Say Hello To Ray Banks And Goodbye To Callum Innes
Brian Greene

Say Hello to Ray Banks and Goodbye to Callum Innes

By Brian Greene

You can't have an open container of alcohol on the street. It's illegal. The upstanding citizens of Manchester frown on it.

The upstanding citizens can go shit in a bucket. They haven't had the day I've had.

That passage comes from Alan Slater, the narrator of Ray Banks's 2004 debut novel, The Big Blind. It's one of the many bits from the book that give the reader a chuckle. Banks is always doing this, making you laugh with his biting sarcasm. But there's really nothing funny about Slater's situation in the book. A volatile friend and former co-worker keeps dragging Slater into his problems, Slater keeps trying to stay away but getting suckered in, and in the end he becomes involved in a murder. The book is a sharply-written account of an escalating nightmare and calls to mind the hellfire circumstances that often make up the storylines in Jim Thompson's novels. Its theme of someone who's just trying to go about his business being brought down by association with a fuckup brings David Goodis to mind.

Banks's second novel, Saturday's Child, introduced the character of Callum Innes: an ex-con, sometimes PI, codeine addict, and inveterate smartass. Cal doesn't start his days looking for trouble, but it always seems to find him. He could probably be content doing his work as caretaker at a gym where trouble boys seek to make themselves boxers and keep out of jail. Even hacking at handing out eviction notices for a slumlord is better than the kind of full-scale bother Cal just seems to be destined for. At one point in the past Cal and his junkie ne'er-do-well brother got tied in with "Uncle" Morris Tiernan, Manchester's most feared gangboss, and Tiernan's vicious son Mo, and that's the kind of association you can never really pull away from. Another unwanted constant in Cal's life is the presence of Detective Sergeant Iain Donkin: a sadistic copper who's every bit as hard as the cons he's always slapping around, and who has it in for Cal.

Beast of Burden, due to be published this March, is the fourth and final Innes book. In it, Cal is slowly recovering from the stroke he suffered in the Armageddon-like last pages of No More Heroes, using a walking stick to get around and having trouble making sentences. But that doesn't stop him from running a PI firm with another ex-con out of an office at the gym, it doesn't stop Donkin from hounding him, and it doesn't stop Uncle Morris from asking Cal to look for Mo when the latter goes missing. Cal finds Mo dead around the same time Donkin gets suspended from the police force, these circumstances bringing about the unlikeliest pair of renegade investigators to ever look into a murder together.

Beast of Burden is Ray Banks's most fully realized novel to date. The guy had a command of his pen already when he wrote The Big Blind, and he just keeps getting better. The characters in this book (all of his books) are outrageous yet they are as real as your mortgage bill; the taut, tense storyline grabs your throat on page one and never lets go; and Banks shifts around from dark humor to hardboiled grittiness to gut-wrenching emotion, seamlessly. Plus, the Innes books are at their best when Cal is tangling with Donkin and the Tiernans.

The best noir fiction writers are the ones who don't have to labor at making their characters and storylines appear authentic. They also remember that, social observation and a convincing portrait of the underworld aside, what brought the reader to the book was the desire to be told a compelling yarn. Chandler, Thompson, Lewis – they wrote in ways that changed how a crime novel could be done, they created whole worlds with their fiction that people are still trying to catch up to, but they also kept the pages turning. Ray Banks does these same things, and he does it while simultaneously reminding you of yesterday's great noir writers and bringing his own unique, contemporary voice into the proceedings. And he does it while making you laugh so damn hard you almost forget to scream in terror.

Some choice Banks humor:

From The Big Blind, a scene where Slater's "friend" Les Beale is giving him some insider's advice on how to carry on in a casino:

Beale: When a casino opens, the manager is supposed to spin the first ball on the roulette wheel, right?

Slater: Right.

Beale: The number that comes up is a lucky number for the casino. You never want to forget that number, man – it never comes in, I swear to God.

Slater: Which number was it?

Beale: Fuck knows. I was arseholed.

From Saturday's Child, the end of a scene where a bar pickup Cal makes turns into nowt:

Girl: Taxi's waiting. And from the look of him, he's already flipped the meter.

Cal: Course. Sorry. Look, I will call you, okay?

Girl: I know. And look, I'm glad you're a gentleman. I think I have a yeast infection.

Cal (narrating now): Who says romance is dead?

From Donkey Punch, a scene where Cal, in Los Angeles and in no mood for a friendly talk, gets cornered by a chatty American:

American: You're British.

Cal: If you want.

American: I have a cousin in Birmingham.

Cal: Alabama?

American: England.

