Now he's a published novelist. After years of scrapes and diversions, he has emerged with a well-received crime noir. It's all good.
Screenwriter Tom Epperson is living his dream
Tom Epperson, a longtime Hollywood screenwriter and even more longtime aspiring novelist, is a gentle man who's just published a brutal book. Epperson, who has a shy Arkansas twang and a slight hangdog manner, was talking on a recent afternoon about his 1930s-esque noir, "The Kind One," at Musso & Frank's in Hollywood, a place he loves for its literary ghosts.
"I know the amnesia thing is standard in noir, it's a little familiar," Epperson, 56, said of the book's protagonist, who has no idea who he is. "But it's so much fun. There's a reason why it's used so often, because it's an investigation into the nature of your own identity. In a sense we're all doing that. I don't believe people who say they understand existence: I think it's a mystery we're all trying to figure out."
It's a comment you wouldn't expect from the author of "The Kind One," whose narrator, Danny, has a good heart but no evident inner life or philosophical yearning. He's interested in surviving from day to day, and that's not always easy.
Danny works for a sadistic gangster who's part Bugsy Siegel, part Mickey Cohen and part Lucky Luciano. This gang leader's actions -- including an opening scene that is horrible without being at all graphic -- were inspired by several contemporary Mexican gangsters.
The book, which has been endorsed by L.A. writers Robert Crais and Carolyn See, was recently praised in The Times. Eric Miles Williamson called the novel "a circus of clichés" -- but in a good way. "On every page, the language is crisp and fresh, the details sharp and keenly observed, the dialogue real, never forced."
Part of what makes the book, which at times reads perhaps too much like a screenplay, appealing is its period setting, which comes from the author's deeply rooted love of the '30s. The decade has special resonance for an L.A. crime novel: Though the book doesn't directly echo the early work of Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain -- and the author avoided revisiting the former because he feared Philip Marlowe's voice would overwhelm his own -- noir casts its grim shadow. Epperson read Carey McWilliams' "Southern California: An Island on the Land" and books about bootlegging and crime, and watched every period film he could get his hands on.
He was struck, in his research, by "the casual racism" of the day. He also found some little-known institutions, including a Pasadena-based eugenics group (supported by Times publisher Harry Chandler) called the Human Betterment Foundation, and an L.A. drinking club called Little Brother's, a rare spot where black and white, gay and straight, caroused together.
