CT's latest rave is Cook's Robbers (No Exit Press); we asked him about the book's genesis...
A famous songwriter (whose name I don't recall) once said that to live an honest life a fellow's got to break the law. A lot of books have been made off that idea. And, it occurs to me, so has many a crime. Maybe that's why I write literary noir. It goes to the heart of motive. I've always thought it odd that when a person commits a generous deed, he's assumed to have acted from virtue, whereas the criminal is presumed to have been driven by immorality, or at best amorality. That such presumptions hold strong in Judeo-Christian cultures especially interests me. After all, the rabbi who passes an unconscious, beaten man in the road justifies his behaviour by citing a moral precept, while the Samaritan proves the better man precisely by breaking the rule. So much for the law.
What we are left with is motive. A generous man in fact may be acting out of self-interest. Indeed, free-market economists base an entire social ethic on that premise: charity holds down taxes. Meanwhile, a man who steals a loaf of bread because an entire social system is out of whack is labelled a criminal, as Victor Hugo so ably described. Given such confusion, where do we draw the line between the law and the criminal act, between the lawman and the lawbreaker? It's an honest question, and the answer is not so clear as the idolaters of law (or crime, either) would have us believe. But the lack of clarity does offer rich soil for the tilling of a good story. So why not get right to it? In my novel Robbers, the question of motive is established in the first two lines: Eddie didn't intend to shoot the guy, and didn't intend to rob him either. But he did. He got into an argument over a penny and committed the crime, and all that's left to see is how he pays for it. Or doesn't.
I've heard many a writer say that his or her novel began with a situation as simple as that. Mine certainly did. Unemployed, I was living in a small town in the mountains of central Mexico, paying my meagre way by shuffling money back and forth between half a dozen credit cards - a possibly criminal act in itself - when I thought of Eddie and his running buddy Ray Bob, both living on the drift, getting into a jam because they lacked the necessary funds for a packet of cigarettes. Next thing I knew, they were on the lam in a boosted Cadillac convertible. Naturally, I wanted to see where they were going. They weren't certain, nor was I. So we went together. Several months later, when I finished writing the book, we all knew. But I still wasn't sure who were the bad guys and who were the good guys. After all, life ain't simple. Neither is ethics. Maybe the most honest character in the book - and the smartest - turns out to have acted the basest. And maybe the least honest acted no better. Such circumstances drive those who categorise books nuts. Is this a mystery or a suspense novel? Is it a crime story or a police procedural? Or is it another animal altogether? Dostoevski gone off the rails, perhaps. This state of affairs, to my thinking, is why God created the handy genre called 'literary noir'.
The French first broached a philosophy we refer to as 'existential', in which any moral standards left standing after Nietzsche (however uneasily) were guillotined and neatly separated from theological authority. Any tenuous standards that are left emerge from our own frail humanity. It has been a great disappointment to many, this moral ambiguity, but not so disappointing as our inability to forge another moral authority from our own entrails. No-one could dissect this quandary as readily as Bertrand Russell, nor dismantle pretenders of a solution as quickly. But who reads philosophy nowadays, besides theologians? What is left for the average man or woman who pretends that existential questions apply only to others - who are muddled in their thinking and lack basic common sense, the only moral compass we seem to have found as of yet - is that red-headed offspring of the naughty French: literary noir. Having written Robbers, I was gratified to learn there was a category ready-made for it. I salute the one-eyed cyclops, Sartre, who made it possible for a character to shoot an innocent man and still seem charming. It was an honest act, and a crime.
So impressed was CT by Robbers, that we've trawled the US reviews…
Publishers Weekly - October 9th, 2000: (pre-release review)
The harsh, foreboding essence of rural Texas dominates Cook's bloody, bittersweet debut novel, charting the adventures of two criminal drifters and their pursuers. The boys' aimless adventure eventually includes Della, a woman who patterns her life on women's magazines and desperately aspires to middle-class respectability. Crafty Texas Ranger, Rule Hooks, picks up their scent. Hooks, a tracker by training and instinct, relies on modern police methods as well as his gut instincts to sniff out his prey. Cook's plot tumbles from scene to scene with jarring brilliance, the pathos of his characters lending his otherwise brutal world a certain beauty. His imagery is striking, almost lyrical. This gritty crime drama is not for the faint of heart, but Cook's prose sets it a notch above many like novels. The publisher compares the book to the work of James Lee Burke; if booksellers push this comparison, or if they aim the title at a hip, youthful readership, it could make out like a bandit.
