Happy Birthday Mr. Gifford
Happy 63rd to Barry Gifford, author of a pile of intense modern noir and vast amounts of nonfiction. Best known for his seven Sailor and Lulu novels — one of which was made into the David Lynch film Wild at Heart — Gifford has written dozens of other books, fiction and nonfiction, as well as the screenplay for Lynch’s Lost Highway.
My personal “we are not worthy” factor with Gifford, however, is that in the 1980s, he started the Black Lizard imprint as part of the Creative Arts Book Company, in Berkeley, California. Back in my tender years, I stumbled across Black Lizard books at Bookshop Santa Cruz (the location that would later collapse in the ‘89 quake, resulting in the death of a friend of a friend).
Back then Black Lizard Books weren’t the classy, art-photo-cover trade paperbacks they would become after Random House bought the imprint in 1990 and merged it with Vintage Crime. These were small-press-lookin’, trash-art kinda dirty mass-market paperbacks with art deco covers. Knowing nothing about crime fiction beyond Raymond Chandler and Agatha frickin’ Christie, I grabbed and devoured them in the stacks because I was too poor to buy them. How weird is it that I was either to ethical or too chickenshit to shoplift books about bad-ass criminals?
For about a year, a trip to the mystery section was for me a visit to Skimmsville. As a result, some of those books I have only the vaguest recollections of, but they blasted a big fat hole in my brain, opening up, in that special way only violence can, new vistas of thought and dreams of black-souled perdition. Jim Thompson, Peter Rabe, Charles Willeford, David Goodis and Harry Whittington were some of the Black Lizard authors I remember discovering for the first time during my lean years in SC. If I’d been more of a criminal, I might still keep them, cherished, in a shoebox alongside my .45. If that had been true, or if I had never stumbled across Black Lizard, things might have gone different, pal, different indeed.
Vintage Crime/Black Lizard continued to publish great crime fiction, but I will forever have my fondest memories of the early years of Black Lizard, and their trashy little paperbacks that hacked into my soul the old-fashioned way. Happy Birthday, Mr. G.
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