, I think, equal parts a showman, charlatan & scapegoat. The Black Pope was, like Manson, the Sixties taking a long hard look at itself. A shadow side to the liberal movements that had appeared. Pop culture Satanism. & why not?

Chaos Magicians say they have been channeling everybody from Bugs Bunny to The Flash …

& from what I can gather they are atheists, choosing the symbol of Satan, Lucifer et al while not “believing” in Old Nick at all. Or at least not in a fawning sense. Worship of the self & of the flesh seems to be the order of the day.

& any religion that has counted Sammy Davis Jr, Jayne Mansfield, Mark Almond, Boyd Rice & a certain damn fine writer I know amongst their members can’t be bad!

Remember that Lucifer originally was the Roman god of the morning star, “the bringer of light” …

Now, the idea of paganism is a very murky one to start with. For instance, there has been no proof of any kind of Pan-Celtic religion. From what I can gather they were a mixture of animism & tribal gods, which blows the original premise of Wicca out the window. Not to say that it invalidates someone’s personal belief at all. Belief can exist fine without truth, that’s one thing the “new” atheists seem to forget or not understand. Also, the idea of true nature-worshipping & not a nature-placating/fearing in terms of Western paganism is a fairly modern one. The highest deities for the Greeks, for example, were those that valued civilisation or very human actions. Pan was originally a bumpkin, only to be brought into our minds as a reaction against the dark satanic mills of the Industrial Revolution. Odin was a god of the mind & language.

Anyway, I digress …

Here’s my take – Monotheism, whether it’s the kind who can eat pork or not, is a very narrow form of religion because only their god (Jehovah, Christ, Allah) exists & all that contradicts their variation-on-a-theme Holy Books is blasphemy. Pagans are essentially polytheists in the sense that although they may worship some form of deity, they accept that it may not be the only one. That’s one thing about atheism, it tends to be defined by monotheistic culture. If you tell a Hindu that you don’t believe in god, he’ll just ask you – “Which one?”

Seems like it has just an experiment in the evolution of thought & ideas & something will inevitably appear to change it. The spiritual impulse is hard wired into us, as a species, I’m afraid. If we don’t blow ourselves all to hell, new stories will appear.

As David Eagleman said “scientific evidence is only a story, but for the moment, it’s the best story we have”.

Sir Isaac Newton made many of his scientific discoveries from failed alchemical experiments. To what extent do you think alchemy is proto-science?

& to what extent will our science seem like alchemy in future generations? That is the intriguing thing, eh …

I became interested in alchemy years ago through its mysterious symbols, & then I discovered that Jung believed that it was through alchemy that both hermeticism & gnosticism had survived after being outlawed by the Church, which is why the symbols were so esoteric. They had to be or the fucking pompous arses in the Church would get you.

Alchemy was the search, not only for gold but for the divine. It was the process that was important, not the end result & they even had their own veiled “death of the ego” stage known as Nigredo that the alchemist went through. Exactly like art in all its forms. The process. Magick has always been known as the Great Art, hasn’t it?

What is interesting is that Monteverdi, one of the originators of opera, was also an alchemist. He tried to create an artform that flooded as many of the senses as possible. As does Magickal rites. Occultism does seem to have been rather instrumental in the creation & development of science & art. One perfumes the other.

Da Vinci, Bruno, Newton, Monteverdi, Blake, Dali et al.

One of the most tragic things about the human is that we, as personal individuals will never know where thought & ideas & science will lead future generations. We won’t be around to see.

We can only dream.

Popularity arises from a tension within our culture, the tension between fashionable paradigms, such as science, and the iconoclasts who make something new. Louis Ferdinand Celine’s ‘Journey To The End Of The Night’ is a seminal work of fiction by a scientist that has been cited as an influence on many writers who have subverted popular paradigms, why do you think his novel has had such influence?

Céline, like many so-called outsider writers, spoke his own truth. Here, in France, it is almost taboo to talk about the man because of his blatant pro-Nazi propaganda & anti-semitism, but one has to separate the writer from the work. That book is such a tour-de-force of honesty. There are few other writers that can rise or plummet to such a level of raw human experience.

