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.

2. The Other Tracks (1951, Gold Medal)

Drawing on hobo lore and the wandering tramp literary tradition, Loftus’s sophomore effort is an uneven book, part Naturalistic road tale, part seedy murder yarn. While it’s a bit of a hash, the standout sections deal with Bolt, the sadistic rail bull and scourge of the ‘bos. The torture and murder scenes are harrowing, especially a prolonged chapter in which Bolt taunts and teases a helpless rummy (in front of an amused audience composed of his one-time loyal traveling companions) before executing the vagabond. Unfortunately, Bolt himself is killed off too soon and the novel’s remaining chapters are essentially anticlimactic.

3. Damn the Circus (1951, Lion)

A sordid and sweaty tale of a traveling carnival and, especially, of a clique of murderous freaks. The book feels more like a horror story than a crime novel. It makes for some squeamish reading, particularly Loftus’s almost loving recitation of the various physical deformities found among the troupe. The plot involves an escalating battle of wills between the carny’s owner and the (Bolt-like) sadistic Sheriff Campbell, demagogue of the southern town in which the troupe has found itself stranded. There is a subplot that pivots on a love triangle between Inez, the fat woman, Scoot, the dog-faced boy and, yes, Ramona, the hermaphrodite. A fast and greasy read, the book was banned upon publication in some counties of Georgia and Alabama.

4. Absolute Night (1952, Lion)

Changing his setting from the rural to the decidedly urban, Loftus delivers a short, sharp slap of a book. This novel feels as if its writer is gaining speed, momentum and confidence for what will be a star turn. Absolute Night isn’t exactly a practice run, but its brevity and single-mindedness are, perhaps, too severe. The story of Crane, a former prisoner of war, tortured and partially crippled by the Japanese at Battan, he returns home to find his hell has yet to abate.

His wife has died during his captivity and their infant daughter has vanished into a nightmare of deceit and bureaucracy. For five years, Crane has dragged himself from city to city, sleeping in fleabag hotels and rooting out dead-end leads in search of his child.

The entire book takes place on the last night of that search, as Crane tears apart an unnamed but inhuman city of mazes and shadows to find his last chance of redemption. Dark, ultra-violent, semi-surreal in places and all of one note, the book moves like a shark through bloody waters. Some feel that it is Loftus’s greatest achievement. Others, an obsessive near miss.

5. Refugee (1952, Lion)

Loftus’s breakthrough novel and arguably his masterpiece. Stark and tight, but still thick with an atmosphere of loss and foreboding, Refugee has the feel of a deathbed confession screamed into the world with a final breath. And punctuated with a death rattle. The story of Brewer (in homage to friend, Gil Brewer), a man on the run and seeking revenge, a man beyond history and identity, the novel is likely the most violent book in the writer’s oeuvre. And with Loftus, that’s saying something. Refugee, one might argue, lights the fuse laid by Absolute Night. Brewer is another of Loftus’s haunted veterans. Though his background is only hinted at, it seems that he took an undeserved fall in a kangaroo war crimes trial and did some time in a military prison on charges stemming from a horrific village massacre.

The book finds Brewer on the day of his discharge, as he receives a letter informing him that his long-lost father is dying and that an inheritance of some sort awaits him. The letter, however, contains no information as to where Brewer might find the patriarch. His only clue is a key to a roadside motel room in another state. He proceeds at once to steal a car, possibly murdering its ownerwe are never entirely sure what is real and what is a product of a shell-shocked brain. At the first motel, Brewer waits for some contact through a Godot-like night, during which he shoots up a hallucinatory drug and experiences flashes of the massacre carnage.

In desperation, he roots in a bureau for a Gideon bible and retrieves instead a moldy, goatskin diary, secured with a clasp. He breaks the seal, finds a key to yet another roadside motel room. And reads unknown details of his own lost childhood. And so, it’s off to the races, as Brewer traverses an America that becomes more and more phantasmagoric. He moves from motel to motel (they’re all the cookie cutter products of an increasingly sleazy chain), collecting additional diaries that reveal additional (and sometimes conflicting) information about his past.

Between motel stops he steals cars, holds up liquor stores, visits a Gothic brothel, exhumes a grave, and evades a growing cadre of police and the angry ghosts of the massacred villagers. It would be a sin and a crime to give the ending away. Suffice it to say that the conclusion of this radical, shocking, perhaps mad, perhaps brilliant little pulp novel beautifully fulfils all of the overwhelming insanity that precedes it. A book waiting to be rediscovered and sanctioned as a deeply American classic.

