My career as a criminal didn’t last long. I’m not proud about it (that I was a criminal at all, not the brevity and ineptitude of my reign).
But in high school, I stole CDs and records. That was my thing. Here’s what I would do:
I would take the meager bankroll I’d earned from summer jobs to the record store. I’d browse the dollar bins for used records and CDs until I found something halfway decent. Then I’d meander to the more expensive used shit, discreetly liberate disc or vinyl from sleeve, and stick it into the dollar packaging. This ruse worked longer than it should have, and I came away with some real gems, The Pharcyde’s Labcabincalifornia and a rare bootleg instrumental pressing of The Roots’ Illadelph Halflife, to name a couple.
In my adult years, memories of my criminal idiocy has lingered in my subconscious like a splinter, festering and oozing into my fiction. My debut novel, Static, centers on a young NYC band, a trio in the mold of The xx or Portishead, trying to make it amidst the anxiety of the digital age. Paul, the protagonist and producer/beatmaker of the crew, not only steals valuable records to pay off his debts, but he steals (some might say samples) the voices in his life to make the music he’s sure will save his soul.
Perhaps it’s no surprise then, that a handful of my favorite books deal with stealing in some capacity, or at the very least, getting the things you want by taking them from others. Below are eight of them, all of which I wholeheartedly recommend.
Paradais by Fernanda Melchor; translated by Sophie Hughes
A novel of propulsive, sharp-edged anger from Mexican novelist, Fernanda Melchor, Paradais is told from the perspective of Polo, a teenage gardener for the wealthy gated community that gives the novel its name. Polo strikes up a co-dependent friendship with Franco, a spoiled, porn-addicted boy who lives in the community and obsesses about losing his virginity. In exchange for Polo’s companionship, and a reluctant ear for Franco’s violent, sexual fantasies centering on his neighbor, Señora Marián, Franco buys Polo booze, and eventually lures him into a demonic plot to take what he wants by violent force. I am in awe of the voice work and momentum of this novel and hardly a week goes by that I don’t think about it. Melchor’s novel trains an unflinching eye on the misogyny, violence, and precarity of her country’s social fabric.
Black Wings Has My Angel by Elliott Chaze
No secret by now that NYRB does God’s work in reissuing lost classics and underappreciated works in translation. Without the press, Elliott Chaze’s hard-boiled crime noir, Black Wings Has My Angel, might have been lost to the smoking ashtray of history. Chaze’s novel follows escaped convict Tim Sunblade, who had been imprisoned for stealing cars. After a few months working on an oil rig, he settles into a Louisiana motel and hires a high-priced call girl, Virginia, a whip-smart femme fatale who quickly proves herself to be his match. As we hurtle toward the explosive conclusion, Tim and Virginia attract and repel each other like magnets of love/hate chaos, and enter a plot to rob an armored truck together. What happens when the person you want is wrong for you, and the things you want to take might kill you? Elliott Chaze knows.
Nobody Move by Denis Johnson
An overlooked page-turner in Denis Johnson’s catalogue, lost amidst the brilliance of Jesus’ Son and Train Dreams and Largesse of the Sea Maiden. Nobody Move is a slim, tightly-coiled heist noir, perhaps the wise-cracking grandchild of Black Wings Has My Angel. Jimmy Luntz is our knuckleheaded protagonist here, a gambling addict, inept criminal, and member of a zero-talent barbershop quartet. Luntz is in debt for a few large to Juarez, a violent gang leader who sends his hit man, Ernest “Gambol” Gambolini, out to bump him off. If that all sounds cartoonish, a sort of literary Dick Tracy comic, that’s because it is. And Johnson pulls it off, complete with all of the crime noir archetypes: the bummy loser with a good heart, the femme fatale, the ham-fisted thugs, the blue-streak dialogue, the bullets. In Johnson’s hands, this is more than a crime genre pastiche: it’s a loving ode to noir novels and a reminder of why we return to them time and time again.
Dilla Time by Dan Charnas
By now, sampling, the production technique at the heart of much hip hop and electronic music, is a widely-accepted, laudable artform. But this wasn’t always the case. In hip hop’s infancy, critics (often white), lamented sampling as lazy charlatanism at best, stealing at worst. But scores of producers—DJ Premier, Pete Rock, Havoc, and Q-Tip, to name a personal Mount Rushmore—have proven that sampling is a beautiful recontextualization of source material, an act of love and homage that yields something fresh and unexpected.