Dostoevesky was one.

Vonnegut was one.

Knut Hamsun was one.

Herbert Selby Jr was one.

J G Ballard was one.

Each of them went through something that most of us cannot imagine. War, debilitating illness, addiction, concentration camps, mock executions, madness … jesus harold christ on a bike, how could they not changed after that? I do think that one’s experiences of life make it onto the page. Directly or indirectly. I also think that if you don’t give a fuck about whether the audience likes it or not or if it is sellable & you’re just as honest as you can be, whatever the genre, as sci-fi or horror or noir or whatever “low brow” writing can still hold essential messages, then you’re doing something right.

Afterthought: I have a Hispanic/Native American friend from New Mexico who used to sleep in a cupboard with pictures of Céline, Dostoevesky & Bukowski on his sparse cupboard walls when he wasn’t shooting at cassette players or taking peyote & getting caught by the police running through his town in his underwear.

He turned to me one day & said, “Why do you write, man. Céline’s said it all. There ain’t no more to say.”

Jean Genet rejoiced from his prison cell when the Nazis marched through Paris and wrote novels which were lauded by the likes of Cocteau, why?

It was all those tight black SS uniforms. To paraphrase P J O’Rourke: Nobody has ever WANTED to be strapped down & abused by someone who looks like a liberal …

I remember reading Our Lady Of The Flowers years ago in Salford. The way he elevated whores, murderers & rapists to the level of Sainthood was one of the most enjoyably blasphemous pieces of writing I’d ever read. & then you learn about his life & how he wrote that book repeatedly on toilet paper as his guards would find it & destroy it.

Getting that book published was the best thing Sartre ever did, the miserable old turtleneck wearer.

Talking of blasphemy, have you ever heard of the folk saints of Mexico & South America? There’s Maximón – the patron saint of gamblers & drunkards & then there’s my favourite, Santa Muetre (Holy Death) – Our Lady Of Last Resorts. She’s the one that all the people who can’t go church pray to: the drug cartels, the prostitutes, the killers, the poor, they all go to see her as she’s said to embrace all without judgement. She loves tequlia & cigars too.

I’m proud to say that I have a statue of her in my bedroom brought over from Mexico by a chum. Possibly the only one in France.

Do you think that all artists and writers have to exile themselves?

In some sense. Even if it’s not physically. But I have no inclination to tell anybody what they “have to” do & maybe, just maybe, I’m talking out of where the sun don’t shine. Either way, I could care.

Yet … just look at the writers who did just up & leave – Pound, Miller, Céline, Greene et al …

To land in a place that is essentially foreign & where you have no history & you have no idea of the language, that most basic & subtle of information systems, & to try to build something there yourself is a very isolating thing. It leads to either introspection or its opposite. You either become self obsessed or try to lose yourself in the noise around you. & many people just re-invent themselves, they become their fantasy. I met one or two who to this day, I still have absolutely no idea who they were.

Not everybody can travel nor live abroad. I have seen a lot of people who judged everything by their homeland’s standards. They never truly left. That way lies madness, my dear fellow. The ones who survive with all their mental capabilities intact are the ones who can adapt.

Exiling oneself is living in permanent cultural adolescence.

Also I think the cutting of oneself off from your peers, or your soceity can be helpful for someone who is creative bent. Questioning yourself is an essential part of being the human animal, is it not? If you are so sure of yourself & the world & the way life works, then you are left with no surprises & that could well show up in what you do. Of course, to have all that lowdown would also make you an eternal dullard. It is our ignorance that makes us essentially noble & the daftest of creatures.

Or maybe I’m just talking out my poopchute.

Tell us about your novel.

Confessions Of A Black Dog started out when I heard an old urban legend in Bangkok that you could get a man killed for a hundred dollars. I began to think of the reasons why a man takes a hit out on himself & how he would feel. That then metamorphosis after I had this vivid dream of a Black Dog.

That changed everything.

