CRITICAL MASS : Billy Bob’s bud Epperson writes retro-noir novel
Posted on Tuesday, February 12, 2008
Tom Epperson is best known as Billy Bob Thornton’s childhood friend from Malvern and frequent screenwriting collaborator — together they wrote One False Move (1992 ), the Robert Duvall-James Earl Jones racial identity drama A Family Thing (1996 ), The Gift (2000 ) and the gritty HBO junkie thriller Don’t Look Back. (Epperson also wrote the script for 1997 ’s A Gun, a Car, a Blonde with that film’s director, Stefani Ames. ) In the BBT mythology, Epperson, who accompanied Thornton on prebreakthrough trips to New York and Los Angeles, is often referred to as “an aspiring novelist.” Now you can strike the “aspiring.” Epperson’s first novel, a noirish crime novel set in 1930 s Los Angeles, has just been published. The Kind One (Five Star Publications, $ 25. 95 ) is a highly enjoyable and oddly lingering book, a pastiche of L. A. mob cliches that manages to transcend the hardboiled genre it knowingly — and lovingly — embraces.
Epperson’s hero is a tough guy named Danny Landon, known as “Two Gun Danny” for a spectacular performance during a robbery of a casino boat some years before our current story opens. But Danny doesn’t feel so tough — he is recovering from a pipe beating that left him with a dent in his head and a permanent limp and burned away all memories of his former life. These days Danny feels passive, confounded by his bloody reputation. He’s groping through the sucking muck at the bottom of his brain, here and there pulling out distinct images and artifacts of which he can’t quite make sense.
Luckily for him, loyal service in his previous life as a cold-blooded killer has endeared him to his bugsy boss Bud Seitz, a snippy bantam crime boss with a germ phobia. Bud earned the ironic nickname “The Kind One” for his ruthlessness, but the title also refers to the pacified Danny, who Bud keeps on out of gratitude. He gives Danny a ’ 33 Packard — a “doozie” of a car — and assigns him the ultimately thankless task of looking after his latest girlfriend, a former nightclub singer named Darla with her own ugly past.
Naturally, Danny and Darla develop dangerous feelings for each other. They have plenty of alone time together as weakened Bud struggles to hold his criminal enterprise together — the gangster paradigm in Los Angeles has shifted with the repeal of Prohibition and, as one character astutely observes, the underworld has been subsumed by the larger world. Everyone is in the rackets now, whether they’re selling dope or insurance. The Depression has hit everyone — even the Mob — hard.
While he’s dealing with stock characters, Epperson imbues Danny and Darla with specific and believable character points. Darla escapes from Bud’s possessiveness through drinking, and her loosened inhibitions exacerbate their perilous predicament. Both are essentially Bud’s pets, serving at the pleasure of a cruel master who’s coming unhinged under pressure. (In a wrenching early scene, Danny is required to help execute a chimp — named for one of Bud’s old nemeses — who incurs The Kind One’s wrath. )
Away from the mob, Danny lives in a bungalow complex with the requisite set of interesting neighbors: an opium-smoking Englishman named Dulwich who is still pining for his Rupert Brooke-ish beloved (who died of influenza after surviving the World War ) and a neglected 11-year-old named Sophie who suffers at the hands of her mother’s uncouth lovers.
As you might expect given Epperson’s resume, there is a cinematic quality to the book, to the extent that most of the chapters might easily be transposed into scenes; you might mentally cast it as you read. (Last week, it was announced that Casey Affleck will star in a film based on the novel; Epperson will adapt his novel after the writers’ strike is settled. )
But Epperson not only has a knack for tight, natural-sounding dialogue and interesting situations; he commands an almost Chandleresque sense of rhythm. While he doesn’t have a knack for — or doesn’t indulge in — the elegant extended simile or heartcracking image, there’s a musical flow to his sentences, which echo Philip Marlowe’s tough poetry in their cadence and attention to significant detail.
While James Ellroy’s Hollywood crime novels seem an obvious reference point, Epperson avoids the postmodern pyrotechnics of Ellroy’s prose, crafting instead a novel of ’ 30 s L. A. that feels like it could have been written in ’ 30 s L. A. There’s a little age-of-irony playfulness to The Kind One, as when Epperson allows a dice shooter to quote a Rolling Stones song as he tosses the bones. (Though, on the other hand, the line could be authentic — maybe it’s something gamblers really used to say. A quick Google search suggested otherwise, but who knows ?)
What’s most impressive about The Kind One is that, unlike most first novels (especially first novels that come after decades of striving ), it reads effortlessly and wears its ideas and literary aspirations lightly. It’s first of all a good story, and Epperson’s prose is so spare and unobtrusive it might be mistaken for utilitarian. It’s anything but that — tuned and polished, as sleek as a bullet and just as penetrating. It could make a very good movie. But as it is, it’s a very good book. E-mail pmartin@arkansasonline. com
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