GOLD FROM THE GUTTER

Matthew Louis has turned a passion for words into one of the crime genre's most talked about new magazines. With the publication of OUT OF THE GUTTER 4 the mag has established itself as one of the genre's must reads.

By Matthew Louis

MY HOME life went to hell around the time of my junior high years when my dad was laid off from his construction job. You take a kid in his early teens, give him only second, third or fourth hand clothes that don’t fit right, two distracted and unhappy parents, a generally disturbed family life and a home in utter disarray, and one of two things is going to happen. That kid is going to jump ship—leave and create another home and the needed emotional ties wherever and however he can—or that kid is going to be ashamed and confused and retreat into his mind.

I’m glad now that I retreated, at least for a while, into my mind. Most kids I knew whose home lives went to hell—and this group comprised most kids I knew—found the emotional and moral support they craved elsewhere; in other homes and other surrogate families made up of disenfranchised youths like themselves. And today, 20 years later, as near as I have been able to track them,100 percent of those kids are ruined for life. They still haven’t found proper homes and families. Most aren’t even bothering to look anymore.

So when I consider that I could have left, struck out among the local white or

Mexican trash, grown into adulthood emotionally and intellectually deformed,

I’m glad I stayed home. Home, as I’ve stated, was not necessarily the most

constructive environment, but then again it wasn’t destructive. I had two

tremendous advantages: First, I was left alone. If I wasn’t given

encouragement or direction, I also wasn’t given beatings or ridicule.

I was able, almost entirely, to call my own shots. And second, although

the family trailer lacked hot water, was often filthy and cluttered, and

was always overpopulated, it was absolutely packed with books.

Whatever their shortcomings my folks were both readers. My dad

got lumber and turned entire walls into bookshelves and every inch

of those shelves was full. And my dad had his own bookshelf, behind

the broken-down armchair, of his A-list reads. This would be my literary

education.

My emotional and intellectual vacuum was filled first with Steinbeck—my old man’s favorite writer and certainly not a bad standard-setter for the beginning reader. The first adult book I read straight through—my gateway book—was Of Mice and Men. When I realized that an entire day had gone by and I hadn’t had a moment of boredom—in fact I’d been enthralled, transfixed, transported even—I was hooked. When I closed the book, my thoughts still marching with the cadence of the story, I knew I wanted more. In a few months I had consumed all the works on my dad’s shelf. These ranged from Huckleberry Finn to Michael Crichton’s Eaters of the Dead to James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice.

That I would find my way to crime fiction was inevitable. When you’ve got a reading addiction you require frequent fixes, and this isn’t as simple as some may think. Ninety percent of what’s available to readers is, frankly, crap. For every book I finish about nineteen other books are put down in disgust and disappointment, and this dilemma has plagued me continually right up to the present moment. I need volume as well as potency. I need tens of thousands of words at a time but I don’t, for Christ’s sake, want to have my intelligence insulted. I don’t want to be handed some weird, highbrow bullshit in the fashion of Oprah’s Book Club so I can waste a few days of my life and then pretend I see the emperor’s clothes. But I don’t want to go too far the other way either … Let’s face it, when you leave the high ground of “literature” you’re going to encounter a lot of writing that’s outright trash. I’m just as lost trying to read, well, most modern crime or suspense fiction, as I was trying to read the idiotic novel The Life of Pi that was such a big deal a few years back (and which, incidentally, not a single person actually enjoyed).

But I eventually found this fantastic place where literature and real, no-bullshit story-telling tend to intersect: crime fiction (broadly defined). There are a couple of ways the desired balance can come about. You can have so-called literature going slumming, adopting the tense plotting and violent turns of crime fiction—take for instance Graham Green’s Brighton Rock, Bernard Malamud’s The Assistant or even Germinal by Emile Zola—or you can have straight-up, unapologetic crime fiction written with world class finesse, the examples of which aren’t hard to find—Chandler at his best, Jim Thompson at his best, at least a dozen of John D. MacDonald’s stand-alone novels, Ross MacDonald (Kenneth Millar) at his best, Puzo’s The Godfather, Dennis LeHane’s Mystic River, Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs … Naturally this could go on for pages …

Not all crime fiction is worthwhile of course (and not all worthwhile fiction is crime fiction)—but the point is that when it’s good it’s great; in fact it’s the best of all possible worlds. It’s like slamming some illicit drug and coming out of the ordeal not depressed and ruined, but stronger, smarter, refreshed and inspired …

Like I said, this reading thing is an acute addiction, and for me, after infinite experimentation, crime fiction happens to be the stuff that is most likely to deliver in both quality and quantity. And when you’re hooked on something, when it consumes so much of your time, you soon get to thinking you’re an expert on it … It was inevitable that I’d progress from being a street-level junkie to beginning to produce my own junk. First I wrote a novel nobody would publish—probably with good reason—and then I shifted gears and did as the writing gurus advise, put my energy into short stories in order to build a résumé. But then, when I went trying to pedal the fruits of my efforts what did I find? The market’s flooded. The few outlets for my particular type of junk are saturated. Everyone’s a producer these days, but who’s consuming?

So I said to hell with it and set up a lab in my basement to refine, cut, weigh and package the stuff myself. Unfortunately, however, the similarities to manufacturing and pushing dope end pretty abruptly here. I can’t put out a hit on Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and take over their share of the marketplace. I don’t have a crew of psychopathic enforcers, I don’t have any 5000 percent markup on my product, and I don’t have any slush funds generated by other assorted criminal activities. I’ve simply got the thrill of producing a great fix for both the hardcore addict and the casual user. I’ve got some steady clients and I’ve got the satisfaction of knowing that, even if I don’t have the resources to beat the syndicate, at least I can give them my middle finger—and I can show the few people who sample Out of the Gutter what it’s like to get a real jolt when partaking of this particular controlled substance.

MATTHEW LOUIS publishes, edits and contributes to the underground pulp fiction rag Out of the Gutter. You can also read some of his work in the new Plots With Guns and John Rickards' D-20.