A Writer Writing About a Writer Writing a Book

Okay, it reads a bit like a writing class device, but it still is a Stansberry. Manifesto for the Dead unlike his other stories is set in Los Angeles, in the seventies when Hollywood and Vine was at its seediest. The main character is based on a real author, Jim Thompson. I did my WIKI research a couple of days ago, eeriely on his birthday, 9/27/06. I knew nothing about him, never seeking out his pulp fiction genre, but discovered he wrote The Killer Inside Me and The Grifters. His write-up is an unbelievable six degrees of separation mentioning Thompson's affiliations with Kubrick, Peckinpah, Redford. I'll need to watch again Farewell, My Lovely, the Mitchum version as Thompson plays the judge.

So Stansberry enters the chain of Thompson devotees. I hear Stansberry's thoughts in about tensing reality against lurid mental crimes in Thompson's words: "... up against that wall himself, clutching all those ragged ends, stories within stories that almost webbed together, the various pieces fraying and disappearing into a darkness that swallowed all calculation. Meanwhile, the killer you had created roamed the city. Your careful plan -- out of control." Echoes of The Confession in this rumination, a theme of Stansberry that the mental deviousness behind the brutal crime is equally, if not more, interesting than the blood splatter patterns. More obviously, the detective in Manifesto asks Thompson: "... Let me ask you something ... I got a chance to look at some of those books of yours. And I been wondering. They got much biography in them? Auto, I mean. Tales of the self ... I mean, you seem like a nice guy. And I ask myself, how could a nice guy write books like those. I tell myself, well, all of us, we got something a little weird inside ..." I can imagine this as a mental debate in Stansberry's head, if not actual cocktail party banter.

His voice is much more raw in this book but despite all the references to the inopportune manifestations of male anatomical parts, there is no actual sex in the book, it's more a love affair with alcohol.

Already started another Stansberry last night, the first of the Dante Mancuso series. Am I hungering to become jaded? What vicarious thrills am I looking for? Am I an author-wanna-be with less guts than Stansberry because I cannot imagine writing this luridly, vividly?