Cal: Right enough. I think I know him.

American: You do?

Cal: Yeah. Ugly lad, right? Won't let people drink in peace?

From No More Heroes, Cal thinking to himself how he should answer his friend Frank's question, the one about what Cal saw and thought during the thirteen seconds when he was dead after having a stroke:

Nothing.

Like there was no God, no heaven, just this eternity of darkness. And that didn't scare me one bit, because deep down, after all those years of hard pews, fire, brimstone and guilt, it was precisely what I'd always wanted. No big man in the sky. No welcome party. No judgement day. No next life, just a lack of this one.

But I'm not about to tell Frank all that. He's a Methodist. He wouldn't take it well.

From Beast of Burden, Detective Sergeant Donkin being informed of his suspension from the force and being asked why he can't get along with the Detective Inspector:

Donkin: Just a difference of opinion.

Superior: Which is?

Donkin: I think he's a cunt; he thinks different.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________

Ray and I had the following e-mail exchange, after I'd read - and been floored by -Beast of Burden

•After writing Saturday's Child, did you know you would do several more Innes novels?

I knew if Saturday's Child got published, there'd be the expectation of a series, and I knew that if I was going to write a series, it would have to be a limited one. I'd already set my stall out by making the violence have a lasting effect, so that put the kibosh on a long-running series. So I figured five books, tops. In the end, it turned into four.

•In what ways are you and Cal similar, and how different? With each successive novel, did the two of you become more alike or otherwise?

Tell you, we used to be a lot more similar, but one year to him is like four to me (and he's been through a hell of a lot in that one year), so of course any similarities have necessarily fallen away. We still have the same sense of humour – I don't know how easy it is to fake something like that. I don't drink nearly as much as he does, though. Not now, anyway.

•Are you going to miss Cal?

No way. I've already moved on.

•You've said often that you prefer to tell crime stories from the vantage point of the criminal and not the police, because the perspective of the former is what you find interesting. Yet in Beast of Burden you've got Detective Sergeant Donkin telling half the story. Granted, "Donkey" carries out his police work like a vigilante, but still, what made you decide to let him have his say?

I short-changed the guy in Saturday's Child, and it bugged me enough to do something about it. Plus, the cheeky part of me wanted to have a middle-aged maverick detective with idiosyncratic taste in music (though not, I hasten to add, my taste in music), and then put him into what I thought was a more realistic environment. So most of his colleagues think he's a joke and he's a hair away from getting the sack. His anger management issues aren't nearly as sexy as your typical maverick copper, either.

•You knew I was going to bring Ted Lewis into this. Lewis is often called to my mind as I read your books. One thing that did this is the parallel narrators in Saturday's Child and Beast of Burden; in both cases the other narrator, besides Innes, is his nemesis, be it Mo Tiernan or Donkin. Made me think of Brian Plender and Peter Knott. Did Lewis inspire you to try this?

I didn't read Plender until after I wrote Saturday's Child, and the idea for Mo's narration came directly from my wife, but there's definitely a few nods to Lewis in Beast of Burden, not least the main plot, which owes a little something to Jack's Return Home. I'm flattered that you thought of him, though, thank you. He's a big influence, absolutely – the man had an artist's mind and a hardboiled heart, and I think he made significant changes to British crime fiction. It's just a terrible shame that only one book of his is in print. But I reckon if I just keep talking about him, someone might take the hint and snap up those rights.

•You've pulled from your experiences working as a double glazing salesman and croupier and used it in your writing. Are you doing day-job work now that is likely to provide you with copy in that way?

Whenever you work with people, you pick up stories. It's inevitable. My current day job is in a hospital, so the faces are many and the stories even more so.

•Do the people at your day job know much about your books? Do you talk about your writing with them, or are you leading two fully compartmentalized lives?

My colleagues don't know anything about the books, and I hope to keep it that way. Raises too many questions otherwise, and I'd rather be seen as a loser than a loser with pretensions.

•Donkey Punch is set in America, Los Angeles no less. How much time have you spent in the U.S.? Where have you been? Any impressions you care to share with an American?

Well, my wife is American and so is my agent, so they helped immeasurably with the American stuff in Donkey Punch. I've only spent a little time in the U.S. (in various places), but most of the peripheral events in Donkey Punch actually happened – for example, there is a crazy woman who comes out at five in the morning to feed the many, many cats of Santa Monica, and that homeless guy was in Chicago, but I've quoted him almost verbatim. I love the States for its extremes, and its undying can-do attitude. It's still a tremendously alluring country to a Brit, I think, even if all your toilet bowls have too much water in them.

