Irony of Humanity: Jim Nisbet's LETHAL INJECTION

James Ellroy called it "unheralded masterpiece of the noir genre." It is widely regarded as one of the finest achievements of moder noir - a classic that stands with the best of Jim Thompson and Charles Willeford. It is Lethal Injection, by Jim Nisbet.

And now, almost twenty-five years after its orginal publication (1987), critics and reviewers are still taking about Lethal Injection. Here's a new assessment on the German publication of the original novel.

Irony of Humanity. A short 20 years later, Jim Nisbet's 1987 novel Lethal Injection belongs to the classic noir book inventory.
Franklyn Royce hasn't achieved much in his life. His wife hates him because he's not ambitious enough to provide her with the standard of living she thinks she deserves. Frustrations with his marriage and job have made him an alcoholic. His own doctor's practice is lousy, so he has to earn an extra couple hundred dollars each month as a prison doctor in Huntsville, TX. Witnessing death sentences is one of the responsibilities that goes with the job. And so he meets the young, black Robert Mencken. During the robbery of a small shop in Dallas, for a whole $9, Mencken supposedly shot the shop keeper in the face several times. When the poison of the lethal injection is already in his veins, he confides in Royce that he's innocent of the crime, but prepared to die. His confession is an awakening for the doctor, and shortly before dying the condemned men seals the experience with a kiss.

Lethal Injection has long been a timeless, insider tip for those who know the genre. For Sandro Veronesi, whose article out of La Repubblica serves as forward to the new German translation, author Nisbet is a "phantom genius", little known and admired by few… but these readers are spread out all over the entire world and all in all aren't so few in number.

But don't expect that the new German edition of Nisbet's classic from 1987 will be a huge hit. That it ought to be is barely more than a fervent wish. In the local, not so badly stocked book store the Pulp-Master titles - after "Dark Companion", “Lethal Injection" is the second Nisbet novel for the Berlin publisher Frank Nowatzki in his highly praised enterprise - are seldom requested. Too literary? Too depressing? In the truest sense of the word, too "noir"?

In any case, for Franklyn Royce the encounter with Bobby Menken starts a new and for him final phase of life. Nothing holds him in his relationship any longer. Convinced of Menken's innocence, Royce sets out on a search for the real killer. He quickly lands with the two people who were there as the murder occurred, for which Mencken was executed. Eddie Lamark is a psychopath capable of anything; Colleen Valdez a heroin addict and sometime prostitute who doesn't need to do much to totally bewitch the sexually frustrated Royce.

The reader only notices at the very end of the book the sophistication Nisbet used in composing this early masterpiece. And that the path of Franklin Royce is already laid out in the path of the man the doctor feels called to revenge. Royce won't survive his search for the truth either. The connections he finally reconstructs and tragically gets wrong is at the very end simply repeat the irony of human destiny that Mencken made Royce aware of: that it was in the hour of death that Royce finally encountered the compassion for humanity he'd spent his whole life seeking.

With Jean Genet the novel itself mentions one of the witnesses whose work pops up in one’s mind when reading "Lethal Injection". Bobby Mencken's prison nickname is Harmacone, after a figure from Jean Genet's "The Miracle of the Rose” whose chains turn into roses in the fantasy of the narrator and give the murderer the aura of a saint. For Sandro Veronesi, it's like Nisbet's beloved Samuel Beckett, Oe, Josef Škvorecky and Fjodor Dostojewski, whose voices he heard when reading the novel. Occasional associations with the famous Malcolm Lowry impose themselves on the reviewer. These few names, no matter how clearly they might be woven into the intertextual network of "Lethal Injection" show the caliber you have with Nisbet. No one who reads the first 50 pages, which force the reader into the cold light of a Texas execution chamber, will argue with the fact that this novel can be understood as vehement plea against the death penalty, practiced again in the USA since 1976."

The Overlook Press has published three of Jim Nisbet's classic works in paperback - Lethal Injection, Dark Companion, The Damned Don't Die - and a 2010 novel in hardcover, Windward Passage.

