Fantastic Metropolis

I am no one’s idea of a biographer. I have neither the general sensibility nor the brass tacks skills required for the job. I have a precarious sense of balance and, occasionally, I fail to see the patterns below the surface of mundane life. Despite this, I spent most of 2003 on a kind of biographical quest that was, sometimes simultaneously, both a tease and an uncomfortable lesson. I spent the year tracking the noir-est of noir scribes, James Loftus.

Look: I’m more thankful than most that we’ve reclaimed Jim Thompson. And while I’d like to see a little more work done to pull the bones of David Goodis and Gil Brewer from the mass grave of forgotten writers, nobody deserves resurrection more than Loftus. His was an entirely American, uniquely twisted, deeply disturbing, and wholly subversive consciousness that found expression only in the gutter, safely under the radar of the mid-century arbiters of sanctioned culture. And like many of his peers in the seedy alleys of the paperback crime novel, his life mirrored his work and his work repeatedly played with the grim tragedy that was his life.

He was born in 1918, in a farm town outside of Pittsfield, Mass. His father was a labourer at the Arnold Print Works. His mother was a chambermaid at a local hotel. Both parents were killed in a house fire in 1930. The blaze may or may not have been a case of arson. This was the first and, in the end, perhaps, the last mystery. As there were no relatives, the boy was sent to the Nazareth School, a home for foundlings in Worcester run by the Sisters of Mercy. He spent the next five years at the Nazareth, grief-stricken, miserable and rebellious. His only consolation was the school’s large library, where he lost himself in voracious reading.

It reads, perhaps, like Dickensian pastiche. But from a Dickens freeze-dried and reanimated in mid-twentieth century America. A Dickens with a tendency to binge on Kafka and Dilaudid. A Dickens who wrote non-fiction noir about a haunted, hardboiled writer named James Loftus.

Don’t bother running to the bookstore to search out Loftus’s work. Unlike his compatriot Thompson, Loftus has remained entirely out of print for the last three decades. And don’t bother hightailing it to the library. Loftus wrote the kinds of stories that civic institutions tend to frown upon. You might have some luck scrounging up a copy of Absolute Night or Drifter on the collector’s circuit. But you’ll pay through the nose and, more often than not, you’ll come away with an abridged version or, worse, one of the pirated knock-offs rewritten by nameless hacks and editors to appease the day’s censors.

Such is the hard-luck story of the writer whom fellow crime novelist Gil Brewer called “the walking heartbreak.”

“I was happy for 15 years,” Loftus once wrote Brewer. “That’s more than a lot of mammals get.”

One day, I hope to have the details and the time required to report fully on the three acts of noir opera that is the Loftus lifetime—his harrowing experience at Okinawa, his battles with opiates and Hollywood, the still-unsolved murder of his wife and daughter. Until then, here is a list of the Loftus novels that I reread last year and my thumbnail impressions of why they are precious underground myths of a reality overflowing with a dark but essential meaning.

1. A God Gone Sick (1950, Beachcomber)

Loftus’s debut novel is a tale of seduction, betrayal and murder reminiscent of James M. Cain. And for its time, the sex and violence quotient is surprisingly high. The story of Flemming, a small-time boxer hustling around the Tijuana circuit, the book reads like a typical pulp fable until the arrival of Lucy, the nymphet new wife of fight promoter Jacob Ward. When Flemming and Lucy hit the canvas, the book shifts into high gear and speeds along until the inevitable demise of the cuckolded husband. Loftus convincingly sketches the gritty, seamy feel of the third-rate gyms and hotels, the exhausted all-night coffee shops and bus stations. The plot is hardly innovative. It is in the development of the characters that Loftus shines his first time out, easily conveying the wobbly morality and latent desperation of Flemming, the brute savagery of Ward and, especially, the Lolita cunning of Lucy.