•You've often said that most of your favorite crime writers are Americans. Is there something particular about American people, and its cities, that makes it more fertile ground for noir, or are there not enough good writers who have drawn upon underworld aspects of life in the UK (and other parts of the world, for that matter) that could be compellingly explored in crime fiction?

I think Britain's an incredibly fertile breeding ground for noir, I just don't think a lot of writers want to deal with it. I also think that the American crime novel has its roots more firmly in social realism than its British counterpart, and even now, when a British crime novel does deal with social issues, it's invariably through the lens of a police detective protagonist, who normally arrives after the real drama has taken place and who promises the reader some kind of easy resolution. So while the modern American crime novel was borne out of the dirt of Steinbeck and Caldwell, while it got down to the blood and bone, it sometimes feels as if us Brits are still peeking over Wilkie Collins' shoulder a little, and that we're scared to get too close to the action. As for noir, it is by definition transgressive, and "transgressive" obviously doesn't have broad appeal. In America, I think it's possible to write noir and make a living at it, simply because your niche audience is still potentially huge. In Britain, writers don't have that choice – they need to write to the biggest possible audience they can in order to stay in print. This is why I'm not published by a large crime-orientated press in the UK. I'm actually literary over here. My mum's very proud.

•In reading other interviews you've done in the past, one answer you gave caught my attention especially. You said that you once had thoughts of being a filmmaker but turned away from that and into writing because being a writer suited your temperament more, it being more of an individual pursuit. Can you elaborate on that line of thought some?

Cinema was my first love, and it's still a big part of my life, but in order to work in the movies I think you have to have a certain level of social ability – you have to be able to deal with large groups of people, and you have to ask other large groups of people for even larger bundles of cash. So I suppose I just became more aware of the process, and decided to take that dream of being the unholy hybrid of Alan Clarke and Martin Scorcese and pour it into books. With books, I get to write, direct, cast whoever I want and I don't have to test in front of an audience of teenagers. It could be a control thing, I suppose, or it could just be the self-sufficiency of being able to create something potentially special alone in a room. Whatever it is, I'm happy doing it.

•Slater's relationship to his girlfriend is much of the driving force behind The Big Blind, and Cal almost gets involved with a girl in Saturday's Child. But in the last three books there's really none of that kind of thing; did you purposely keep romantic entanglement out of those books?

The original drafts of No More Heroes had Donna coming back into his life, but it ended up on the cutting room floor. Cal himself isn't much of a ladies' man for a very good reason, though. I won't spoil it, but it's alluded to in a couple of the books, and I think he actually says why in Beast of Burden.

•There are well read people who will never touch a book if they gather it has some elements of crime in the plot – they write it off as a "mystery," or a "thriller," and hold themselves above it. Is it worth telling them that The Long Goodbye, Down There, Jack's Return Home, etc, are psychologically complex, emotionally dense works done by people who could write circles around many of the literary cognoscenti's darlings, or do we leave them to their conceits?

Fuck 'em. They're just as narrow-minded as those who proudly say they haven't read a book since school. Leave them to their obfustication and navel-gazing, and let the whole ridiculous argument about genre be left to those with time on their hands and egos to stroke. The rest of us will plug on with our books (whether they be literary, noir, hardboiled or cosy) and keep writing the stories we want to read. Everything else is white noise and counter-productive.

•Noir fiction is such a niche market. Are you content writing for people who are already inclined to like what you do, or do you sometimes long to reach a wider and more general readership?

To be honest, I don't think about it. I write what I want to write. If it gets published, that's fantastic. If people buy it, even better. Longing for a bigger readership is a good way to lose your mind, man. I'm not going down that alley.

•Give me 10 novels that would make the top shelf of your bookcase and which could not be considered crime fiction.

One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey

Last Exit To Brooklyn, Hubert Selby Jr

Ask The Dust, John Fante

A Feast of Snakes, Harry Crews

Stone Junction, Jim Dodge

Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates

Senseless, Stona Fitch

Factotum, Charles Bukowski

Winter's Bone, Daniel Woodrell

I Am Legend, Richard Matheson

•OK, let's close with the inevitable what's next question. Now that you're done with the Innes series, where you do you go from here?

I'm working on a few things at the moment – nothing I can really talk about, unfortunately, superstitious as I am – but there's nothing pressing. But Beast of Burden doesn't hit US shores until 2011, so I reckon I've got a little time to come up with something spectacular. And when I do, you'll be the first to know. Actually, no, my wife will probably be the first, but I'll definitely tell you at some point.

Posted at 2:47PM Friday 06 Feb 2009