I already knew that Blighty was steeped in stories of Black Dogs (I saw Black Shuck in a book when I was a lad) & the fact that it had also been a symbol for melancholia (That is a far better description of it than depression or some such whiny term, don’t you think? Less victim-y) & I delved into those old stories.

Anyway, the book took on a life of its own (Black Dog daemon?) after this & I kept it on the back burner as I moved from Thailand to Morocco & back to Britain after eight years. When I ended up in London I submitted a short story version of Black Dog to Lee Rourke & Matthew Coleman at their fabulous Scarecrow Magazine. They dug it, surprisingly enough. It was my first story published.

Then after I was off again, this time to France & it was here that the book just flowed all together.

I originally self published COABD along with a book of my short stories, but the splendid Pablo D’Stair of BrownpaperpublishinG read some of my writing & recently asked if he could publish it. It’ll be out sometime between now & Christmas.

It was finished about three years ago & seems so distant now. I haven’t read it since I finished writing it.

Woof!

Thank you Jason for giving an extraordinary and unique interview.

Here’s an old review of COABD ‘to wet your whistle’. You can get a copy of it here.

And ‘here’s another link that’ll shed more light (or darkness) on the Black Dog for you…’

The Beaten Dog Bites Back here on Pulp Metal Magazine’s Dictatorial.

And of course the Pulp Metal Magazine itself, ‘a heady smorgasbord of odd fiction, cult celluloid, unreal doodling, lowbrow waffle & heavy, heavy music’.

Dana Cameron is a noir writer with a difference. She is an archaeologist.

Drawing on her knowledge of digs and all they unearth she writes edgy fiction that digs deep into the behavioural motivation behind crime.

In her first book, ‘Site Unseen’, her protagonist discovers that archaeologists ask the same questions as detectives. She has written for ‘Boston Noir’ and her writing is imbued with careful research and logic. There is a lot of thought about how cultures and sub cultures shape behaviour.

She met me at The Slaughterhouse and we talked about excavations and crime.

Scroll to the end of the interview for more links to Dana’s work.

To what extent do you think detective work is like an archaeological dig?

While I’ve been an archaeologist, I’ve only read about being a PI or police detective or spoken to professionals in those fields. I get the impression the jobs are virtually the same, with a few exceptions, including the urgency of solving a crime. Both are reconstructing events that happened in the past based on material evidence as well as the documentary record or personal interviews. There’s often a disconnect between the way people behave in public versus what they do in private, and both detectives and archaeologists have to account for that. At heart, both professions are about human behavior and motivation.

I suspect detective work is like archaeology in that there are many, many more hours of painstaking work, comparison, and recording than appears on the surface. There’s a chain of evidence (we call it context, in archaeology) because in the same way a crime scene can be contaminated or altered with time, you can’t put an archaeological site back after you’ve excavated. Excavation is fun and it’s the thing people think of when they imagine archaeology, but it’s only the tip of the iceberg, and even that isn’t as glamorous as is popularly portrayed.

It’s digging very precisely measured and recorded holes without union pay or benefits. Fastidiousness and use of all the senses—plus a load of research and a little intuition—are required in both jobs. What I imagine is similar is the satisfaction when two pieces of the puzzle fit —click!—together, literally or figuratively.

Is there a point for you as an author, when in excavating the motivations for a murder, you begin to dig into the psyches of your characters and what do you find there?

When I began writing, I always started with the setting of the story, because that dictated the motives of nearly all my characters. Because I knew what my main character was doing there—conducting an archaeological excavation—I knew who else was there and what they had at stake: an economic interest in the property, a political agenda, a desire to keep something hidden, professional ambition. Most of the antagonists were not professional criminals, and that led me to consider what would make an otherwise ordinary person turn to murder. What worried me was that, considering some of the motives, it is a remarkably thin veneer of the social contract between the characters and their decision to commit murder. What reassures me is that the vast majority of real people, even given the emotional or economic pressures my characters had, don’t resort to crime.

