Fantastic Metropolis

David Soyka: The detective novel at times seems to be recognized as a legitimate literary form—witness, for example, the critical attention to Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless in Brooklyn—but, at the same time, it’s often relegated as a genre that is somehow intended primarily as entertainment. Given the obvious literary aspirations of your work, do you feel that being labeled as a writer of a particular genre in any way hindering? Or, is it in some ways liberating?

Ray Nayler: I think that the detective novel has actually been recognized as a valid literary form for some time, although not always here. The French, for example, point to the American detective novel as high art, and found Jim Thompson and Raymond Chandler, among others, to be fine practitioners of the existential novel, before its time. Camus was a fan of Thompson and other crime writers. Almost everyone respects Poe as a major innovator, and he is the father of the genre. Many of our finest “mainstream” novels have been crime or mystery novels in thin disguise. I think that the genre has always done well. On the other hand, the genre will always suffer somewhat from the stigma of being purely “entertainment.” That is partially the fault of the many sloppy writers in the genre, a tradition that goes back as far as the tradition of fine writing done in the name of Detective and Crime fiction. There is quite a bit of garbage out there, and there always has been. But then there is quite a bit of garbage in the literary novel field, and in any artistic endeavor. The Detective genre isn’t immune from bad writing, but neither is any other market. I think that the problem lies more in the public perception of Detective fiction, boiled down to its simplest elements of tough investigators, femme fatales and gunplay. That’s unfortunate, but it isn’t the fault of the genre. It is the fault of consumerism. People using Bogart to sell coffee or butter. People not paying attention.

David Soyka: Here comes the obligatory interview question, “What writers influenced you?”

Ray Nayler: It’s odd to say, but I think that William Styron influenced me the most at first. I read Set This House On Fire and I wanted to write like that. Jim Thompson and Cornell Woolrich were influences on me for sure. And there is no avoiding Chandler. Bret Easton Ellis is, at times, inspiring. But if you asked me what book I carried around the longest, and what book affected me the most early on, I would say it was a collection of poems by Wilfred Owen. I still envy his power over the word.

David Soyka: What’s on your bedside reading table these days?

Ray Nayler: At just this moment, I’m reading The Man With the Golden Arm by Nelson Algren. Under that is Manifestoes of Surrealism, by André Breton. I just finished Chuck Palahniuk’s Choke about a week ago. I enjoyed that book. He’s a brilliant writer. I also picked up a collection of Sherlock Holmes stories, and am looking forward to reading and rereading some of those. Then there’s always the Freud Reader. You can never get enough Freud. That stays on the nightstand.

David Soyka: Something tells me you must listen to guys like Tom Waits. What is it about losers and the underbelly of the American dream that makes it such an attractive venue for artists to mine?

Ray Nayler: I was having a conversation with a friend of mine a couple of weeks ago about class–working class, middle class, and upper class. These days it can be confusing trying to figure out your own class. You can be poor but have things. You can be middle class but feel poor. We were searching for indicators of class. What we came up with was Laundromats. The more times you’ve been to a Laundromat as a child, the poorer you were. Flea markets can be another indicator. And if you ever had to buy your school clothes at the thrift store (not the vintage clothing store, and not so you could look cool) that marks you as poor. So I’ll put it this way: I saw a lot of Laundromats as a kid, and I wore a lot of terry shirts and corduroy pants that were long out of style. Tom Waits is great, but being poor and eating church yams is not that great. I don’t really care for artists “slumming it” by mining that kind of thing. Or for artists making fun of the working poor, making them into caricatures. I had my time in suburbia too, and that’s in my fiction. But at the core of it, my family was poor. That doesn’t make my fiction more or less authentic, but it might give an answer as to where it comes from. As for the American Dream–maybe if I write well enough I can have a bit, by and by. In the meantime, I chalk up all the dirty dishes and boxes to deliver and conveyor belts to experience. More things to write about. Or am I not supposed to tell anyone I haven’t quit my day job yet?

This interview originally appeared in the now-defunct Blue Murder.