The Crime Studio

December 12, 2001

The Crime Studio affiliate link, Steve Aylett
Four Walls Eight Windows, 2001
156 pages

Steve Aylett is one of a recent crop of UK writers — China Miéville and Iain Sinclair are others — whose cross-genre work affects an extraordinary synthesis of popular and high art. Steeped in the postmodern broth, they’re daughters and sons of Borges and Beckett as much as Alfred Bester and Chandler. More direct literary forebears they tend to locate in Mervyn Peake, Mike Moorcock, M. John Harrison, Angela Carter.

All this sounds heady stuff, but consider also that Aylett’s obvious influences include music videos, the punk ethic, comic books and all those noir movies we grew up with. Moorcock has been as influenced by the comics and pulp novels he began writing and editing when a teenager as by the 19th-century novels he so adores, editions of which crowd his shelves. Sinclair is as fascinated by the literary career of Jack Trevor Story and William Hope Hodgson as by that of Jimmy Ballard, or the horror films of David Cronenberg.

The Crime Studio is actually Aylett’s first book, from 1994. With half a dozen others, hacking away at sacred trees, British accent and buckskin fringe blowing in the breeze, he’s blazed a unique trail into the contemporary urban forest. Think of Don Westlake’s crime capers written on coffee overdrive, Ring Lardner on a bad “Haircut” day, the Marx Brothers rewriting Crime and Punishment. What one reviewer has called “mutant fiction for the new millenium.”

The Crime Studio, like Atom affiliate link and Slaughtermatic affiliate link, is set in Beerlight, “a city where crime has been perfected to an art form.” Beerlight is America thrown in the pot and boiled down to leavings: violence and individuality trucked out to the extreme and let loose there. In Beerlight, bulletproof underwear is openly on sale and paranoia is regarded not as a mental aberration but as standard equipment, like toothpaste, shoes, and automatic weapons.

In evidence, one of the denizen’s grand schemes:

Stressworld was to be the last word on artificial mayhem, an automatedenvironment of paranoia and hostility from which the paying public would fight tooth and nail to escape, sustaining injury and profound mental trauma. Specter saw it as an authentic urban experience, air-conditioned by the sighs of the suicidal. Drive-by killings would occur on the half-hour. Visitors would run screaming from berserk automatons. Dismal conversations would take place. Satisfaction would be a rumour.

Aylett has a weird genius for the Dickensian names he sprinkles through his chronicles of Beerlight: Kitty Stickler, Madison Drowner, Taffy Atom, Eddie Thermidor, Harpoon Specter, Dante Cubit, Harry Fiasco. He’s a literary break dancer in newly-liberated, super-cool shoes, a stand-up comic who can’t be still, a master of one-liners and of satirical salvos that jump up like Brown Bettys. His stories, in fact, are built of such, layer upon layer of headlines, wise cracks, punch lines, set-ups and sideways remarks.

Atom, for instance, features Dead Barbie Dolls complete with casket, cadaver makeup and bugs; a talking, carniverous fish as sidekick; and a “syndication bomb” that, set off, strips the subtext away from any situation, rendering everything flat and meaningless, “a living Updike novel,” for up to three hours.

Similarly, Beerlight police chief Harry Blince with his “pre-Cambrian intellect” has long managed to pass himself off as a biped while his men “after years of undiluted mayhem had become almost undergraduate with misery.” Another character almost becomes English “through bad illumination and lack of exercise” and frightens little kids “by murmuring poetry.” Nor is rehabilitation for any of these Beerlight denizens a likely prospect. One attempts scream therapy only to find himself able to summon nothing more than a whistle. A philosophical burglar on the Sartrean model believes that things exist only in the reality of being stolen.

Here is Aylett, with typical breathless compression, setting up a story:

It was a joke downtown that Eddie Slam’s desire to kill everyone was buried so deep in his subconscious as to be hardly relevant. The apartment building where Eddie lived was like something out of Metropolis — the walls glistened and the tenants were pale. It had a communal rat and a clientele of crazed barbers who hadn’t worked in years. Merit stars were awarded for the fastest and scariest whole-body convulsion.

Everything unfolds quite naturally from such set-ups, as elsewhere from the rapid strokes with which Aylett renders characters:

Auto-Rhino was the living embodiment of Hitler’s theories — he was never anything but amused by the guttural assaults he committed upon those more intelligent than himself. It seemed he had sneezed out an entire brainlobe in early adolescence, and what remained swam in his skull like a lone crouton. He counted as wasted every day in which he did not strangle a man.

Subversive? Shameless? Believe it. Aylett and his like are literary terrorists, using everything we take for granted, everything we supposedly know, against us. If one function of popular art is to bolster assumed values, if one function of “high” art is to throw up barricades against those same assumptions (what Lionel Trilling calls adversary intent), then Aylett and Co. are over there squatting out of easy reach of both by the trashcans and crawlspaces that comprise the world’s true history, reading closely, blowing raspberries, chalking runes on the wall.

In recent years Four Walls Eight Windows has regularly made available seminal work by such as Moorcock and Lucius Shepard along with vital new work by Paul Di Fillipo, Alvin Lu’s The Hell Screens affiliate link, and Aylett’s several books. They’re to be soundly congratulated.