The last couple of years have kept Barry Gifford as busy as ever. Since 2019, the prolific novelist, poet and screenwriter has had three new collections of his prior work come out—Sailor & Lula: The Complete Novels, an expanded edition of his most iconic series; Southern Nights, as an omnibus volume containing three early novels; and Roy’s World: Stories 1973–2020, which collects, for the first time, all of his loosely autobiographical tales of misspent youth in Chicago—as well as a newly released Western novella, Black Sun Rising / La Corazonada.
Supplementing this literary bounty are two films: the new documentary Roy’s World: Barry Gifford’s Chicago, which combines archival footage, animation and spoken word readings from Willem Dafoe, Matt Dillon and Lili Taylor, and the long awaited Blu-ray release of the newly restored director’s cut of Perdita Durango, which was adapted from Gifford’s 1992 novel 59° and Raining: The Story of Perdita Durango (part three of the Sailor & Lula series).
Although it would be reductive to dub Gifford a writer of noir or crime exclusively, his fiction often delves into both, and taken as a whole, there are few people whose work has had so overriding an influence on those genres.
Said work isn’t limited to his own writing either: Gifford was the founding editor for Black Lizard Books, the independently run publishing house almost single-handedly responsible for revitalizing interest in hardboiled noir fiction during the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. Between its founding in 1984 to its sale to Random House and merging with their Vintage imprint in 1990, Black Lizard published 82 titles, the majority of them reissues of forgotten pulp paperbacks from decades earlier.
These artfully designed, carefully curated releases helped rescue Jim Thompson, David Goodis, Charles Williams and others from obscurity, while also introducing readers to more eclectic and offbeat offerings from the likes of Gertrude Stein, Simon Njami and Sin Soracco. Black Lizard’s influence is still felt today and can be glimpsed in the operations of such boutique publishing houses as Hard Case Crime and NYRB Classics.
I recently spoke with Gifford about the history and legacy of Black Lizard, as well as his deep personal connection to noir and crime fiction.
Zach Vasquez: How did Black Lizard get started?
Barry Gifford: In the early ‘80s, I was browsing through a bookstore in Paris and saw these Jim Thompson novels put out by the Série Noire [the French publisher of paperback crime and detective novels founded by Marcel Duhamel in 1945]. I bought a several of them, along with a couple of others. Maybe [David] Goodis, but I don’t remember.
When I was a kid, I used to read all these books off the paperback wire rack, starting when I was about 12 years old. I read [Thompson’s] The Killer Inside Me. So, I was attracted to them, but I realized later when I read the Thompson novels in French—because they were unavailable here, except to collectors—that there was a psychological edge to what he and some of the others like him were doing.
I was doing some editorial consulting for a publisher and I told him about it. And so, he said, “Well, see how much it will cost because we don’t have any money.” I got a hold of the agents—for Thompson and Goodis and various others—and they were only too happy to get their books back in print. And for virtually no advances, or very, very little. And so we started in 1984 with 50 cents, a pencil and a telephone. That was it.
The Série Noire seems like the prototype for what Black Lizard became.
The Série Noire had its own distinctive style and design, so that was important in my decision as to how to present and produce the books. In fact, in a kind of reverse homage to the Série Noire and Duhamel, we did a novel by an African French writer, Simon Njami, Coffin and Co., and translated it into English. I did Francis Carco’s book, Perversity, which was translated by the writer Jean Rhys. It was a curiosity in that sense. I mean, it belonged in the series, I wouldn’t have done it unless it fit. But the fact that it was translated by Jean Rhys as a job that Ford Madox Ford has gotten her in Paris, it was kind of an homage, you know, to take the French novels and translate them into English the way Duhamel had done it.
How important were the physical presentation of the titles to you?
We had a prototype that we were trying to develop. We started with three Thompsons. Then we did a Goodis. We did a book by Gertrude Stein, and we did my novel, Port Tropique, and a couple of others, just to try the different physical sizes of the book, to see what it would look like.
We found a couple of great artists who were able to not just replicate the old ‘40s and ‘50s paperback covers but design them in a way that was more modern, while still redolent of that of that period. We found a wonderful artist named Jim Kirwan. He was essential. I think he did all but three of the covers.