To many, J Dilla is the Apex Sampler (his name pops up more than once in Static as the paragon of the craft). His MPC is in the Smithsonian. Dan Charnas’ meticulously researched, moving tribute to J Dilla, Dilla Time, is yet another brick in the monument to Dilla’s greatness. Dilla Time argues that with J Dilla’s off-kilter sampling techniques and ear for rhythm, he created a new musical time-feel, an accomplishment that places him on par with other musical pioneers like Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, James Brown, and others. Whether or not you love hip hop more broadly, or J Dilla specifically, this book is more than a biography. It’s a touchstone.
Breaking & Entering by Joy Williams
It’s right there in the title. Breaking & Entering. Or so you would think. Ostensibly, this book is about a married pair of drifters—Liberty and Willie—who break into the unoccupied beach homes of wealthy families on the Gulf Coast of Florida to escape their meager lives and experience the finer things, their slice of the American Dream. They drink the owners’ booze, wear their clothes, sleep in their beds, and when danger starts to peek around the corner, they move on.
But like all of Joy Williams’ best work, the novel is difficult to categorize; masterfully off-kilter, unsettling, and beguiling, surreal surfaces hinting at a rotten, Lynchian core. Liberty and Willie have been lovers since they were teens, but as they drift around the palm-studded landscape, they begin to drift apart, and to this reader, the heart of the novel is loneliness and desolation. This is a novel about taking the life you wish you had and then realizing that it’s as cold as death without comfort and companionship. Or, as the softies among us (raises hand) might call it, love.
Body High by Jon Lindsey
Gnarly cover. Great book. Like many of the iconic Vintage Contemporaries paperbacks that the cover art nods to, Jon Lindsey’s novel is off-beat, darkly funny, and by turns grimly difficult to stomach. Leland, a drug addicted burnout who has recently lost his mother to suicide, is our guide. His best friend, “FF” is a fellow addict and Lucha Libre wrestler. His aunt is 15-year-old Jolene, a fact which provides clues to Leland’s dark and rotted family tree. When Jolene, who also has a taste for drugs, experiences kidney failure, Leland hatches a plan to kidnap his own estranged daughter (you see, to finance his drug habit, Leland donates his sperm) to harvest the life-saving kidney. What ensues is a twisted odyssey through a sun-cracked Los Angeles that Lindsey clearly knows a thing or two about. Lindsey is a phenomenal writer who wraps all that trauma in a big, aching heart. Body High shows us what happens when taking the things you want unlocks parts of you that perhaps you wish you never knew were there.
Teenager by Bud Smith
Teenager is much more than a road trip novel. In some ways, it’s the adolescent cousin of Breaking & Entering. Trade a married couple and beach home B&E for a pair of Bonnie and Clyde-esque teen lovers and a healthy dose of grand theft auto, and you’re in the right area code.
Seventeen-year-old Kody Rawlee Green and his girlfriend Tella Carticelli, who he calls Teal Cartwheels, are the stars of the show. Within the first few pages, Kody escapes from juvenile detention, murders Teal’s parents to save her from abuse, steals a car and peels off with the love of his life in the passenger seat. From there, we’re off on a surreal journey across America following two teens whose trauma has forced them to grow up much too fast.
Teenager is about what it means to be an adolescent in all of its aching, yearning, idiocy and explosiveness. It’s about what happens when your heart writes checks that your brain can’t cash. The voice is unexpected, funny, full of pathos in every sentence. If you’re looking for plausible plot and hyper-real characters, look elsewhere. But if you’re looking for the truth about what it means to be young and wild and free and in love? Look no further.
Dirty Suburbia by Sara Hosey
This collection of ten stories from fellow Vine Leaves Press author Sara Hosey centers beautifully, relatably flawed characters. Young women who, through fits and starts and fuck-ups, seek to find their place in the world. There’s an awkward young academic who falls for a Henry David Thoreau impersonator. There’s a pair of tweens who, in a simulation of what they perceive as womanhood, tip a babysitting adventure over the line into an accidental kidnapping. In the title story, two women are in love with the same scuzzy video store clerk. When the protagonist, Sue, learns that her boyfriend, Matt, has been cheating, she plots to foil his plan to rob the video store where he works. In the process, she forms an unexpected bond with the woman who forms the third leg of the love triangle and embarks on a path to confront her own demons. It’s a vivid, original story, and I can see the short film in my head. Like many of the books on this list, the story reminds us that when we get what we want by taking it from others, we often get way more than we bargain for.