A Writer's Influences: Jim Nisbet

Jim Nisbet, author of Windward Passage, Lethal Injection, The Damned Don't Die, and the forthcoming Old & Cold, recently sent us this note on what writers have influenced him most:

"That's a long list and, one way or another, it would have to include almost everything I've every read.

I've been around a long time, of course. So, for example, I read almost all of Dostoyevsky when I was 22 and maybe 23 years old. I went to my draft physical bearing a copy of The Idiot, and, basically, I never got over Dostoyevsky. Those translations were done by a woman named Constance Garnett. Now, 40 years later, we have in America a completely new and really interesting re-issue of all the novels of Dostoyevsky as translated by the team of Richard Pevear and his wife, Larissa Volokhonsky, and these translations are just terrific. As a result, to date I've reread The Possessed, The Devils, The Gambler, Notes From Underground... And, you know what? Dostoyevsky is still great.

Pevear and Volokhonsky, by the way, have made a big hit here with their translation of War And Peace. I reread that, too, but, you know what? As my friend the late, lamented Robin Cook (aka Derek Raymond; is he translated in Italy?) used to say, "Tolstoy? You can have Tolstoy." Apostasy! Sacrilege! But, well...

Stendhal (much borrowed by Tostoy); I have a collection of English translations of Le Chartreuse de Parme and reread it regularly. (My favorite one remains the first one, done by The Lady Mary Lloyd; my copy was published in 1901.) I hope one day to be able to read it in French. But I also just read La Vie de Henri Brulard. Cesare Pavese I could mention, and Curzio Malaparte -- why not? I'm talking to an Italian! I've even read Ferdinando Camon. Who can forget the entire family fighting over the anchovy hanging by a string over the dinner table? Not so much Moravia... All of Jane Austin. Most of Beckett. Moby-Dick -- what a book! A Story of A Life by Konstantin Paustovsky. All of the literature of single-handed sailing, particularly of course by the circumnavigators, starting with and often coming back to Sailing Alone Around The World by Capt. Joshua Slocum. Books on astrophysics...

But you probably want to know about thrillers. So, Jim Thompson, David Goodis, Dan J. Marlowe... which brings me to...

Chandler, Hammett, H.P. Lovecraft, Ross Macdonald ... and Kerouac. I've read much of what these guys wrote, and avidly, and years ago, and, you know what? Unlike Dostoyevsky, I've not been able to bring myself to repeat the experience. There you have it. But I very much admire The Factory Series, and that before I met its creator, the English writer Robin Cook, whom I came to count as a friend, but of whom, interestingly enough, I never read or heard of until I started going to France. He's still relatively unknown...

When I was nine and ten and eleven years old I read all kinds of Mickey Spillane and various other thrillers, A Coffin for Dimitrios, James Bond, but no more.

Christ, I forgot about Faulkner!... And never mind every book about Antarctic exploration, beginning and ending with The Worst Journey in The World, by Apsley Cherry-Garrard.... Then there's Wilfred Thesiger! And all the Voyageurs tramping North America, looking for plews and the northwest passage. A huge body of literature. Mad dudes like Celine and the Marquis de Sade...

And the poets! One of my back-burner projects is a complete English translation of Les Fleurs de Mal. there're about 115 of them. I've done 35...

I can't list all the authors, let alone all their books. This is a very long discussion... Endless... It's one of the reasons why literature is so great. That, and it's not television... One of the joys of being a writer is that you get to read all the time. That's my approach, anyway... "

Dark Companion will be published in a new trade paperback edition on March 29. Join Jim Nisbet at M is for Mystery in San Mateo, Ca on Wednesday, March 30 for a reading and Q&A.

Jim Nisbet at his "Wildest and Weirdest!"

