Review: "Manifesto for the Dead" by Domenic Stansberry

 

Manifesto for the Dead by Domenic Stansberry Permanent Press, 2000     Manifesto for the Dead hit bookstores the same day Y2K had been forecasted to cripple the modern technological society. The whole world was going to crumble into ruin and this Stansberry guy had a hardboiled and noirish crime novel with a velvety, stark prose scheduled for release that same very damn day. A positive attitude from the writer and the publisher of a bleak as hell tale about the grimmest and perhaps the most luckless of the paperback writers, Jim Thompson. It was January 1, 2000, and the world didn’t end on that first day of the last year of the 20th Century. That wouldn’t happen until 25 years later when too many American voters— Well, okay. We won’t go there… Instead, we’ll go to 1971. When a 64-year-old Jim Thompson is living at the bottom of a bottle and sleeping in the penthouse of the Hollywood Ardmore. He hasn’t been able to write a word in months and his wife, Alberta, is to blame—or so Thompson thinks. The couple’s money is almost gone and with no reasonable way of getting more, Alberta finds a dumpy apartment in the Hillcrest Arms where they can fade away. But Thompson’s luck changes—from shitty to shittier but Thompson’s sure it’s the break he’s been waiting for—when he’s approached by a producer with a bad reputation, Billy Mircale, at the “fashionable gutter joint” of Musso & Frank’s. Miracle is working on a deal with one of Hollywood’s heaviest producers and he thinks a book, especially one written by a guy with Thompson’s reputation, could push the movie into production. Thompson agrees to write the book, without much negotiation about pay—and he’s getting ripped-off, like he always gets ripped-off. But as he writes, Thompson’s real-life begins mixing with his fiction: An Okie hired killer with a dead bombshell in his trunk comes off the page, followed by a fading starlet with her own secrets, and of course Miracle is mixed in everywhere, too. Manifesto for the Dead was a brave novel to write. It was released at the height of Jim Thompson’s popular revival—he had died in 1977 without much fanfare, but by the late-1980s his work was in fashion in a big way with literary critics and academics, readers, and writers. Which meant no matter how good Stansberry’s novel was, there would be criticism from those looking to criticize for no other reason than it was a fiction with Jim Thompson at its center. The poor reviews tended towards snide comments about Stansberry’s inability to capture Thompson’s voice, which from my vantage is unfair at best. I mean, check out the opening paragraph: “This was the end. The final trap. The last flimflam. And for Jim Thompson, this ending—this long plunge into the sweet nothing—was set in motion on the day he first met Billy Miracle, at the Musso & Frank Grill, down on Hollywood Boulevard.” How’s that for a doomed Thompson protagonist? A protagonist that, this time is the tough-luck writer himself. The plot is simple: Murder, betrayal, and blackmail, all fueled by an ill-fated fear and Thompson’s underlying self-destructive behavior. This simplicity gives it a kinship to the best of those 1950s hardboiled novellas published every month in the pulps. The 1970s setting is littered with hippies and druggies, conmen, and z-list celebrities. The Hollywood players are cast with a shadowing of the ludicrous and the starlets, even the fading ladies, are painted as tough and ambitious as everyone else in the City of Angeles. And then there’s Thompson. Unlucky, something of a mark for every unethical bastard in Hollywood, and running for his life. Manifesto for the Dead is my kind of book.

Manifesto for the Dead is out-of-print, but you can find used copies in every corner of the internet. Click here for the hard cover at Amazon