Vampire Noir

Charlie Huston's Joe Pitt novels.

by Mary Borsellino

Charlie Huston's Vampire Noir

When you think about it, noir and vampires are a natural fit. What better context is there to tell stories about protagonists who grapple with the grimier, bloodier, more selfish aspects of human nature? About social systems where the young, the scrappy, and the self-made have to battle against the stratas set in place by old money and old power?

Charlie Huston's novels about Joe Pitt, an archetypal noir anti-hero if there ever was one, stand as proof of just how well the two genres can blend. The books are intriguing, compelling, a little bit nasty and a lot entertaining.

The world Joe Pitt inhabits is structured into Clans, factions of vampires (or Vampyres, as they're called in the novels, to distinguish them from our pop-culture conceptions of monsters in the dark) who are constantly vying for territory. While it's never hard to follow the divisions and alliances at any given moment of the story (such alliances change frequently as the novels progress), there's no doubt that the world Huston has created is a highly complex one.

"Initially I was making things up as I went along," Huston admits. "I'd started the first Joe Pitt book, Already Dead, as something to entertain myself with. As such, there was no real need to spell things out; I was free to let the various Clans evolve.

"In fact, the whole Clan structure was unplanned. When I started, I only had the Coalition in mind; they were intended to be more of a monolithic power structure. The Society was going to be more ragtag, a real underground organization. At some point I need for the Society to have more juice, to be more of a counterweight to the Coalition, and once I entertained the idea of multiple Clans that split the city into turfs I just started to run with it. For about 100 pages. About there I got side tracked by other work.

"Years later, once I had sold my first crime novels, I had a chance to show Already Dead to my publisher as a partial manuscript for sale. That's when I needed to put together a bible for Joe's world, something to show that I had a roadmap and knew where I was going. That was the first time I really sat down and tried to outline the Clans, their structures, beliefs, and agendas. I've actually got some of that bible up on the Joe Pitt page at my website. Anyone who reads the books can see that the Clans continue to evolve from that plan."

These days ' especially if you're talking to a comics reader ' the words 'noir pastiche' inevitably conjure up thoughts of Miller's Sin City. Huston's skewed vision of Manhattan has a significant one-up on the world created by Frank Miller, though: here, the women get to be rounded characters too, not just sexy silhouettes and hearts of gold. There are heterosexuals and lesbians, HIV-positive women who keep their sex appeal, transgendered women who form sisterly bonds with runaway heiresses.

"Writing female characters does not come naturally to me, and I'm always concerned that I'm dealing too heavily in clich' when I do," Huston says when I remark on how well he's populated his world with individuals who happen to be female. "I don't find it hard to find room for female characters, but I do find it hard to do them justice.

"It's not the genre conventions that are restricting, it's my own lack of imagination. I want all my characters to have some degree of life to them, an extra dimension so that the reader can invest something emotionally, but it's harder with female characters because, well, I'm a guy. There are some life experiences I will never have because I come equipped with a penis. Not that I'm complaining. But I do find myself sweating the honesty of my female characters in a way I don't fret with the boys. My wife is a big help. She keeps an eye out for moments when I slip up and something rings hollow."

At the center of the Joe Pitt novels is, unsurprisingly, Joe Pitt. Just as the women in Huston's work are pleasingly nuanced as people, so too are the men afforded a masculinity which carries in it more layers than you might expect from the average genre cast of characters. Everything, from vulnerability and sexuality to fight scenes and wisecracking, spins a little differently to how the reader expects. Joe's the classic noir protagonist, the jaded romantic who thinks he's way more of a hardass than he really is inside.

"I'm nothing like Joe. I don't even smoke anymore. And I haven't been able to keep up with his drinking for years," says Huston. "Joe may be less of a hardass than he thinks he is, but that still leaves plenty of room for him to be a bastard and a cold blooded killer. I'm working on the fourth Joe Pitt book right now; at this point it's something of a love/hate relationship. I've been with the guy for years, and I'll be with him for another couple years until I write the fifth, and final, book in the series, so I need to get along with him, but there are certainly times when his shit drives me up the wall.

"One of the freedoms of a character like Pitt, and of his whole world, is that you get to write dialogue just because it sounds cool. You get to have entire scenes and settings just because they feel cool. You get to have plot twists just because you think they will be cool. I'm always working to make Joe's world internally consistent, but it's a world filled with cool-talking and cool-acting characters who are mostly all badasses; that means I have tons of freedom to let my imagination go. That's fun. Mostly I'm pretty excited when it's time to start one of Joe's stories, there's a great deal of freedom, but by the end I'm usually ready to deal with stuff that's a bit more down to earth.

"Writing the dialogue in Joe's world is a blast. These characters just drip one liners and parting shots and cutting asides. A character I loved writing, but haven't returned to since the first book, is Chubby Freeze. I'm working now to make room for him when I write book five."

To round out our chat ' because I'm sort of hopelessly addicted, as gripped by these books as Huston's heroes are by their bloodthirsty Vyrus ' I ask what's coming next.

"The third Pitt book, Half the Blood of Brooklyn, will be out in December," Huston tells me. "And I think it won't be a big surprise if I say Joe's going to Brooklyn. This is a pivot book; some of the larger plots for the series, both the story of what the Vyrus is, and the resolution of Joe's relationship with his girlfriend Evie, will really get primed in this book so you can see where they will be going next.

"I didn't want to be overly coy about those things, and they will start being dealt with very concretely in this book. The self-contained adventure has to do with Clans from off Manhattan starting to come over the bridges.

"Joe's world is a very carefully balanced ecosystem; it's not built for more Vampyres to come calling. Someone has to deal with it."

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Originally published in Sequential Tart, October 2007.

Sequential Tart