Noir Nation No. 1 was dedicated to Amy Winehouse, who lived a dark life in the open lights. It’s hard to know which killed her, the darkness or the light. Or a bad combination of the two.
In this song, she asks, “Will you love me tomorrow?”
Amy Winehouse, Noir Nation will love you tomorrow and forever….
NEW YORK CITY – August 1932
Caught between the Great Depression and a massive heatwave, New York is a city on the edge. Businesses close up shop, breadlines grow longer and riots are almost a daily occurrence.
But when corrupt NYPD Detective Charlie Doherty is assigned to investigate a dead body in a flophouse, he knows there’s more here than meets the eye. He quickly discovers that the girl’s death is tied to one of the most powerful families in New York, and a kidnapping case that could tear the city apart. In a chase that takes Doherty from the mansions of Fifth Avenue to the slums of the Lower East Side all the way to City Hall itself, Doherty is in a race against time to find the people responsible for putting his city on a Slow Burn.
Available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Kobo soon to come!
Scarlet Street (1945) directed by Fritz Lang was based on the French novel La Chienne (The Bitch) by Georges de La Fouchardière. It had been previously dramatized on stage by André Mouëzy-Éon, and cinematically as La Chienne (1931) by director Jean Renoir.
The principal actors Edward G. Robinson, Joan Bennett, and Dan Duryea, had earlier appeared together in The Woman in the Window (1944) also directed by Fritz Lang. The three were re-teamed for Scarlet Street. The film was later featured in an episode of Cinema Insomnia.
Lang’s science fiction film noir classic Metropolis has become a staple in the curricula of film schools. The film was based on the screenplay and novel written by his wife Thea Von Harbeau, which is available in an New Revised Edition published by VegaTrope.
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Born in Barcelona in 1961, Juan Carlos Girauta, graduated with a degree in Law from the University of Barcelona and obtained an MBA at the ESADE Business School. Given his tendencies towards writing, he began studies towards a Doctorate in Philosophy but later abandoned it to pursue economic and political journalism. Currently, he writes for the Spanish newspaper ABC and serves as a political analyst on radio and television programs
Disorder (El desorden in Spanish) is Girauta’s second noir novella and the first one translated into English. Both versions, the Spanish original and the English translation, have been published by the Singapore-based Monsoon Books exclusively in e-book form. He took time away from his busy schedule to speak with Noir Nation editor, Eddie Vega.
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Noir Nation: At what point did you know you were a writer? What was the process of discovery like?
Girauta: I have always had a strong tendency towards writing. I entered the University of Barcelona to study law, but soon I realized that I would have preferred studying philosophy and literature. Nonetheless, I finished law in order to work as a lawyer, but never abandoned the possibility that I might become a writer.
Noir Nation: In one of your author photos, your hand seems to form what we in New York call the Bronx Cheer. Was that unintentional or were you trying to send some kind of message?
Girauta: Hahaha! I had no idea about the Bronx Cheer. It was rather a pose to break the monotony involving those photo sessions whenever you are not a model and you are not paid for those.
Noir Nation: Tell us about your most recent book, Disorder.
Girauta: It is about a serial killer who, clinging to the remembrance of somebody who doesn’t even exist, seeks a sense of guilt, of a remorse he is unable to feel. Meanwhile, in the first person, the main character remembers his crimes, philosophizes, identifies his elusive identity with the city of Barcelona and taunts the weird prestige that he has attained. He has roused fascination in some circles and contemplates with a kind of astonishment the theory that a journalist has developed about him. The turning point of the narrative is in Vienna, in the home of Sigmund Freud, which was turned into a museum. That’s all I can say.
Noir Nation: The book appeared in both English and Spanish. Did you collaborate with the translator, Ian Goldring? Were there things you wrote that were beyond translation?
Girauta: I don’t think there is something that can’t be translated when we are dealing with languages that are alive and have a strong literary tradition like Spanish and English. Ian’s translation is very faithful to the original and keeps the spirit of the text perfectly. I didn’t collaborate with him because I leave all those matters in the hands of my literary agent, a fellow Spaniard who lives in Singapore. My agent is an impressive fellow. He has a Ph.D. in Philosophy and translates from modern Greek. His Twitter handle is @Seleucus.