Most recently, I’ve been starting with my protagonists, their strengths and weaknesses, and setting up antagonists specifically against those qualities. Anna Hoyt has a valuable tavern, but no real power against the crooks preying on her in 18th-century Boston. Gerry has fantastic powers as a PI and a werewolf, but what if the lynch-pin of his faith, his belief that all werewolves are dedicated to protecting humans, is wrong? It makes him incredibly vulnerable. Amy is a liberal reporter, the woman she knows only as “Spooky” is a covert operative with her own rules; together and individually, they have to decide what peace and democracy is worth. One life? A dozen? A hundred? Their own lives?

Inevitably, when I’m digging into the psyches of my characters, I’m playing out philosophical debates and emotional questions with myself. The summer I spent alternating perspectives between a stalker and his victim was one of the most grueling and intense ever, and having freed myself to go to those places, ask those questions, I know it won’t be the last time I experience that. It comes down to one question: driven to an extreme, what would you do? Are you capable of taking action? Speaking up? Staying silent? Changing yourself? Changing your mind?

That’s why I love writing crime fiction: you get to tackle all the big questions.

Archaeology is the exploration of the past, do you think that detective work depends on the past in order to execute justice?

I think understanding the past informs our notions of justice, and detective work, like archaeology, depends on context (including the past). But “justice” is different from “legality,” however, and knowing someone’s history and background might lead an investigator to pursue (or not) one avenue or another.

Tell us about ‘Boston Noir’.

Boston Noir is one of the dozens of the award-winning “City Noir” collections published by Akashic Books. Dennis Lehane is the editor and I was delighted to be invited to contribute a story along with writers like Dennis, Lynne Heitman, Jim Fusilli, and Brendan DuBois. I’ve lived in or near Boston most of my life, and have used the area and its history in one way or another in most of my work. “Femme Sole” was an opportunity to try something new to me, writing noir and in the third person. Never having written noir, I realized I needed to find a balance between including all the elements of a traditional noir story, and not sounding like I was trying to mimic the writers who’ve defined the style. So I chose the North End neighborhood—a waterfront is always a great setting for crime—and set the story in the 18th-century. As soon as I decided that, I knew I could honor the conventions and structure but keep my own voice, and Anna Hoyt, my protagonist, emerged and took over.

How would you define noir and how does it differ to the rest of your writing?

To me, noir fiction is about desperate people who don’t have the usual recourse to the law (for whatever reason) and are forced to resolve a criminal matter themselves. Usually, the protagonist is not a professional, and may be shady or even criminal him- or herself. I think there has to be a choice, in the end, or a sacrifice of some sort—the ending may be satisfying but is usually grim or bittersweet at best. So in “Femme Sole,” Anna lives in a time where there is nothing like a modern police force and as a woman, she doesn’t have the same social status as the men who threaten her, so she must find a way to take matters into her own hands—and survive.

With amateur sleuths, they usually are working with the local law enforcement to solve a crime, having been sucked into the investigation because of their specialized knowledge. Emma Fielding’s archaeological expertise and her access to various communities is one example. For me, these stories are similar to noir in that the protagonists discover ways to use their own skills and abilities. Unlike noir, however, amateur sleuth mysteries are ultimately more optimistic about changing things for the better. Emma thinks she can be a force for good in the world; Anna Hoyt is just concerned with surviving the next murky situation she finds herself in.

PI characters, like Gerry Steuben in “The Night Things Changed,” may take some of the same latitude as noir characters (there is a strong tradition of PIs in noir stories, of course), but Gerry, being a werewolf, assumes much more of the burden of investigating and meting out justice than he did when he was a cop. His powers hamper him as much as they aid him. And in my WIP espionage thriller, my covert operative has been trained to do things most people can’t—but does that mean she should?

All my characters are to some extent self-appointed in their pursuit of justice, and in most crime stories, there is an element of ethical debate—what is right for me to do? But in noir, it’s less theoretical because what is at stake is usually personal survival.

Do you think that revenge is lawless justice?

Holy cow–what a complex question!