I knew that the authors themselves, for the most part, were unknown. Even Jim Thompson. Their books hadn’t been properly reviewed even at the time when they came out, because they were considered just, you know, some pulp paperback. So, I determined to have the series be uniform, all the books look alike. Not numbered, but so that people would still know immediately that it was a Black Lizard book. That they were buying the series, author unknown. Some they would like and some that they wouldn’t. And it worked in that style. I think that if we had done it all differently and not been uniform in the production, it wouldn’t have been as successful. Readers had to trust the editorial expertise.
I feel like you see that concept today with imprints like The New York Review of Books series.
Or Hard Case Crime. Years ago, Charles Ardai, who does Hard Case, he showed up at a NoirCon presentation and he told me, “I tried to replicate what you had done, and I want to thank you for having been the modern day pioneer.”
How were those first few Black Lizard books received in the larger crime publishing world?
Right away, people began sending me books. People who were aficionados, mystery writers, crime and thriller writers. Elmore Leonard—Dutch, he was a friend of mine—would suggest titles. These people were much more encyclopedic in their knowledge than I was.
I had the idea of only doing three titles a season. We had to build it slowly, because we were really so underfunded. But people started visiting from all over the world, started coming to the little Black Lizard office in Berkeley. It became quite popular, and not just with the aficionados. The Wall Street Journal did an article on Black Lizard. I remember the reporter coming to see me in my loft office, climbing up these creaky stairs with a bare light bulb hanging over them, and she came in and said, ‘Well, this is just like one of those novels.’
It hit a vein, and then New York publishers began imitating it, publishing titles willy-nilly, whatever they thought they could get away with. But they didn’t understand the psychological edge of most of the writers I was putting back into print.
But you also put out new work, or at least work from contemporary writers.
I wanted to do new writers, and so I had people like Jim Nisbet and Sin Soracco and a couple of others doing original titles. And of course, my novel, Port Tropique, which had been published earlier, was in that series first and later put back into print by Vintage along with many of my other books.
I know you were just starting to put out some out-of-print titles from Charles Willeford when he passed away.
I loved Willeford. I had read a couple of Charlie’s novels and I got him into the mix early. I became quite good friends with him. You know, Wild at Heart was dedicated to him. Charlie was a great guy, one of a kind. We did The Burnt Orange Heresy. And the last title that I did was The Black Mass of Brother Springer. He had published that novel years before and they changed the title to Honey Gal. He regretted that he had allowed them to change the title, and there were some other things he wanted to change in the book. So, I said, “Okay, Charlie, we’ll do this.” And I did. And that was the last Black Lizard book that I had anything to do with.
The nice thing about Charlie was he hit it big with his Hoke Mosley series. He had a movie made off of that, with Alec Baldwin—Miami Blues! Anyway, I was so happy for Charlie.
Were there other titles you would have liked to have published before you left?
Of course, I wanted to do the Elliott Chaze novel, Black Wings Has My Angel. Unfortunately, when the whole package was sold to Vintage, they decided not to do that title. And I really slammed them for it. I said, you don’t know what you’ve got in your hands, you really don’t. Black Wings Has My Angel was a quintessential book that deserved to be published. And as I wrote exactly in my introduction to it in The New York Review of Books edition, when I went to see Elliott and finally got him to say okay, that would have been the last book I did in this series. But it turned out to be Charlie Willeford’s Brother Springer—which is a terrific novel, by the way, and somebody should make that into a movie.
Another novel I would have done is They Don’t Dance Much.
The James Ross novel.
Yeah, that’s one that I definitely would have done. Later, I was asked to write a screenplay based on it. Which I did, although the movie didn’t get made. But I had a great time working with that novel.
Were there any other Black Lizard titles that you tried to adapt for the screen?
First of all, I didn’t initiate anything. I write screenplays periodically, usually only if there’s a movie being made from one of my books. It’s a secondary language for me and I only want to do it if it could be something great. Port Tropique was bought for the movies when it was first published and went through different incarnations. I wrote the first screenplay, and then other people came in, they had a director who wrote the screenplay, and this and that, and the movie never got made. That’s a pretty typical Hollywood story.
Then David [Lynch] came along and picked up Wild at Heart. And David and I became great friends. So, I got spoiled because I was dealing with a groundbreaking director, a visionary, and someone who knew the difference between a book and a movie. Then we went on to do the HBO series Hotel Room, we did Lost Highway, we worked on other projects that didn’t get made.