Noir Nation: The book uses many references to pop culture – to the actress Sharon Stone for example – but also to literary giants such as Borges. In what way did you intend the references to advance your narrative?
Girauta: My literary conscience, to use that expression, is a mixture of elements that, crystallizing in Postmodernism, allows me to incorporate references from the pop culture in which I was raised during my adolescence in the 70s, precisely when the Francoist dictatorship was agonizing in Spain. Not by chance, my beloved groups still are Genesis and, of course, The Beatles. I have tried to make my literary, musical, overall artistic, references part of the novel’s natural fabric. I hope to have attained it.
Noir Nation: The cover has a minimalist approach to design. How did the cover come to be made?
Girauta: The cover was created by a graphic designer who works with my literary agent. The designer thought that a crimson blood stain would be a good idea on a red black ground. After all, the center of the story is murder and its irreversibility. Its indelible stain.
Noir Nation: What was your writing process like?
Girauta: I am not sure that I should unveil this, but let’s do it. The history in Vienna was written first. Then it occupied its place (a central place, I think) in the novel. Actually it’s logical. I think that the events at Freud’s house, when the protagonist Juan Barcelona steals the small statue, should have a special place and intensity so that the whole of the story could work.
Noir Nation: Do you socialize with other crime writers? If so, does it help your creativity? Or hinder it?
Girauta: To speak the truth, I have some friends and acquaintances in the publishing industry, but not many, and even fewer who are noir writers. I was, for instance, a very good friend of Horacio Vázquez-Rial, one of the best Argentinean writers in the last three decades, but he died of cancer last year.
Noir Nation: What’s the market like for crime fiction in Spain and Latin America?
Girauta: Noir literature is much more stronger in the Anglo Saxon markets than in the Spanish-speaking ones. One reason is that many noir novels we read in Spanish are translations from other languages, mainly English, though there have been some stunning surprises from countries like Sweden, with the works of Henning Mankell and Stieg Larsson. There is comparatively less noir production originally written in Spanish.
Noir Nation: Is Spain embracing eBooks? Or is it clinging to print?
Girauta: The problem in Spain is that the reading index is not high. Half of Spaniards do not read, whereas in France, only 25% of the population does not read. To make matters worse, the recession has driven Spain’s unemployment rate to 26%, so the growth of the eBook market has been rather slow.
Noir Nation: Do you use online social media to create awareness of your work? If so, which platforms do you think work best? Are you likely to find readers more on some than on others?
Girauta: I have a Twitter account (@girauta) with more than 7500 followers and my literary agent administers the Facebook pages of both El desorden and Disorder. Twitter is more alive than Facebook because I decided not to open a personal account on Facebook. My work as a political analyst on radio stations and Spanish TV channels and as a columnist on the Spanish newspaper ABC takes all my time.
Noir Nation: Tell us about your literary influences.
Girauta: My basic influences belong to the Spanish Golden Age (the 16th and 17th centuries), to the Russian literature of the 19th century, to the movements of Aestheticism (Oscar Wilde) and Spanish Modernism (Ramón María del Valle-Inclán), and to the great Argentinean literature of the last century (Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Ernesto Sábato, Julio Cortázar).
Noir Nation: Is there a question you’d like me to ask that I did not ask?
Girauta: It’s been an awesome interview, and perhaps I would like to add a personal reflection: rather than a genre, the noir novel is a formidable code to trasmit to broad audiences all kind of narrtives, including the more ambitious intellectually.
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Jimmy Vargas, a writer, musician and leader of a combo called the Black Dahlias, is doing keenly interesting work in noir music videos, recordings, and live performances. We were particularly struck by the way he layers classic film noir elements with elements of horror and Jack Kerouac-style lyrics. He also runs a blog dedicated to the 1940s Siren or Femme Fatal.
A recording artist with with Dionysus records in Los Angeles, he took time away from his busy performing and writing schedule to talk with Noir Nation editor, Eddie Vega, about his music and filmography.
