Owen Hill’s The Giveaway collects the complete Clay Blackburn tetralogy…at last.
By David Ulin
Alta
Reviewers, or so the prevailing wisdom insists, are supposed to be neutral. Which is to say we shouldn’t be fans. That such an idea is ridiculous goes without saying; what reason is there to do this work if you’re not an enthusiast? This doesn’t mean we read or write without critical judgment, or that we’re unwilling to offer a negative review. But among the critics with whom I want to be in conversation, the most essential draw is the heat of the discussion, which expands beyond book and reviewer to engage the community of readers at large. Many, like myself, didn’t set out to be critics. It’s just that nothing matters to us as much as literature. In that, I guess, we’re like booksellers, which is a job I have also held. This, in part, explains my affinity for Clay Blackburn, the poet/book scout/unlicensed detective at the center of Owen Hill’s The Giveaway.
Hill, of course, has himself been a poet and a book wrangler; for many years, he was a buyer at Berkeley’s legendary bookstore Moe’s. In 2018, he coedited The Annotated Big Sleep, an excavation of the Raymond Chandler debut that certainly exerted an influence, off kilter though it may be, on The Giveaway. Gathering three full novels—The Chandler Apartments (2002), The Incredible Double (2009), and the never-before-published Mayakovsky’s Bugatti, along with the short story “Righteous Kill,” originally featured in the 2020 anthology Berkeley Noir—The Giveaway represents both a unified work and a collection of disparate pieces, each of which can be appreciated on its own. In that sense, perhaps, it is most effectively read with a kind of double vision: the long and the short of it, if you will.
Clay is a charmingly offhanded detective, a Berkeley gadfly with a gentle sense of irony. “My books,” he explains at the beginning of The Chandler Apartments, “have been published by the likes of Angry Dog Press and Thumbscrew Press, and in mags like Gas, Bluebook, and Twatsdelight.” The satire is so dead-on I had to look up these publishers and journals to be sure they weren’t real. At the same time, he is an acute observer of human dissembling and disconnection and the lies we tell each other—and ourselves. “I think, on some level,” he reflects about a person of interest, “she did understand that she was in the presence of another human being. But I’m not entirely sure. Not everyone has a soul.”
The result is some of the most idiosyncratic noir I know.
This is as it should be, for noir is an idiosyncratic genre. If it inevitably functions according to a set of conventions, it is most effective when it also challenges or violates those norms. The Blackburn novels represent a case in point, with a reluctant detective hero, a sidekick willing to do the dirty work, and a host of supporting characters who recur from book to book. These include love interests—men and women—as well as a panoply of anarchists, unhoused people, bohemians, and outsiders, each, like Berkeley itself, possessing an uneasy toehold in the present and a complicated history with the past. “I’ve lived in Berkeley for close to twenty years,” Clay admits in The Incredible Double. “Street folks, philosophy majors, aging radicals…life in Berkeley can be one long version of ‘Who’s on First?’ Being a poet I sort of like the game. Linguistic juggling is part of what I do.”
All that juggling adds up to a fascinating porousness in which much of what we encounter is not one thing or the other, but many different things at once. It’s a slippage Clay embodies because he is so often in the middle. I’m not only referring to his sexuality, although that’s a part of it, but also to the tension between his taste for living well and his socialist tendencies. What makes it work is Hill’s sly sensibility, which is knowing without ever losing its whimsical edge. In The Incredible Double, the gunsel sent to keep tabs on Clay is named Wilmer, echoing a character in Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon. In The Chandler Apartments, a smuggling operation is disrupted when the poetry retreat that was set up as a cover crumbles after not enough A-list talent can be recruited to participate.
“Creeley will be pretty pissed,” Clay says, referring to the poet Robert Creeley. “I wouldn’t want to be on his bad side.” The inference leads us to another form of doubling in which the line between fiction and the real world is not effaced exactly, but rather cunningly and convincingly blurred.
This kind of vision comes to full fruition in Mayakovsky’s Bugatti, which takes its inspiration from the Russian communist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, who while in Paris in the 1920s—or so Clay claims—bought a Bugatti despite his politics, seduced by the lure of “good clothes, White Russian girlfriend, fast cars.” It’s a deft metaphor (telegraphed, parenthetically, in The Chandler Apartments, where Hill first shares the anecdote) for Clay’s contradictions, his liminality, and it informs the shape of the novel, which is a mystery lacking any final resolution other than a directive to “find your personal Bugatti and drive.”
Here, Hill takes us through a series of MacGuffins—involving a cat burglary scheme, a restaurant that prepares its meals using a psychoactive condiment, and the theft of a rare, ancient Roman coin—to highlight what we know already: that everything is a MacGuffin, that there is no solution to any mystery. It’s a bracing lens through which to write a novel, and an equally bracing way to cap the series. “The arc is long, like they say,” Hill writes, “but also squiggly, and you just never know where it’s going and there are no guarantees.” Yes, he’s addressing justice, as is only fitting in a work of crime fiction. But even more, it is existence he has in his sights. “Time passes quickly, slowly, then quickly again,” he admonishes, “hurry up and wait.” In the three novels and one short story that make up The Giveaway, Hill has done precisely that, reconsidering not just noir but also poetry and politics, along with so much of what lies in between.•