My novel Perdita Durango got made by Álex de la Iglesia. Pedro Almodóvar wanted to do it originally, but he couldn’t get the rights. Pedro and I became friends, and I don’t know what it would have turned out like if he had done it, but it would have been fun. In any case, there are parts of the film of Perdita Durango, I think, which are terrific. Other things I wouldn’t have done. But it wasn’t up to me at that point, I didn’t own it any longer. But having the first two parts of the Sailor & Lula series made into movies was really gratifying.
So, the answer, is no. I haven’t adapted any of the Black Lizard books.
Still, they ended up inspiring a number of movies, including several adaptations of Jim Thompson.
People were looking around for properties, for something new, but which wasn’t really new. Marty Scorsese picked up The Grifters, and Maggie Greenwald did a film of The Kill-Off. And what else? After Dark, My Sweet. The Grifters was great. Stephen Frears directed it. That was beautiful, I mean, that was really, really, really well done. And of course, it gave a boost to the sales of Black Lizard.
With Goodis, I wanted to pay homage to François Truffaut, in the sense that when I reprinted Down There, Goodis’s novel, I used the title Shoot the Piano Player. I’ll tell you a funny little tidbit: I recently saw on TCM a film of George Simenon’s novel La tete d’un homme [alternately titled A Man’s Head or A Man’s Neck], which was published in 1931. Julian Duvivier directed the film—it’s a brilliant film—and there’s a scene where a person enters this nightclub and written on the wall in graffiti is ‘Tirer sur le pianiste’. Shoot the piano player. Truffaut, who of course was a critic and film scholar himself before he began directing films, when he directed Goodis’s novel Down There, he used the title Shoot the Piano Player. And there’s even a funnier twist: Duvivie and Truffaut hated each other.
How big was your involvement in Black Lizard when Random House purchased it?
First of all, I was involved with it from 1984 until, let’s say, halfway through 1989. That was my full time with Black Lizard. I was involved in it for about, I would say, 70 of the 82 titles that got into print. Towards the end, I just didn’t have time. I had my own writing and career to deal with. And I got into movies. And that’s when it was sold.
After that they went on for a little bit longer and I thoroughly disagreed with what they were doing. They didn’t know what they were doing. They didn’t have any person who really understood what I had been doing. There were a few [books] at the end which I thought were negligible, but then the company was sold to Random House.
In fact, I talked about that with my editor at Vintage. I said, you got to get somebody in here who knows what they’re doing, who understands this. Anyway, it was out of my hands. I was done. I was the founding editor, but I never made any money out of whole thing because I didn’t own it. The person who did, who put up the money for the books, when I told him that I didn’t have time to do it anymore, he said, “Well, if you’re not here, I’m going to sell it.” And so that’s what he did. He finally broke even and made some money after the sale. And I can’t blame him for that.
When Random House took over, they kept a couple of the titles you had put out in circulation, but it seems like they went in a different direction, publishing more foundational and better-known authors like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.
Well, obviously they wanted to keep Thompson’s books in print because there were all the movies sales, and some of the more obvious ones. And they of course wanted to feed in their Hammett and Chandler and Patricia Highsmith or whomever they had, their more prominent authors, and create this Vintage/Black lizard category. Hammett, Chandler, these guys were the forerunners for most of what we were doing, and I was glad to see them become part of Black Lizard. Because they belong there. But of course, I couldn’t get the rights to those books.
Right after you left there was a broader surge of interest in noir, especially in American cinema. What do you think accounted for that?
If you do something that turns out to be successful, of course, you’re going to have imitators. I remember my agent at the time, after the success of Wild at Heart, saying, “We’re getting all these manuscripts in and they’re all imitations, lovers on the run, or this and that. There was hardly anything new with that—that had always been a theme, going back to Thieves Like Us, or, you know, any of that stuff—but people jumped on the bandwagon. And then of course, there was a success of the film of Wild at Heart. That inspired many more people. I like to look at it as inspiration, as homage. I mean, that’s really paying respect in a way to what came before. I was just glad to hit that vein.
But let me just say, I think the term noir has really been overused and abused. You know, it’s great when Eddie Muller, who’s a friend of mine, does a Noir Alley series for TCM, he really understands the concept and knows what he’s doing with it. But, you know, at the time, I really think that they—publishers and filmmakers—tried to slap this noir label on things that had nothing to do with noir. All of a sudden, noir turned into a two-syllable word in the United States. It’s only one syllable in French, right? So, the thing is, it just got abused, and it’s still being abused. But that’s none of my business.