Booklist October 15th, 2000:
(pre-release review by Bill Ott)
Eddie and Ray Bob are runnin' buddies, and they run for all they're worth, through Texas and Louisiana, in this high-octane first novel. Eddie starts shooting first, but it's really sociopath Ray Bob we have to worry about. Then there's Della, a hairdresser who hitches a ride in the runnin' buddies' ragtop caddy, and naturally three's a crowd. This may sound like a cross between Natural Born Killers and Will and Grace, but, in fact, it's something very different. Cook takes the noir chase novel (there's a persistent Texas Ranger on the boys' trail) on some remarkable detours. Yes, we feel the pathos of white-trash lives gone wrong, but soon enough, we've forgotten the big picture; we're runnin', too.
Kirkus Reviews November 15th, 2000:
(pre-release review)
First-timer Cook, a former journalist and human-rights activist, serves up 'running buddies' Ray Bob and Eddie, who follow up their prison stint with a killing spree motivated by a need for cold beer, pocket money and an amorality so deep it must have been implanted prenatally. Their demonic swathe through most of Texas leads them to Della. Meantime, Texas Ranger Rule Hooks and his tracking dog Lucky are closing in, as is another old-time lawman, out to avenge a relative who became one of the buddies' victims. Della, whose mentors are drawn from soap operas and the sleazier talk-show hosts, is appallingly funny, while Ray Bob's behaviour makes a powerful case for capital punishment without trial. Despite some schmaltz towards the end, an impressive first effort.
TCP magazine December 2000:
by Reed Holland
Robbers falls within the genre of darkly comic, smart-talk thrillers of Elmore Leonard, James Ellroy and James Lee Burke. Cook, whose novel will soon be published in England, France and Japan, writes with evangelical rhythms and a sheer joy for words that can make his prose read like Faulkner's or Cormac McCarthy's: "Vast stretches of land to a horizon unbroken save for lonely trailer homes perched queerly in the stepped green-brown expanse, as if dropped from the sky as an alien afterthought." Cook, who lives in Austin, aspires to the literary noire. He finds it in the wasteland along the Houston Ship Channel that once was a leper colony, a highway on the Bolivar Peninsula broken away by the Gulf of Mexico, and a hardwood overstory so thick in Jasper County that a deluge of rain roars on the canopy, slowly dripping through, as the action takes a hair-raising turn. Make what you will of Cook's antiheroes, violence and frank carnality, but here's a Texas writer whose eye is keen, and whose voice is sure and strong.
Some more excerpted reviews for Robbers:
Texas Monthly magazine, December 2000:
Vice Grip: Cook's Recipe For Crime
In one sense this earthy first novel by Christopher Cook is a feel-good book: compared with the title character, you can't help but feel good about your own relatively decent self. In Robbers, two aimless outlaws, Ray Bob and Eddie, hook up and, in a sort of quien-es-mas-macho contest, set out on a killing adventure that is far too casual to be called a spree. A surly Texas Ranger lopes after them in determined pursuit, a chance encounter with a wayward beautician causes even more tension for the gunning buddies. The characters are hardly sympathetic, but Cook clearly has the suspense-building gene; his writing, fluid yet visceral, compels the reader to hang in there while the nerve-jangling plot tick-tick-ticks toward its explosive end. The author especially excels in the laconic, cuss word-laced dialogue of Western menfolk (cuss word-laced? Hell, it's filthy!) and in clever coinages all his own: For example, he dubs the West Coasters moving to Austin 'cyberokies' and the brutish, red-headed Ray Bob is a 'coppernob'. For such a writer, crime (fiction) can't help but pay.
The New York Times Book Review, December 24, 2000
(from Crime by Marilyn Stasio):
Bad boys like Ray Bob and Eddie need no introduction; they are just what they are, 'outsiders from the rural frontier: young and unemployed and broke, trawling boredom after a late greasy lunch.' Christopher Cook puts the match to these combustible 'running buddies' in Robbers, a debut novel with classic noir bones, when he sets them down in Austin, Texas, in a stolen Eldorado and points them to the highway. Cook covers it with fearless originality, in a lyric voice that sings itself raw.
Titles
all title links to amazon.co.uk
except where specified