Jim Nisbet's Windward Passage continues to received extraordinary review attention from all over the globe. Here's a new one, written by book critic Woody Haut for Crime Time, a terrific website from the International Association of Crime Writers:

"Jim Nisbet, author of The Damned Don't Die, Lethal Injection, Prelude to a Scream, Death Puppet and Price of the Ticket has long been one of my favorite noirists. In Windward Passage, his tenth book, he pulls out all the stops, combining his long-standing noir sensibilities with an off-the-wall post-modern disposition and cultural critique. Pacey, but filled with enough tropes to keep the most hardcore Jim Thompsonite happy- at least those partial to the final section of The Getaway or the surrealism of Savage Night- Windward Passage centres on a ship that sinks in the Caribbean, its captain chained to the mast. A logbook, a partially written novel, a brick of cocaine and the DNA of a President are all that remain. The appropriately named dead sailor's sister, Tipsy lives in San Francisco, where she hangs out at bars with her gay friend Quentin. That is until she runs into Red, Tipsy's brother's old employer.

Scrambling genres and voices, Windward Passage flits around geographically as well as linguistically, high-tailing it from San Francisco to the Caribbean and back again, dove-tailing from fast-talking, never-less-than-witty dialogue to tangential asides, reportage, paradoxical quips and a novel within a novel. With his ear to the ground, Nesbit not only updates the traditional noir narrative, combining it with a sea adventure story, conundrums, a dash of cyberpunk, and a sprinkling of literary concerns (including the likes of Tom Raworth, Paustovsky and Leonard Clark's The Rivers Ran East). From a prologue that will leave you scratching your head for at least a hundred pages, Windward Passage sometimes reads like a hardboiled Saragossa Manuscript, and bound to appeal to anyone looking beyond the confines of the genre. Still, I remember thinking while reading the novel that this is the sort of book we're told doesn't get published these days. So hat's off not only to Nisbet, but to Overlook Press. Because this is Nisbet at his wildest and weirdest. I'm still not sure what it all adds up to, other than an entertaining, insightful and highly recommended adventure."

More Praise for Jim Nisbet's WINDWARD PASSAGE

Jim Nisbet's Windward Passage gets a stellar review in Booklist: "Nisbet, whose cult appeal has never really translated to the mainstream, hits another one out of the park. It's a typically skewed story, one that requires the reader to pay attention, follow intricate plot threads, and-most importantly-get comfortable in the author's landscape with (let's face it) very little help from him. Nisbet isn't one of those guys who say: OK, reader, here's the fictional world I've created, and here are all the things you need to know about it. Instead, he just plunges right in and asks us to keep up with him. Here the story is set in a sort of alternate-reality version of our world. The plot? Well, that's a tricky one-saying too much about it risks blowing any number of nifty surprises. Let's just say there's a sunken boat, a brick of cocaine with the DNA of a very highly placed individual, a dead sailor's sister, and a vast conspiracy. Nisbet's novels are linguistic playgrounds, full of funky words and phrases ("ceiling snurfs," "rhinoported attendees," "infundibulum") that are obscure, made-up, or just plain weird. Readers who like their fiction to be tidy and linear might not want to go anywhere near this novel. On the other hand, lovers of the unorthodox, the intellectually challenging, and the aggressively offbeat will enjoy themselves immensely." - David Pitt

Meet Jim Nisbet, author of WINDWARD PASSAGE, at The Mysterious Bookshop in NYC on May 7

Jim Nisbet, author of the noir classic Lethal Injection and newly published Windward Passage, will be signing books at The Mysterious Bookshop in New York on Friday afternoon, May 7, at 4pm. (55 Warren Street in Tribeca).

Nisbet is the author of nine previous novels, including Lethal Injection, Dark Companion, The Price of the Ticket, Prelude to a Scream, and The Octopus on My Head. His work has been published in eight languages. Nisbet has twice won the Pangolin Papers Annual Fiction Award, and thrice been nominated by for a Pushcart Prize in short fiction. His novel, Dark Companion, was shorted-listed (with four other nominees) for the 2006 Hammett Prize. He has also published five volumes of poetry.

Don't miss this rare New York appearance by one of the great masters of noir fiction!

