Chad ByrnesIt’s a sweltering Monday afternoon when Richard Lange walks into El Compadre, a cavernous, dimly lit Mexican restaurant decorated with Christmas lights, rustic paintings, and wrought-iron chandeliers. A Hollywood staple since 1975, El Compadre is located on a stretch of Sunset Boulevard where dingy motels and strip bars rub elbows with guitar shops and nondescript galleries. It’s a perfect place to meet Lange, one of the best crime-fiction writers Los Angeles has seen since Jim Thompson or James Ellroy. With a slender frame, gray beard, and genial but slightly haunted expression, Lange scans the dining room before beaming, “I love this place!” Lange writes hardboiled fiction that ranges from gnarly to downright dark, but you would never know it by his benign and unruffled demeanor — and with the recent release of his latest novel, Joe Hustle, Lange has a lot to smile about.
Since the 2007 publication of his debut short story collection, Dead Boys, which is like Denis Johnson’s scabrous Jesus’ Son but with guns and palm trees, the 61-year-old Lange’s fascination with lost souls living on the fringes of society has only deepened. The lone outlier is Rovers, Lange’s horror novel, which Stephen King called the best vampire novel he’d read since Let the Right One In. Lange admits he threw a curveball with Rovers: “My publishers called me and were like, ‘Why did you write a horror book? You’re going to lose your readership! You’re going to ruin your career!’ I was just happy to hear them say I have a career!” He laughs. “But I write what inspires me at the time. What can you do?”
Although he’s known as a noir writer, Lange isn’t interested in private eyes, cops, or the dirty deeds of the 1%. His taste veers toward hustlers, alcoholics, gang members, ex-cons, and the everyman struggling with a criminal background. “Although I enjoy reading detective novels, particularly Ross MacDonald, I’m just not into writing procedural stories,” Lange admits, as we take a red-leather booth. “I never set out to write crime fiction. I’m just fascinated with interesting characters.”
“I learned more about the world from working at that supermarket than I ever did in school.”
With a combination of Robert Stone’s grit and Elmore Leonard’s humor, Lange’s books are thrilling and propulsive, but also stark, introspective, and realistic. They take place in bars, motels, laundromats, highways, and the dark corners of Los Angeles, San Diego, and Mexico. A modernist at heart, his ability to slip into a character’s consciousness is downright Joycean, and his interior monologues are like Virginia Woolf on whiskey and bad speed. As readers, we experience the streets on a textured and visceral level, viewing the contemporary world through a cracked and, at times, absurdist lens. And there’s always an element of menace creeping underneath the narrative. By occupying that space between perception and reality, Lange also taps into a particular fear and paranoia only ex-cons or the truly alienated can grasp. Take the following excerpt from Joe Hustle, in which our titular protagonist moves through the city in the dead of night while carrying contraband:
He’s fizzing with dread as he walks to the house, the gun in his waistband, the dope in his pocket. He’s a felon in possession of heroin and a firearm, a fucking idiot with a one-way ticket back to prison. A squirrel chattering at the top of a palm tree nearly stops his heart, and he feels eyes on him everywhere.
At times, Lange’s writing is so authentic you’ll wonder if he spent time in prison himself. “No,” he says, smiling, almost flattered. “But I’m glad you think so.” And like any good writer, he knows his city intimately. Los Angeles isn’t just home but an endless wellspring of inspiration — its smells, sounds, rhythms, and specific existential angst. In Lange’s books, Los Angeles takes on different guises; sometimes it’s amiable and welcoming, at other times, not so much. In this excerpt from “Bank of America,” in Dead Boys, the hero plans a bank robbery with his friends but keeps getting interrupted by the vibrations of the city itself:
It must be a thousand degrees outside. Even with two fans whirring and all the windows open, the air just lies there, hot and thick as bacon grease. One story below, down on Hollywood, an old Armenian woman is crying. She sits on a bus bench, rocking back and forth, a black scarf wrapped around her head. Her sobs distract me from Moriarty’s presentation. He asks a question, and I don’t even hear him.
Born in Oakland, California, Lange’s family moved around before settling in the coastal town of Morro Bay. Growing up, he devoured comics and movies, until he discovered Hemingway’s Nick Adams Stories and John Steinbeck’s East of Eden. “After that, I abandoned comic books and sci-fi novels for good,” he says, chuckling, as we dig into our enchiladas and (literally) flaming margaritas. Lange was accepted to the University of Southern California’s film school on a scholarship. “It was the early ’80s. A crazy time in downtown L.A. I was always broke. When I wasn’t in class, I worked 35 hours a week in a supermarket near the campus. That’s where I met people from all different cultures and backgrounds, wonderful, interesting people I would’ve never met back home. I learned more about the world from working at that supermarket than I ever did in school.”
After college, Lange worked at various bookstores in Los Angeles before being hired as a copyeditor at Larry Flynt Publications, the porn empire most famous for Hustler magazine, then eventually as managing editor for RIP, which was a popular heavy metal magazine at the time. “I was there for nearly eight years. Until the second Nirvana broke and murdered the heavy metal scene overnight,” he says. While working as an editor, Lange would go home each night and write stories. “I just thought I’d work a regular job for the rest of my life and occasionally get a story published,” Lange says, shrugging. “But things changed.”
