"Crime"

nik.mercer — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 08:41:54 -0700

Director (The Mark of Cain)/editor-at-large (Stop Smiling)/occasional T.V. writer (Deadwood) Alix Lambert is an enigma. Since the beginning of her professional career, she has unabashedly expressed an overt interest in the morbid, sick, dirty, perverse, and gritty (one of her earliest art school exhibits was entitled The Return of the Cadavre Exquis, for example). In short, shock value has never been an issue for the jack-of-all-trades New Yorker.

So it's with little surprise—but endless intrigue—that we find her latest publication, Crime: A Series of Extraordinary Interviews exposing the world of Crime—Real and Imagined, a 350-page tome of which she is the primary editor. The Fuel book is deliberately made to look like a chunky pulp fiction artifact, but with a stylish, sexy twist (every header is in underlined and italicized Avenir—i-D Magazine's typeface of choice for years—after all). In terms of content, too, the collection of intimate interviews is all at once shrouded in mysterious allure and spun with modern, sometimes academic finesse.

While Anthem has yet to get through the whole thing, it's one of the most compelling non-fiction reads we've picked up in years. It sets out to connect, as the subtitle implies, the real crime with the imagined. Utilizing a chicken-or-the-egg sort of philosophy brought to a whole new level of scholarly investigation, the interviews inform us of the hazy line between the crime that literally plagues the projects and Little Italys across the nation and the big-bang stuff we see on the silver screen, in crime novels, and television shows.

Actor Viggo Mortensen divulges us with his "first memory of crime" (it involves a "maggot-riddled baby's corpse in a burlap bag," believe it or not); playwright and essayist Joe Loya explains his background as a bank robber; writer, actor, and director Ben Affleck stresses the importance of not distancing the audience from criminal narratives; Japanese writer, actor, and director Takeshi Kitano remembers his Yakuza abduction; mystery novelist and screenwriter Elmore Leonard reflects on his early memories of guns (feeling nervous about and drawn to them all at once) and broods upon the "simplicity" of crooks; surprisingly, every single interviewee tells a succinct and articulate tale of individual import that obviously figures into the bigger picture and theme of Crime. Read this book and be mystified by the back-stories of some of the speakers, be scared by the realness of crime and evil-doing, be awakened to the real and imagined consequences of it all, and be drawn in—despite your best efforts to remain disaffected—to the gritty underbelly of evil.

Amazon.com order page for Crime

Fuel Publishing order page for Crime