A River Runs Through It: Introduction to Jay Russell's Apocalypse Now, Voyager

Let me tell you something about Marty Burns.

I know, I know: when you're introducing another writer's work, particularly when that writer is some kind of pal, you should kick off by telling the world what a great guy he is, explain why you admire his witty way with words and his natural story-telling ability, try to keep the envy out of your voice when you describe his palatial home with its extraordinary domed library and world-class collection of duck decoys, and maybe hint at some kind of wacky adventure off the Florida Keys involving Donald Trump's third-best yacht, two redheads who worked as dolphin trainers in Sea World, their baby alligator, and a case of fifty-year-old Jack Daniel's -- or at any rate dredge up some kind of anecdote that's a whole lot more interesting than the usual stuff a couple of writers get up to when they knock heads at a bar, which most often involves gloating over the misfortunes of other writers and setting the publishing biz to rights. But Jay Russell, the four-packs-and-bottle-of-Jack-a-day two-fisted typing phenomenon who is actually the alter ego of shy, retiring sometime academic Russell Schechter, has claimed that this character of his, Marty Burns, is in some way his alter ego, and already we're getting deeper into po-mo territory than I care to go right now. So for the moment we'll forget the guy (or guys) who dreamed him up, and talk about Marty Burns, former teen heartthrob of the 1960s sitcom Salt & Pepper (catchphrase: "Hot enough for you?"), lead actor in and executive producer of the cancelled PI show Burning Bright (write to Fox and ask them to at least put out the DVD sets of both series), sometime supernatural sleuth, hero of three novels (Celestial Dogs, Burning Bright, and Greed & Stuff) and a bouquet of short stories, including three of my all-time favourites (and not only for the titles), 'The Man Who Shot The Man Who Shot The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence', 'Whatever Happened To Baby June?', and 'Sullivan's Travails', and the novella you are right now holding in your hands.

Like all the best private eyes, Marty is something of a schizophrenic, combining a streak of wide-eyed romanticism with a large dollop of hard-boiled, knowing cynicism. Which is to say, even though he won't admit it, he's deeply in love with his town -- Los Angeles -- and the wild and crazy guys and gals who inhabit it, but he's also street-smart, and knows where all the bodies are buried. He's an errant knight of those mean boulevards, a dreamer and maybe even an idealist, but he's no wide-eyed innocent. He knows that righting wrongs is a Sisyphean task in this crazy mixed-up bad-to-the-bone world, but he does it anyway, because he just can't help himself. Plus, he's the kind of guy to whom things happen. He attracts serious weirdness. He's no magician or psychic, he tried to get by as a working stiff in the Dream Factory, and when that doesn't work out he tries to get by as a low-rent private investigator who specialises in worker's compensation cases, but strange stuff happens to him all the same.

And because he lives in Los Angeles and works in the business that likes to boast that it's like no other, that can be pretty strange indeed. I lived in Los Angeles for a couple of years, and admire the hell out of the casual yet deadly accurate invocation of its everyday, ordinary weirdness that twinkles in the background of the Marty Burns stories. You can live in Los Angeles and go about your ordinary business in a perfectly ordinary way -- the daily grind at some insurance office, for instance, shopping at Ralph's, maybe a quick drink at the Copper Penny before dinner at Norm's -- but you'll find yourself driving past a bum on a bus-stop bench who's wearing a TV set on his head, with his face where the screen should be, or you'll park next to a car that's covered in purple shagpile. On the outside. That's your ordinary, everyday Los Angeles weirdness. It's the kind of town where it isn't hard to seek out intense situations; a place where extremes of wealth or behaviour are part of everyday life; a place where one former police chief wanted to buy tanks to deploy against the citizenry; a place where some of the choicest real estate in the world is constantly at risk from destruction by raging wildfires, mudslides, earthquakes, and oceanic storm surges. But if you're Marty Burns, weirdness gets turned up all the way to eleven. If you're Marty Burns, your evening can start out with a naked gal hitting you up for a drink, and then get progressively curiouser and curiouser.

Marty Burns definitely has a love/hate relationship with his city -- which Los Angeleno doesn't? -- but he wouldn't live anywhere else, and he's a pretty good guide to its high and low places, and everywhere else in between, and I don't mean the suburbs. For Marty, in between is the place where the weird things that happen to him tend to come from, and the place through which he often has to travel to find the solutions to his cases. And in this story, in between happens to be the Los Angeles River.

Even if you've never been to Los Angeles, you've probably seen the Los Angeles River in a dozen movies. It's the giant culvert that snakes through the metropolis from the San Gabriel Mountains to Long Beach, a real river that the Army Corps of Engineers paved over in the 1940s as part of the city's flood control system. Los Angeles is a desert town, but it's also built on the floodplain of a crumbling mountain ridge; when it rains (and a storm in Los Angeles can dump the annual average rainfall in a week, after two or three years of drought), the water has to go somewhere. Deepened, armoured in concrete and tamed, the Los Angeles River has been used as the conveniently unpopulated backdrop for a thousand Hollywood car chases and gunfights. It's where the giant ants of Them! made their nest; it's where William Pedersen's rogue cop and his hysterical partner got into a serious car chase involving an army of federal agents in To Live And Die In L.A.; it's where neophyte car repossession operative Emilio Estevez first encounters his mentor's deadly rivals, the Rodriguez Brothers, in Repo Man. And in this story it's the blank space on the map that's a venue for unpoliced transgression, a boundary where the real and the weird meet, the route to another Los Angeles, to Yang-Na, the City beneath the City, and the setting for a tale that's both a detective story in which the detective is the MacGuffin and must solve the puzzle of his own kidnapping, and also one of the flat-out strangest love stories you'll have read in a long time.

To say anything else would spoil the ride, but trust me, it's a good one. Jay Russell/Russell Schechter (oh hell, let's call him Russell) evokes the sleazy weirdness of the City of Angels with the tender attention of someone who definitely loves the place. He has an eagle eye for the telling detail, writes dialogue that's as sharp as a box of knives, deploys his encyclopaedic knowledge of pulp fiction, noir movies, and American junk culture with a wit so dry you could drop an olive in it and call it a martini, and on top of all that exhibits an admirable streak of craziness. Who else would have thought to recreate Apocalypse Now with a woman who's a reincarnation of Now, Voyager's Bette ("Oh, Jerry, don't let's ask for the moon. We can have the stars!") Davis, a Ralph's shopping cart, and the Los Angeles River? Not only that, but Russell possesses a distinctive narrative voice that's strong enough to carry his tale from a birthday party in a biker's bar in Long Beach all the way upriver to the Outer Limits without once dropping the narrative ball. It's a tough trick, especially in a story that skilfully blends a smooth cocktail from three genres (private eye, occult horror, and fully-fledged biopunk science fiction) which by rights should be entirely immiscible. But Russell brings it off not only because he has a deep knowledge of his chosen game, and knows exactly how to bend and stretch the rules, but also because he's one of those writers who possesses a strong and original narrative voice that engages both the heart and the head, and makes the unfamiliar seem entirely and seamlessly plausible by anchoring it firmly in the quotidian.

That's the river that carries the story, flowing steadily, strongly and seamlessly, part attitude, part tone, part style and part something indefinable, something that can't be broken down to a sentence-by-sentence analysis but which is nevertheless instantly recognisable in just about every sentence Russell writes. If you don't believe me, turn the page and read the first sentence of this novella. I promise that it'll sweep you off your feet, and plant a hook so deep that you'll be happy to go with the flow, wherever it takes you.

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>This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.

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