It depends. If you’re talking about someone just going out and killing or hurting someone in retaliation for a perceived wrong, then yes, it is a kind of lawless justice, meaning that it is outside the law and justice perhaps only in the eyes of the person taking the action. I think there can be revenge, or attempts thereat, through the legal system. I think there is revenge that is not illegal, and is merely spiteful or meant to be hurtful. But are these true justice?  Depends on your point of view, depends on your culture, it depends on what you think of the law.  Now I have to go back and re-read The Count of Monte Cristo, for one.

In terms of lesser slights, I think living your life well is the best revenge—is that lawless justice?

Revenge, retribution, retaliation…all very slippery ideas, in the real world. But in fictional worlds… they make for great writing.

Nowadays identity theft represents a real threat that is being dramatised in fiction. To what extent do you think that crime fiction has at its heart the need for identity to be intact enough to survive menace?

May I say, I am having the best time with these questions, Richard! Most stories—any genre, any period—have some kind of conflict, and identity is usually at the heart of that. I believe identity is integral to crime fiction. The protagonist is inevitably challenged, torn between doing what is safe, what is smart, what is right. Hamlet is torn between avenging his father and regicide. In Chushingura (or The Forty-Seven Ronin), Yuranosuke gets drunk and eats meat on the night before the anniversary of his master’s death (unthinkable breaches of respect) in order to convince his enemies he’s not a threat—he’s tormented by this offense, but commits it so he can serve the larger imperative of revenge. Sam Spade has some pretty low moral standards, but sending his partner’s murderer to jail defines him as a detective and as a person.

In my own worlds, Anna Hoyt has to decide whether survival is worth submitting her self in marriage; Gerry Steuben has his faith shattered and must decide how to continue.

In each of these cases, decisions are made by the protagonists as to how far they can go, survive, and yet still be true to themselves. The identities being challenged—prince, samurai, detective, businesswoman, Fangborn—are even more important because they are internally determined by the characters. It’s how they see themselves, their self-definitions, and that matters more than external notions of who they are.

I think the point Charles Gramlich makes in his Chin Wag interview is spot on: Thrillers (and here I would say, most crime fiction) push the character to the edge, but he or she comes back, self intact, whereas in horror, the self is shattered and remade. In all the instances above, the characters would not be protagonists if they did not retain that one thing, a core of themselves. The story wouldn’t exist without that conflict in those characters.

What inspired you to write?

The short answer: someone held a gun on me.

The longer answer: I’d wanted to write since I was able to read, but decided at a very early age that I didn’t want to get into bar fights or run with the bulls (which is what I thought writers had to do). So I gave up that dream and turned to another, archaeology—this all between ages four and nine or ten. What I didn’t realize until much later was that I was studying humans and their needs and motivations at a very personal level—examining their homes, their belongings, their trash, their public and private documents—which is really excellent  training for a writer. Scientists and researchers have to communicate, and by learning to teach, I learned something about telling stories. I won’t say archaeologists are detached, but they do learn to look at things critically within context, and that, along with my academic background, taught me a lot about editing. And I kept reading voraciously the whole time.

The event that really flipped the switch took place on a site in Maine.

A pot hunter came out to the site where a colleague and I were surveying, and when my friend told him it was illegal to dig there without a permit (which we had, of course), he pulled a gun on us. A transit is not much to hide behind, and while this guy was screaming at us, I had to decide whether he’d shoot if I ran into the woods or whether he’d shoot if I did nothing. So I just memorized everything I could about him and his truck, and eventually, he left. We made a police report; months later, he was arrested for applying for a permit to dig on that site.

After that, I was telling the story to another friend, along with anecdotes about other near-misses in the field: the time a cement mixer rolled off the road and onto the site we’d just left for lunch, the friends who were shot at for working too close to someone’s concealed still, etc. She reminded me that these sorts of events weren’t necessarily commonplace and said I should write them down. Suddenly, I knew I had to try fiction. I began to write, found a writing group, attended Bread Loaf Writers Conference. My goal was to find tougher andtougher (and better) criticism for my work.

The questions that arose after that event are what got me writing fiction, though I’d been writing lots before then. The urge to explore human behavior was always there.