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Noir Nation: Is Jimmy Vargas your real name?
Vargas: Jimmy Vargas is the name I was born with in Chicago 1919, before my death in Los Angeles 1947. I have returned, earned and re-inherited the name after my rebirth in London 1958. It’s been quite a treacherous and tumultuous trip reclaiming my name, story and unfinished life back. Thirty years of living on and off in doss houses on Main, scouring bombed out burlesque houses, and skideroo bars, for a whisper of my racketeer pimp past. My complete story is told in the Requiem for My Shadow Bride DVD Installation / Book series.
Noir Nation: How did you come to create your Jimmy Vargas persona, the seedy crooner who hints of horrific murders to come?
Vargas: I am not a persona… I’m a natural born huckster looking for coins of grace, and rations of redemption from a dissolute and diabolical past that is soldered into my “Silver Cord.”
Hucksterism is my natural DNA.
I earn’t it.
I didn’t invent this.
Mine is not a bourgeois literary fun fair ride.
I’ve lived a life turning coin in the exotic industry performing and promoting striptease and erotic dancers before it became another hip feminist pursuit. I even headed up my own entertainment agency of vintage acts, rockabilly and swing combos, fan dancers and carnival freaks from the mid- eighties over three continents called Teasa-Varga.
I’m merely retracing the exact same life as I had in the nineteen forties.
And that includes the subject of murder.
But this time I’m paying for it.
As for the horrific murders to come?
Well I gotta do the death tango with my past firstly.
My quest now is to get through this incarnation without having her blood on my face, her image scorched in my eyes that I can never un-see, and not having to plug my ears to stop the cursing of her siren voice.
The est of noir is that “Every man walks in the shadow of some other silent grief, a violation and a damnation they had incurred on others or that had been plastered on them.” I’m squaring up on the outstanding ‘vig’ on mine. (Black Halo Prologue)
I’m paying for it by installations of penance in Music, literature and film.
Elizabeth Short, The Black Dahlia
Noir Nation: Tell us about the Black Dahlia. Who was she? And how did she come to influence your work?
Vargas: Elizabeth in her incarnate life was a huckster, though not a trained actress, she beheld an exotic theatrical spirit, that she pitched as trinkets for drinks, dinners, overnight havens and cash “loans.” She beheld a luminous dark glow that beguiled and torched both men and women alike. Her name was given to her by a tarot reader in Los Angeles, a trick sobriquet, both a word play on a movie at the time Blue Dahlia (1946) and a nod to her all gothique black wardrobe of gown, lingerie hosiery and hair, a ‘gimmick’ in which she was seen traipsing and mooching around the Hollywood studios and bars.
Her death was a Mayan voodoo rite.
I’ve been attesting to this fact for decades.
Steve Hodel’s Black Dahlia Avenger, a recommended read alludes to his father as her killer, who lived in the Frank Lloyd Wright Mayan House at the time. His known associates were part of the Hollywood voodoo milieu, Man Ray, Ben Hecht, Jack Parsons.
As for now Elizabeth Short the Black Dahlia remains entrapped in the aether of the Hollywood that spurned her, and her vibration still hums over Los Angeles downtown. Elizabeth Short is the Madonna of every starlet / soubrette / huckster who comes to Hollywood.
Elizabeth wanted fame, she now has it on eternal lease, in the cradle of mortis.
We had a connection in 1946. Stag movies.
Elizabeth Short is the Satanic Martyr Saint to my work
Noir Nation: Clearly, film noir has a strong influence both on your music and the look of your music videos. What specific movies influenced your work?
Vargas: Silent movies such as The Stranger on the Third Floor Left, Seven Footprints to Satan, Madam Satan. The German expressionists who took their Gotterdammerung vernacular and en-bedded into films of American urban nightmares. Noir prophets like Murnau (Nosferatu, Cabinet of Dr. Caligari), Fritz Lang (the whole canon), Billy Wilder (the whole canon from Double Indemnity to Lost Weekend to Sunset Boulevard) Ulmer (Detour). The European surrealists such as Bunuel and Man Ray. Post War Italian neo-realism. Poverty Row noir productions of Monogram and Eagle Lion Pictures. Exploitation peep show burlesque loops and 1940’s Roman Catholic Education Bio-Pics of the Saints. It all feeds my visual output.
