Namaste Mart Confidential: Reading List
My debut novel Namaste Mart Confidential is a missing person P.I. story and dark comedy set in Los Angeles in 2013. Adam Minor, an aspiring novelist, and Richie Walsh, a stand-up comic, both pay their bills as clerks at a fashionably spiritual hippie grocery store in West Hollywood but also maintain second careers as unlicensed private detectives. When a lingerie saleswoman goes missing, Adam and Richie are hired by her employer to find her. Their odyssey brings them into contact with the Armenian mob, outlaw Mormons, and all sorts of wild L.A. characters. In this book, true details from my own life are blended into the fictional story. Here are some of the books where writers open investigations into crime or books that blend fact and fiction which influenced me while I wrote it. Some spoilers are ahead.
Point Doom by Dan Fante
Dan Fante, son of the legendary Jon Fante, crafts an L.A.-set P.I. thriller centered around J.D. Fiorella, a Dan Fante-like anti-hero struggling with addiction and anger issues. J.D.’s sober these days, living with his elderly mother in Malibu, and he’s just got a new job selling used cars. A chance road rage incident on the Pacific Coast Highway puts him straight in the crosshairs of a deranged movie producer and his psychotic daughter. Mixing dark humor with flashes of horrific violence, Fante delivers a page-turning thriller that manages to thread in many great personal moments worthy of his earlier, more overtly autobiographical Bruno Dante series. What we get is Fante’s best novel. The touching dedication is to his mother Joyce, once played by Judy Holiday in Full of Life (1956), who loved mysteries and crime fiction so much she claimed to have read her way through every series printed in English.
2. My Dark Places by James Ellroy
In the mid-90s, at the height of his legendary career, James Ellroy reopens the still-unsolved 1958 murder of his mother, Geneva Hilliker in El Monte, California. A retired L.A. Sherriff’s detective named Bill Stoner joins him on the cold case, and we get not just a fascinating true-life detective story, but a brutally honest memoir of Ellroy himself, the story of his family, as well as the ruminations of a man finally dealing with the lack of closure over a tragedy which occurred to him when he was only ten years old. Don’t be expecting a pat conclusion. “Closure is bullshit,” Ellroy often says.
3. Blood Will Out by Walter Kirn
A dark, personal memoir worthy of comparison to My Dark Places. Author, literary critic, and Montana resident Walter Kirn volunteers to deliver a disabled Gordon setter named Shelby, recently adopted over the internet by Rockefeller descendant in the east. Once in New York City, Walter meets Clark Rockefeller, and forms a strange friendship with the eccentric heir that lasts for fifteen years. Later, Kirn learns that “Clark Rockefeller” never existed at all and the man he knew was a Tom Ripley-esque conman who was about to be put on trial for murder. Kirn’s long first section where he’s on a road trip, delivering Shelby to an uncertain future, will haunt you.
4. Prophet’s Prey by Sam Brower
Here, an actual P.I. and mainstream Mormon chronicles one of his own investigations. Sam Brower (picture a Utah-vibing, real-life version of Kevin Costner in Yellowstone) opens a years-long case against the FLDS (Fundamentalist Latter-Day Saints) and its leaders, the Jeffs family, an insidious polygamist cult, rife with organized pedophilia. Many religious groups often speak about the need to push extremists out of their various faiths — Sam spent years actually doing this at great personal risk and has written a spellbinding account of his experiences. A badass high-light worthy of a Clint Eastwood flick — when some FLDS thugs show up on Sam’s property looking to intimidate him, he chases them down, boxes them in, and leans his head in through their window. “You come near my house again and trespass on my property, I’m going to splatter you all over my driveway,” he says. If you think the fringe, outlaw Mormons in Namaste Mart Confidential seems too outlandish to have any basis in reality, read this book.
5. A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
This one’s not crime or true crime, but it’s a landmark in blending the truth with fiction. A Moveable Feast is Hemingway’s memories of Paris in the 1920s, when his writing career was just beginning and he was still with his first wife, Hadley. It’s before all the head injuries, the plane crashes, and before his suicide in 1961. Significant parts of this book have been verified as lies. Hadley shows up, but her trust fund they lived on during those “starving artist” years does not. We know from countless sources that Hemingway was a pompous and repellent jerk, especially to his older, more successful and more sensitive friend Scott Fitzgerald, who did nothing but champion the younger writer. In this text, he always comes off as the hero. A Moveable Feast is laughably petty. It’s cartoonishly dedicated on settling old scores through lies. Regardless, it remains a heartbreaking and beautiful masterpiece. It’s great fiction. Papa’s looking back on the good and the bad and crafting an elegiac and romantic vision of how things should have been. One of his most enduring fictional creations is this younger, heroic portrait of himself. With Namaste Mart Confidential, I asked myself, “Could I try something like this, a love-letter to an earlier time, as a P.I. novel?
You can buy Namaste Mart Confidential here.