6. Tremble (1954, Pocket)

Unable to sustain the fever pitch of Refugee, Loftus’s follow up book is a qualified letdown. Tremble has its moments but overall the novel feels forced and, tellingly, exhausted. Written, according to notes on the manuscript’s end page, in just two weeks, the novel tells the story of the growing relationship between Alma, a nurse at the Norcross Asylum, and a new patient, Harris, a convicted killer suffering from “dementia praecox.” The first half of the book is told from Alma’s point of view and it climaxes in a bizarre, disturbing scene in which nurse and patient copulate, violently, in a medieval-seeming “lobotomy lab.” The second half of the book is relayed from Harris’s point of view and, while it moves more quickly, its episodes become increasingly unhinged. The book devolves into a series of roadside murders as the couple drive headlong toward their ultimate fate, a confrontation with Harris’s equally disturbed father.

7. Null & Void (1956, Avon)

While Loftus doesn’t return to the heights of Refugee here, Null & Void represents a reclaiming of professional control after the macabre bombast of Tremble. A straight crime story of the good-man-gone-bad variety, it tracks the course of Ross Vernon, an everyman clerk at the registry of deeds who gets mixed up in a land fraud scheme that leads to kidnapping and murder. The book sold well and was apparently optioned for a time as a proposed vehicle for director Ted Tetzlaff.

8. Mendacity (1958, Perma)

In some ways, Mendacity can be considered Loftus’s most controversial novel. And not necessarily because of its subject matter—the pimps and prostitutes congregating along Tijuana’s Avenida Revolucion.

9. Drifter (1962, Popular Library)

Loftus’s entry in the serial killer genre, written and published years before that term had entered the American vocabulary. Local police and Federal agents still referred to such cases as “drifter murders” back in the early 1960s and the novel has the thick, foreboding atmosphere that this lost phrase suggests. Set in an unnamed beach town that resembles Truro or Wellfleet or any of the small towns at the tip of Cape Cod where Loftus occasionally resided in the mid-fifties.

10. The Tyranny of Evil Men (1965, Bantam)

Loftus’s most crafted and polished novel, it is also his longest and most self-assured book, written at the height of his confidence and control, during his “great pardon,” or “the season of homemade gravy,” as he called it in a letter to pal Gil Brewer. The writer took his time on this one and it shows. A recasting of Richard III as a gangster story, the plot is crafted, measured, even masterful. The characterization is complex and subtle. Some extant correspondence between Loftus and his editor indicates that the novel was originally considered for hardcover publication and the writer took this as a sign of “imminent breakthrough.”

Unfortunately, if not surprisingly, Tyranny’s release was utterly and irredeemably bungled. The cover art featured a crude and anachronistic illustration of a 1920s-era Tommygun-wielding cartoon mobster. Whether due to the timing or the hokey cover, the book received almost no reviews. And so, what should have been the novel that ushered Loftus into stability and respectability became instead the prelude to the tragedy that would derail the writer forever.

11. Man in a Suitcase #1: Brainwash (1969, Ace)

Adapted, very loosely, from the teleplay by Francis Megahy and Bernie Cooper, this almost incoherent novelization of a short-lived television show was the result of the writer’s sudden need for cash. The series had already been cancelled by the time the book finally hit the stands.

12. Limbo (1972, Lancer)

Loftus’s last book is, in its own unique way, a fitting end to a hard and, ultimately, nonsensical life. A hallucinatory roman a clef about a writer who suffers a breakdown following the death of his wife and child, it is a wonder that it was even published. The pseudo-psychedelic cover art indicates that Lancer was hoping to ride the last wave of late ’60s road and drug epics. But this dark, dense story is a wildly unstructured affair. The burned-out, cross-country journey back to the suffocating New England farm town where it all began recycles motifs from Refugee. The most coherent and compelling sections are the writer’s letters to an unnamed “future apologist.” In the charred remains of the writer’s childhood home, he meets the ghosts of all the people he has lost along the way. The ghosts are reading from the tattered paperback copies of the writer’s collected works. Issued during Loftus’s disappearance, it appears he never saw the published book.

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Jack O’Connell is the author of the novels Box Nine, Wireless, The Skin Palace and Word Made Flesh.