"An eirie echo of a dean man's sytle" NY Times
From LA WEEKLY
NOT TO WORRY. THERE IS PLENTY OF LIFE yet in the mystery genre, … So proves Domenic Stansberry with his haunting Manifesto for the Dead. Stansberry's protagonist is aging crime novelist Jim Thompson at the end of his career in 1971. Booze, age and despair have rendered him so decrepit that the whores on Hollywood Boulevard mock him as he passes. The book begins with Thompson sitting at the bar at Musso's one afternoon, listening to a whisper from the bottom of his whiskey glass: "You're at the bottom of the pit, Jimmy . . . I can smell you decomposing."
But within minutes he bumps into Billy Miracle, a nickel-and-dime producer on the make who is shopping a screenplay about a love triangle and a killer that ends with "everyone get[ting] fucked." He wants Thompson to write a book based on the screenplay ("I'm thinking, if we have book interest, we can get movie interest too"), but can provide neither money nor the screenplay upfront. Thompson, desperate for work, takes the job.
A few mornings later he receives a visit from a nervous Okie looking for a man named Sydney Wicks. The Okie has the wrong address, and when a cop car cruises by, he turns and runs, leaving his car keys behind. Thompson finds the body of a young woman, apparently strangled, in the car's trunk. Drunk already, and suffering tremors "as if the world were tearing apart, the light disintegrating into the dark," Thompson is "overcome with an inexplicable guilt, as if he were the one responsible for the girl's death." He hides the car in a remote spot in the hills. Later that day, after ironing the deal out with Miracle back at Musso's, Thompson feels "the foreboding again, a trap about to spring. Planets misaligning, stars falling out of the sky."
His instincts are not wrong. Within a few chapters, Thompson wakes up, on the lawn of a Beverly Hills mansion, with no memories of the previous evening. The mansion turns out to belong to the big-shot producer who was supposedly backing Miracle's film project. And the big-shot producer turns out to have been beaten to death the night before. Thompson is set to take the fall, and his life is beginning to suspiciously parallel the plot of the book he's writing.
Despite its use of a historical figure as a character and its book-within-a-book structure, Manifesto for the Dead is for the most part a conservative noir. It has a booze-soaked antihero, plenty of testosterone and violence, a tight link between sex and death, all set in a nightmarishly decaying cityscape. Of Hollywood Boulevard he writes: "Darkness had descended, but the city was lit up, hazy as could be. The sky overhead was gray-black, smudged with yellow. Some drunks nearby hollered like animals . . . A woman sat on the corner, coughing blood." L.A. is "one long town with one long street. Stucco houses under a white sun that spun around other suns in a galaxy inside a universe black as black could be."
But Stansberry is not content with a this-worldly tale of suspense. He buries a sense of cosmic foreboding in nearly every line. Through a poetics of menace that at times takes on a positively hallucinatory beauty, Stansberry exposes the Manichaean heart of noir. Thompson waits for a phone call from the mysterious Sydney Wicks in an East Hollywood bar: "It was a long time before the phone rang again. An eon. Three eons. The sun collapsed and was born again and every living thing turned to dust. Then it started all over, the creatures creeping up out of the big nothing, tigers with fish gills, birds with snake eyes, the whole ugly business. The jungle roared and squealed. The freeway thundered." There is not just emptiness and evil in the world; the world is evil and it is empty. And it is apparently collapsing. Another good omen for the millennium to come.
Reviewed by Ben Ehrenreich
*****
"Fascinating... Beautifull written... An enviable achievment." San Francisco Chronicle
From The San Francisco Chronicle
It takes courage to attempt a noir novel about noir master Jim Thompson (``The Killer Inside Me,'' ``The Grifters,'' ``A Hell of a Woman''), and it takes a great deal of skill to pull it off. Thompson's writing is deceptively straightforward -- tempting to imitate but impossible to nail. Aficionados assume they can. Cold-eyed college boys, would- be moviemakers and pasty-skinned pseudo-experts think they know Thompson better than anyone else.
But San Francisco writer Domenic Stansberry is in many ways a much better stylist than Thompson, and MANIFESTO FOR THE DEAD (Permanent Press; 182 pages; $22), his novel about Thompson, is fascinating: beautifully written, fully thought out and locked in an intelligent argument with itself about what noir has come to mean.
The book mixes fact and fiction in a tale set at the end of Thompson's life, when the author was 20 years past his heyday. Nearly forgotten and almost broke, Thompson is warming a barstool at Musso and Frank's Grill in Hollywood when he encounters Billy Miracle, a movie producer with an interesting proposition. Soon, though, Thompson comes to fear that he is being framed for a murder -- and that his reputation as a hard-boiled writer may prove his undoing.
Should a writer be held responsible for the thoughts he has written down and published? Should we assume that if Thompson wrote such things, he is capable of acting them out? If so, doesn't that make noir simply a form a journalism, written before the fact or even after it, by authors who make up in bravado what they lack in art?
If not, if Thompson were no more capable of crime than Laura Ingalls Wilder, have his readers been misled and let down?
In ``Manifesto for the Dead,'' Thompson is alive on the page, and the questions that Stansberry poses about the nature of noir seem part of Thompson's own disintegrating persona and point of view. That, along with Stansberry's evocative and disciplined writing, makes this book an enviable achievement.
Reviewed By Ellen McGarrahan