Noir Nation: We noticed literary echoes of Jack Kerouac in the lyrics of your songs. Did he influence your work?
Vargas: I dig Kerouac’s jazz breath rhythm but Ginsberg is more my kick because of his street candor, melancholy, and anguished defiance. I’ve also love the rat tat tat tabloid writing of Ben Hecht, Mark Hellinger, Quentin Reynolds Walter Winchell and Mortimer and Lait of the “U.S.A. Confidential series”. Mix that in with six years of reading and studying Latin, and it makes for an interesting bouillabaisse.
Noir Nation: In addition to film noir, we noticed a look in some of your music video scenes that are reminiscent of the work of Quentin Tarantino, especially his From Dawn to Dusk, directed by Robert Rodriguez. We are thinking specifically of that fabulous scene with Salma Hayek… Was it intentional or mere coincidence?
Vargas: Dusk till Dawn has not influenced me.
Nor Tarantino for that matter.
I’ve been living in my own hadeian burlesque universe since the seventies, and produced shows and filmed videos of that aesthetic before Dusk till Dawn came out.
Tarantino and myself may well be feeding from the same pulp cesspool of libidinity, lust and death.
A greater influence over my work is David Lynch.
He shoots heroin on film.
Lynch is the master.
As for the Salma Hayek connection?
Well my muse Liliana Scarlatta is of Latina origin, as is Selma.
There’s a serpentine grace to Latin women when they dance.
That’s probably what your keen eye is suspecting.
Noir Nation: You are creating in many formats, music, film, and fiction. Which gives you the greatest pleasure?
Vargas: Mine is a trinity of Music film and fiction which work off each other. They are not separate art-forms. They cross breed from the same poppa. When I’m writing, a camera sits on my desk alongside my Epiphone guitar. Each influences the other, so there’s a consistent visual, literary and audio stream.
Noir Nation: Tell us about your collaboration with Liliana Scarlatta and Mia Mortal. Both play 1940s femme fatales in your videos, but they could be femme fatales in any age. How were their characters created?
Vargas: My Muses come complete as mistresses of their own universe. They allow me in. It is they and they alone who divine my work, for my work is inherently female.
They are not characters.
Mia and Liliana are two female exotic sirens who tug and pull at my creative horns. They amaze, torture, honor, sensualize, demonize and exalt me. The whole Vargas canon celebrates the exotic divinity of their female spirit.
They are the Black Goddess and the White Goddess.
Liliana, the Shadow Bride is a feisty raven haired Argentinian. She is an exotic dancer and sorceress who possesses the nitrate glamour of Hollywood film stars of the thirties, forties and fifties. My Shadow Bride series is about her as such a subject, spanning over a fifty year period.
Mia Mortal, Madame Sin / Maitressa Maia is a chilled Scandinavian Platinum Blonde.
She is a consummate Burlesque Diva and Exotic Showgirl.
Her talents also span Performance Art, Aerial, Trapeze, Art and fashion modeling.
Miss Mortal has earned her Lilith fan feathers with distinction, working in venues all over the world like the Tivoli (Amsterdam) Moulin Rouge (Paris) Raymond’s Revue Bar (London) Nagashaki Music Hall (Tokyo).
Mia has performed with me since 1999. She appears in the Striptease in Noir Series, as well as our forthcoming Black Halo music / video installations
Mia too in her spare time tangos with the tarots, when same fingers aren’t unzipping her elegant Dior Gown or bewitching with a capricious cancan.
I am blessed by her collaboration.
Noir Nation: Where do you see yourself five years from now?
Vargas: Dead.
Next incarnation.
I’ll have said what I want to say.
I’d have paid for the murders and the pimping by song, word and image. These are hermetical works of penance and absolution.
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A video interview with Jimmy Vargas can be seen here.