Noir writer Susan Straight feels at home in the dark
EDGAR. He's sitting here at my desk now, looking not frightening or tell-tale but rather plaintive, reticent and melancholy. He's ceramic, of all things for an awards statuette, his face painted pure white, his brows, eyes and mustache six Picasso slashes of black and his cape cerulean blue. Who in the world makes this bust of Edgar Allan Poe, given out every year in New York City by the Mystery Writers of America? The 62nd annual banquet was earlier this month, and I imagine it has to be a factory nearby, not in China or Mexico, but a dark and gritty place behind a sooty facade laced by black fire escapes.
I was 16 when I wrote my first short story, which featured a dead body. I had been banished to Riverside City College summer school by my mother, who knew all my friends were using or selling drugs and getting drunk every night. I was by far the youngest person in the creative writing class, taught by the wonderful and patient Bill Bowers, who actually loved the desert and, unbeknownst to me, crime and noir fiction. I wrote lyrical scenes of a place called Hurkey Creek, a campground in the San Jacinto Mountains: A girl wanders up the creek with its mossy rocks and icy water, lizards with sapphire throats and blue jays with black helmets. The girl finds a lovely waterfall with a dead man floating beneath it.
Bowers made a few bemused comments.
The second story featured the desert, including glittering mica, Gila monster lizards with orange-beaded skin and a dead body found at the end.
This time, he took me aside and asked if I had problems at home.
I couldn't explain to him that the only novels in my house were my father's Ken Follett and Robert Ludlum thrillers and six years' worth of Reader's Digest Condensed Books, which I consumed immediately upon their arrival. The best parts of those tomes were the mysteries -- Dorothy Uhnak's New York City, with a sniper shooting in Central Park's Sheep Meadow, was the most lasting vision I took away.
I just told him I'd try to write something in which people stayed alive, and I did.
