New York, and the world, have been transformed by an unexplained global catastrophe now known as 'the Dark. Once a modest researcher, has now become an involuntary detective. He is recruited by her elder sister to find the missing daughter of a local gangster in a city in chaos where anarchy and violence are just a step away. He soon discovers the case is anything but straightforward and compellingly close to home. Compromising photographs and the ambiguous assistance of a young woman with ties to the criminal gangs lead him to New Orleans, which has seceded from the rest of America in the wake of the Dark. A perilous journey down the Mississippi river, murderous hit women and sidekicks, and the magic and dangerous glamour of the French Quarter become a perilous road to nowhere and to madness in his quest for the amoral daughter, his own lost love and his sanity. Will he find the missing women or lose himself?
The Louisiana Republic by Maxim Jakubowski was published by Caffeine Nights on 10 May 2018. As part of the Blog Tour, I'm pleased to welcome the author here to Random Things today. He's talking about the books that are special to him in My Life In Books.
My Life in Books - Maxim Jakubowski
Doomed romanticism, the magic of the 1930s, the autobiographical elements reflecting Scott and Zelda's own lives. A novel that burns bright but behind which lies the fabric of despair.
Pierre Drieu la Rochelle/LE FEU FOLLET. A French novel about the final days of a man about to take his own life and seeking rescue from the friends he once had and the women he loved. To no avail. Was filmed by Louis Malle, and no less depressing, and moving.
Raymond Chandler/THE LITTLE SISTER. Every crime writer should kneel at the altar of Raymond Chandler and Philip Marlowe. I have actually stolen one its main premises for my LOUISIANA REPUBLIC, no need to say more.
Marc Behm/EYE OF THE BEHOLDER. The ultimate existentialist crime novel. About a second-rate investigator who lost his daughter and imagines a young woman on a murderous spree across America might be her. It all ends badly, but it was inevitable.
James Crumley/THE LAST GOOD CASE. It could be any of the late Crumley's novels, about losers and landscapes of abject beauty and terror. The man looked like a bear and wrote like an angel and brought the PI novel to its modern apotheosis.
Emily St John Mandel/LAST NIGHT IN MONTREAL. A stunning and sensitive debut novel by a young Canadian author about fathers and daughters, lovers and losers and the map of the pain. She didn't even realise when writing it that it was actually a crime thriller!
Chris Whitaker/TALL OAKS. Another splendid debut (Disclaimer, I chaired the judging panel that awarded it last year's CWA John Craesey Fresh Blood Dagger).
Small town America with a touch of David Lynch and the Coen Brothers where pain, loss and totally incongruous humour blend when they shouldn't.
Ivy Pochoda/THE ART OF DISAPPEARING. Another debut by an author whose later books are actually thrillers. About magicians, lost souls, the desert, Amsterdam and so much more, a dazzling tapestry oh humanity in all its fallibilities.
The magic of night and its illusions and dark corners in a modern fairy tale about an errant spectacle whose shadow and glitter takes over a couple's life and changes it forever. A delight and a shudder. The images still linger now in my head with a shiver of pleasure.
The novel that demonstrated to me that erotic writing could also be literary and not just derivative. A tale of New York at its roughest and the most tragic (if explicit) love story I'd ever seen. Deadly in its emotional and physical effect but written by a poet.
A thriller as sharp as a scalpel set around the California film world by the screenwriter of The Man Who Fell to Earth, Croupier and other classics. Indescribable but so full of menace and atmosphere that even years later I still think of it as a movie in my own mind.
A dancer is fascinated by a display of puppets in a Montreal shop window and ventures inside the store, only to be irrevocably transformed into one herself. Her husband, a writer suffering from a block, seeks her out in an odyssey to rival Orpheus, as the puppets rebel and attempt an escape.. Quite unique and terribly moving.
The complexities of human sexuality set against the striking background of a California winery. Explores the world of BDSM and submission with delicacy, fire in its guts (and genitalia) like no other. Yet another forceful example of writing about sex with talent and perception.
Maxim Jakubowski - May 2018
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: (from www.maximjakubowski.co.uk) Maxim Jukubowski worked for many years in book publishing as an editor
(including titles by William Golding, Peter Ackroyd, Oliver Stone, Michael
Moorcock, Peter Ustinov, Jim Thompson, David Goodis, Paul Ableman, Sophie
Grigson, Marc Behm, Cornell Woolrich etc) and launched the Murdor One Bookshop,
which he owned and ran for over 20 years.
He now writes, edits and translates full-time in
London.
He was born in London and educated in France, and
his books have been translated into many languages. From an early age, he was
always fascinated by popular culture and his writing and editing has
criss-crossed all areas, from science fiction & fantasy to thrillers and,
inevitably, erotica.
He conceived one of the genre’s first major
contemporary anthologies The Mammoth Book of Erotica which has since been
followed by a further 20 volumes, and four books devoted to erotic photography.
In addition to over 90 collections in other genres, he has also edited the Sex
in the City series, ad runs the Eros Plus and Neon lists, alongside crime
imprints Black Box Thrillers, Blue Murder and Maxcrime.
He has been a columnist for Time Out and the
Guardian, and contributed to most major newspapers and magazines, and is a
regular arts commentator on British TV and radio. He also ran London’s annual
crime film and literary festival Crime Scene and is a consultant for several
overseas film festivals.
He has won the Anthony and Karen awards for his
contributions to, respectively, crime fiction and SF & fantasy.
He also writes a monthly book review column for
lovereading.co.uk
He is Vice Chairman of the Crime Writer’s
Association.
For the past three years he has been busy writing ,
under a pseudonym, a series of Sunday Times bestselling novels which has now
reached ten volumes.
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