“I’d rather write a scene where Joe changes a thermocouple on a water heater than like … a detective interviewing a suspect.”
When Dead Boys was published, Lange realized he might possibly become a full-time writer. “I remember I needed to follow up Dead Boys with a novel. I opened my drawer and realized I had given them everything I wrote,” he recalls with a heavy stare, shuddering at the memory. He quickly got to work, and over the next 17 years cranked out This Wicked World, Angel Baby, Sweet Nothing, The Smack, Rovers, and now, Joe Hustle. In doing so, Lange became one of the best crime writers Los Angeles has ever produced.
Joe Hustle isn’t just a return to the streets of Echo Park (where the author has lived with his wife for two decades), but a venture into something new: the love story. The protagonist earned his nickname by taking every two-bit gig he could scrounge while barely making rent at the flophouse he lives in with other luckless miscreants. Although he always tries to fly straight and keep his head down, his criminal past and severe PTSD, developed after fighting in the Iraq War, frequently threaten to break his resolve. Sometimes he’s forced to release what’s boiling inside him and punch someone in the face. Then one day he meets Emily, the intriguing daughter of a wealthy family, and his world splinters into a million pieces.
Although Joe Hustle’s story is simpler and more straightforward than in Lange’s previous novels, the characterization of Joe is more complex. “That was deliberate,” he says. “After my last few books, which were pretty reliant on plot, I wanted to go back to my short stories, which were more character-based. And I wanted to bring it all back to L.A., to my neighborhood, Echo Park.”
“Anti-heroes. You’ll find a lot of them out here.”
In tackling a love story, which was relatively new for someone usually fascinated with gang members, tattooed bartenders, traumatized war vets, and shattered women escaping abusive marriages (although Joe Hustle does feature similar characters and imagery), Lange says he was inspired by filmmakers he loves. “Well, for the romance aspect of Joe Hustle, I thought a lot about Cassavetes,” he explains. “You know, A Woman Under the Influence or Minnie and Moskowitz, stories about people who get together that are nuts. The French call it ‘Amour Fou.’ Personally, I’ve never experienced anything like Joe and Emily’s whirlwind relationship. I’ve had some crazy love affairs, but I’ve been with the same woman for 30 years.” Lange looks off in the distance, as if weighing his characters’ troubled fates, before sighing, “Thank God.”
Lange and his interviewer (Courtesy Chad Byrnes)
Lange obviously loves Joe Hustle, a scruffy vet who is ambitious but slightly paranoid, passionate but prone to bouts of drunkenness and self-pity. Joe is more than just an eccentric character, he’s also an evocation of the ravaged world we live in now. “He was based on a bartender I knew at the Short Stop, which is a bar near Dodger’s Stadium,” Lange recollects. “I called him ‘Joe Hustle.’ He hustled all the time. He painted houses, toured in bands. The book isn’t his life story or anything, he inspired it. The real guy passed away a couple years ago, but I think his spirit animates the book.”
Joe Hustle is one of Lange’s crowning achievements. The writing is engaging and humanistic without treading into sentimentality, something Lange has never been accused of. In many ways, his prose is closer to the brusque and whimsical writing of L.A.’s proletariat author John Fante than to your average mystery scribe. Always humble, Lange shrugs and says, “Honestly, I would never call myself a ‘crime writer,’ I’m not that good. There are so many good crime writers out there, it would be presumptuous for me to say that….” He trails off. “Like we talked about, I don’t care about plot that much. I’m much more into character. I’d rather write a scene where Joe changes a thermocouple on a water heater than like … a detective interviewing a suspect.”
Ultimately, it doesn’t matter if you shelve Richard Lange in literature or noir — for my money, he’s a modern-day Jim Thompson, the renowned L.A. crime novelist from the ’50s and ’60s. Lange’s expression brightens when I mention Thompson. “Yeah? Great. I mean, Thompson is daaaarrk. I wouldn’t even put him in the noir section. He’s like Bukowski with a little crime mixed in. I’d call it ‘Grit Lit.’ Thompson gets under the surface of things.” Lange chortles. “There’s a reason he’s big in France.”
Walking out of the dark confines of El Compadre on a summer afternoon is like being slapped in the face with sunshine, smog, and noise. Cars pile up on Sunset while the sounds of construction sites, car horns, and blaring radios swell to a crescendo. Lange squints and puts on a pair of sunglasses. Before parting ways, I ask him how he would describe his books to someone not familiar with his work. “That’s a tough one,” he says, pondering, rubbing his gray beard. “The important thing is to get people to relate to characters they normally wouldn’t be interested in. You know, people you might turn your nose up at in real life. My goal is for the reader to root for them by the end of the book. Anti-heroes. You’ll find a lot of them out here.”
And what about Los Angeles? Does he still derive inspiration from a city that has gone through innumerable changes? “Oh yeah.” Lange beams. “I wouldn’t live anywhere else. My wife and I still live near Sunset Boulevard, which can still get fucking crazy. I swear, if you go the wrong way, it’s bad luck,” he adds, with that same haunted look I caught earlier. “For me, Los Angeles has never lost its romance. It still works for me.”