There is no single theory of archaeology. Michael Schiffer, one of the founders of behavioural archaeology, rejected the processual assumption that the archaeological record is a transparent fossil record of ancient societies and that the artefacts are destroyed by numerous cultural and natural processes. If we transpose that to detective work, to what extent is it impossible when dealing with cold cases that reopen dormant and unsolved crimes, to effectively decipher the past?

I’ll see your Schiffer and raise you a post-processualist…

Taphonomy is a word from the Greek, roughly meaning “the study of graves.” It’s one of my favorite words. In archaeology, it refers to the site formation processes that affect a site after  it’s abandoned. Artifacts may be destroyed because they are too fragile to survive, or carried off by animals, or picked up and reused by humans, and are subject to weather, geological shifts.  Any number of factors, at scales from the molecular to the global, affect how a site and its evidence may or may not be preserved.

Understanding these processes helps us interprets sites. Schiffer is right: sites aren’t usually completely intact time-capsules, and neither are crime scenes. Knowing how taphonomic forces work (and knowing how, say, bodies decay, the rate at which certain insects reproduce in a corpse, how animals may disturb or gnaw on bones and material clues, how soil chemistry affects the preservation of bones and artifacts,etc.), gives us more information to work with. But in archaeology, you can only make a good case for what might have happened; you can’t prove it.  You can only prove what absolutely couldn’t have happened.  Not completely satisfying, but still extremely useful.

So while I think cold cases can be re-opened with newer scientific techniques, and these offer more solutions and possibilities than in the past, they’re not perfect. CSI is glossy fun, it is entertainment, but it does real forensic experts a disservice by suggesting that these answers are now instantly available and irrefutably accurate. What we actually have is more ways of trying to solve a crime, more avenues of exploration. I think that is amazingly helpful to families who’ve lost loved ones and can now identify their remains. It’s not necessarily a straight line to who committed the crime, however.

Are you expanding your repertoire (with urban fantasy, noir, espionage, and historical crime fiction) in order to develop specific skills as a writer? Or are you inspired to write these different stories and are then changed by the experience of having written them?

For the most part, I started exploring different subgenres by being asked to contribute to anthologies. After that initial moment of giddiness at being asked to try something new, there would be the inevitable panic every writer faces when confronted with a new challenge. In some cases, it allowed me to explore genres I’ve loved but was not currently writing. In others, they were completely new to me, but the conventions and structures gave me a framework to start with, and then I got to discover another part of my voice. One WIP is not the result of an anthology convention, and that’s an espionage novel. I’ve always loved them, and want badly for this one to be something I would enjoy as a reader.

I am changed by what I write, and I’ve decided, as a writer, you can’t know too much about yourself. When I find myself shying away from writing a scene, and try to figure out why, it is often revelatory (and there’s usually some great material to exploit within that reluctance). Writing some characters makes me approach political issues differently than I might have before. It was easy writing about an archaeologist: I knew a lot about Emma and we shared many things in common. I’m not a werewolf, an 18th-century tavern owner, or a covert operative.

When I’m trying to make those characters real, I have to delve into emotions we might share, some of which aren’t very comfortable but are very powerful. If I can translate that into character building, I’m very happy. And, usually, that reflection gives me more insight about myself and others, which gives me more to work with.

Writing can change you emotionally and intellectually, but also physically. I now have a bad knee and ankle, thanks to several years of the mixed-martial arts training I used to inform several characters. I started running, because of Emma. Because I make music playlists for every story, novel, or character, years later, when that music comes on, I find myself having flashbacks to a particular piece of work. It’s weirdly Pavlovian, and can get a little freaky if I’m at a party and suddenly hear music that I used to write a brutal scene. But if I need to revisit a character, I have the environment to facilitate the work. It’s sunk into my bones.

Thank you for giving a profound and far-ranging interview Dana.

“Femme Sole” has been nominated for the Edgar, Agatha, Anthony, and
Macavity awards for “Best Short Story.”  You can read it, for a short
time, at her website.

Dana blogs with The Femmes Fatales, ferociously talented women devoted
to the fine art of crime fiction.