“Jim Nisbet -- whose pen is mightier than a million swords -- does it again with Windward Passage. This is a book that should not be missed.” – Michael Connelly

“Well, it's official. In the next decade, the world will finally be weird enough to make Jim Nisbet accessible to the masses...his books have the sort of "naked lunch" effect that William Burroughs used to describe the hyper state of perception once experiences under the influence of narcotics. But you ignore Nisbet at your own peril. Because he really does know what's going on and why. He's lived in your future for some thirty years. He's still looking back. Readers would do well to look forward.” – Rick Kleffel, The Agony Column
"Jim Nisbet is a cult favorite in Europe and it's easy to see why. I've talked to a few people about this author and comparisons abound; he's Thomas Pynchon crossed with Raymond Chandler; the lovechild of Patricia Highsmith and Don Delillo, and on and on it goes. For my money I'd say he reads like Jasper Fforde meets Ken Bruen. One thing for sure, he's unique and man does he have a vivid imagination.” –SleuthOfBakerStreet.com

“Nisbet's novels... always look like one thing but turn out to be something else entirely. It is a rare talent, not accessible to all, perhaps, but no less special.” –Booklist

“Missing any book by Nisbet should be considered a crime in all 50 states and maybe against humanity. Erudite, perspicuous and sanguine...This California philosopher, etymologist and savant will take you on a trip like no other writer I know. Do not miss this one or any other of his great books!” –The Swarthmorean

“In Windward Passage, Nisbet captures the absurdities of present-day America with a rare pungency in this noir gem…Crime, cosmology, politics, philosophy, physics and more enter into this cautionary tale, which climaxes with the suddenness of a cobra strike and then delivers a denouement that's both stunning and absolutely perfect.” –Publishers Weekly

"Nisbet mixes noir mystery, dystopian sf, and a great deal of humor into a bubbling, complex stew. With his scruffy characters, political and philosophical bent, and ability to turn a striking simile, he resembles no one so much as a somewhat more subdued (no talking inanimate objects) Tom Robbins. Highly recommended." - Library Journal

Overlook Authors Jim Nisbet and Katie Arnoldi to Appear at Los Angeles Times Festival of Books April 24-25

Meet Overlook authors Katie Arnoldi and Jim Nisbet at this weekend's Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, located on the UCLA campus in Los Angeles.

The largest public literary festival in North America will mark its 15th anniversary by once again delivering an exciting and diverse world of culture and amusement under the beautiful Southern California sun to more than 130,000 people of all ages. Seven outdoor stages will feature everything from celebrity and author readings, book signings and Q&A's, live music, comedy and children's activities to cooking shows and culinary demonstrations. Nearly 100 panel discussions and readings featuring more than 400 authors blend with hundreds of exhibitors representing booksellers, publishers, literacy and cultural organizations to make the Festival of Books one of the city's most cherished and engaging institutions.

Katie Arnoldi, author of Point Dume, will appear on Sunday, April 25, at 1:30pm, Rolfe 1200, and the Book Soup tent at 4pm.

Jim Nisbet, author of Windward Passage, will sign books at The Mystery Bookstore booth (#411) on Saturday, April 24, 5-6pm.

The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books was created in 1996 to promote literacy, celebrate the written word, and bring together those who create books with the people who love to read them. Between 130,000 and 140,000 people attend the event annually.

General event information is available online at latimesfestivalofbooks.com or by calling 1-800-LA TIMES, ext. 7BOOK. Detailed speaker and event information will be provided in the official festival program, which will be published in the April 18th edition of the Los Angeles Times.

Welcome to Overlook, Jim Nisbet

We're thrilled to announce the acquisition of Jim Nisbet's new noir crime thriller, along with nine novels from the author's celebrated backlist, including Lethal Injection and the Hammett Prize finalist Dark Companion. The new work, untitled at the moment, will be published in 2009. Crime fiction columnist Sarah Weinman reports on the deal on her terrific blog, Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind.