Flying into southern California, after a cross country flight that has taken me right over the Gulf Coast floods, the landscape goes through a series of contortions. First mountains, then desert, then the coastal plane with its great sprawling city. The plane flies over it all and keeps on going out into the Pacific Ocean, before making a reluctant turn and heading back into the smog to land at LAX. Those few moments of flying west into the Pacific blue are enough to give me a sense of just how much this city is on the edge. America has finally come to its end, and all that remains are thousands of miles of blue.

 

It’s an extraordinary tribute to human ingenuity, of course, that Los Angeles should have succeeded in coming into existence on such an unpromising strip of land between desert and ocean. So successful has it been, though, in conquering the landscape, that it’s easy forget just what an elemental place this is, and how thoroughly shaped by its surroundings. The desert at the city’s back serves a potent metaphor for the extent to which those who come here have burnt their bridges: there’s no going back from LA, you succeed or die. The ocean, meanwhile, plays a more complex part in California life. On the one hand it’s the idyllic backdrop to a million postcards, on the other it’s every bit as much a barrier as the desert, just as the desert announces there’s no going back, so the ocean says there’s no way forward. It's immutable, unconquerable.

 

But while the desert is mostly respected in its fierceness and aridity, the Californians have long loved to tangle with the sea, to defy it. And above all they’ve done so by surfing it. Surfing is the emblematic Californian pastime. From the fifties onward it’s been less a sport than a culture. It inspired movies first and then a whole genre of music, that began with Dick Dale’s Wipe Out and reached its apotheosis with the Beach Boys.

 

Never before or since has a major musical act been so identified with a sport as the Beach Boys with surfing. It would have been unimaginable for the Beatles to pose in soccer gear, or Elvis to wield a baseball bat. In a world where rock and roll was cool, sport was the epitome of not cool. Except for surfing, and maybe that’s because surfing was less a sport than an image of utopia, the American dream written on the waves.

 

Personally, I have to say that for a long time it failed to do much for me. The Beach Boys were OK – it’s hard music to dislike, though I could never quite buy the ‘Brian Wilson is God’ stuff that leads rock critics to endlessly vote Pet Sounds the greatest record of all time (and why would rock critics, that nerdiest, most citified of tribes, so idolise this bronzed outdoor music anyway? Oh yeah, that’s one of those questions that answers itself, isn’t it?). Anyway, like I say, The Beach Boys didn’t do much for me, and neither did Gidget movies. The culture of it seemed a million miles away from the freezing beaches of South Wales.  No, the first time I actually felt the appeal of surfing and its culture was when I read a paperback called Tapping The Source by Kem Nunn.

 

Tapping The Source is a coming of age surfing noir novel telling the story of a kid named Ike Tucker, from way out in the desert, coming to Huntington Beach, California’s self-proclaimed surf city, to find his missing sister. He's heard that she disappeared off to Mexico in the company of some badass surfers and, despite his youth and inexperience, he's determined to find out what happened to her.

 

In an effort to get close up to the guys who may know the answers, Ike takes up surfing, and the pages devoted to his first attempts made it clear to me, for the first time, that the ease and grace and general golden sun kissed fantasy enshrined in the classic surfing photos are the exception not the rule. Surfing, it transpires, is difficult, dangerous and fiercely competitive. On his first try Ike is punched out by a fellow surfer for inadvertently getting in the way, and it’s only when he falls under the ambivalent care of surfer-turned-biker Preston that Ike begins to get the hang, not just of surfing, but of how to survive out of the water as well.

 

The Huntington Beach Nunn portrayed was a place on the cusp of change, a once laidback hippie surfer hangout that was, at the turn of the eighties, becoming increasingly commercialised: more and more people come to surf, college kids on the one hand, runaways and dropouts on the other. The soundtrack, meanwhile, was changing too. Punk rock was the new sound in town and its harsh rejection of the hippie values reflected the extent to which  Nunn revealed those values to have curdled.

 

Tapping The Source is one of those books that stays with you. It was one of the few novels of its time to note the arrival of punk, to portray an America that was moving on from the Vietnam era. There were longstanding rumours that it was to be filmed. Other surfing films did come out – Surf Nazis Must Die, which, if memory serves, punk entrepreneur Malcolm McLaren had something to do with, and Point Break – both of them indebted in varying degrees to Tapping The Source.

 

But neither the novel in particular, or surfing in general, were things I thought all that much about until the summer of 1998. That was when the second part of Kem Nunn’s surfing trilogy, The Dogs Of Winter, came out, and it was also when I moved back to Wales and discovered that, with the introduction of the lightweight affordable wetsuit, surf culture had come to South Wales.

 

I’d only been back a couple of weeks when a friend suggested we could go surfing one Sunday. I was still more than somewhat dubious, but thought why not, attracted by the incongruity of the idea as much as anything else. And so we made the drive out west from Cardiff, past Swansea and out onto the Gower Peninsula, an outcrop of the Welsh coastline that feels oddly locked in time, stuck somewhere around 1965. At the very end of the peninsula is the village of Llangennith and its attendant beach, a great sandy bay with a fair complement of surfers. I hired a wetsuit and a body board and gave it a go and the first time a wave picked me up and carried me to the shore I was converted. Since then I’ve had, if not quite a love for surfing, at least what we Brits might call a definite fondness for it. I even put it in one my books. There’s a surfing theme in my novel Cardiff Dead, my own coming of age noir-ish novel, that was a conscious tribute to the influence of Kem Nunn.

 

Not, I hasten to add, that I'm any good at it. But still, heading south from LAX towards the surfing coast of southern California, I’m looking forward to seeing what I can’t help thinking of as ‘real surfers’ up close.

 

The drive down from the airport begins by skirting the ghettoes of South Central LA, (places now so familiar from films and, especially, video games like Grand Theft Auto, that one of the first questions my thirteen year old son asked me when I told him I was going to California was ‘are you going to Compton’), before heading through a light industrial wilderness inland from Long Beach. Next, a right turn takes me though the heavily Vietnamese suburbia around the town of Westminster and down on to Pacific Coast Highway, in one of its less romantic stretches, as it heads south into Huntington Beach, Surf City itself.

 

It's getting dark now, so the first thing is to find a place to stay. In Tapping The Source Ike Tucker finds a room in the seediest motel in town, the Sea View. These days seediness is thin on the ground: there’s a Hilton and a Hyatt and a Best Western, but after nosing around a little, I wind up at the Surf Inn. It’s a fifties establishment, built on stilts, that seems to hark back satisfyingly to a rougher and readier Huntington Beach, The motel, like so many other old school American motels, is run these days by an Indian family. And it’s cheapish and clean and affords a sea view if you find the right spot on the roof.

 

Night comes down fast in these parts and by the time I've showered and headed out, the ocean is no more than a dark presence thudding repeatedly against the shore. If it stays like this there’ll surely be good surf in the morning. Meanwhile I amble along the seafront till I come to Main Street and turn inland to see what shakes in Huntington Beach by night.

 

The answer to that seems to be not a lot. Whatever edginess Huntington Beach may once have had seems, at least on this evening at the back end of September, to have been replaced by a sedate mix of clothes stores and theme bars – the kinds of places you can find an any mall anywhere. I grab a hamburger in a vaguely Hawaiian themed sports bar and watch some baseball and head back to the hotel.

 

As I arrive back I notice for the first time that the house next door to my hotel, a regular suburban looking house, nothing remotely fancy, has a single oil well in its yard, calmly pumping away through the night. It’s so prosaic that the weirdness of it doesn’t hit me for a while. Sure, doesn’t everyone have an oil well in the back yard of their beachfront property? The casual proximity of industry and recreation is a reminder of just how new this all is, how recent its taming. It’s only when I get to bed that I remember that Ike Tucker’s hotel in Tapping the Source also has an oil well next to it. Perhaps I’m a little closer to the source than I realised.

 

I’m up early next morning. By eight o’clock I’m out on the beach surveying the scene. The waves are still coming in and already there’s a whole lot of people in the water, maybe that’s why Huntington Beach was so quiet the night before. Energy conservation. And while on land Huntington Beach may be pretty tame these days, here in the surprisingly cold water things are as serious as ever. To get a closer view I take a walk down the pier, rebuilt after being destroyed by monster waves in the eighties. Ike Tucker soon learnt to his cost that the ocean close to the pier is no place for beginners, and the same is evidently true today. All the guys I can see below me are very good indeed, as you’d need to be to surf this close to the pier’s concrete pilings, which could easily make a wipe-out fatal.

 

I watch them for a while, contemplate hiring a board and going in myself and decide against it, feeling way too old to go through the certain humiliation awaiting me in the surf. Instead I head back into the town looking for traces of the old surf culture. It looks to be long gone. Jack’s Surfshop has been here since 1957 but these days it’s a giant purpose built surfing superstore, in which the boards and wetsuits play second fiddle to the clothing ranges produced by the ubiquitous brand names – Quiksilver, Billabong, Rip Curl et al. 

 

Just off Main Street there’s a Surfing Museum which is featuring a rather tenuously surfing linked exhibition of ukeleles. It's nice enough but rather adds to my sense that surfing is something that used to be a homemade activity but has now been subsumed by global commerce. Much the same goes for the ‘Surfing Walk of Fame’ which I find myself following as I head back up Pacific Coast Highway. It consists of a series of plaques built into the pavement celebrating the deeds of assorted top surfers, in obvious tribute to the Hollywood Walk of Fame. It’s all much too clearly part of Huntington Beach’s attempt to brand itself as ‘surf city’ after the Jan And Dean song.

 

Now Kem Nunn is evidently well aware that the surfing world has moved on since he wrote Tapping The Source. His second surfing novel, The Dogs Of Winter, starts in Huntington Beach, but its nominal hero, a washed up surf photographer named Jack Fletcher, wastes little time in leaving town and heading north to the California Oregon border, in search of big cold water waves that only the truly hardcore would ever consider surfing.

 

The third, and most probably final, book in the sequence, Tijuana Straits, also forswears the commercial surf scene, but this time heads in the opposite direction. It's set at the very opposite end of California, right down south on the Mexican border and it’s in that direction that I'm headed next.

 

Driving south from Huntington Beach, the first place I come to is the moneyed, yachting crowd town of Newport Beach, which once boasted the Rendezvous Ballroom, where surf music was more or less invented, and then there’s Laguna Beach where Kem Nunn lives. Laguna Beach is one of those cute beachside town that, a long time ago, was known as something of an artists colony, but these days you’d have to be a pretty successful artist to inhabit.

 

Kem Nunn lives just above the town in a pleasingly ramshackle neighbourhood. It’s the kind of place private detectives live in books and Hollywood films, but probably not in real life. I ring on the bell and Kem Nunn comes down to the gate. He’s a tall lean individual with a neat beard and a serious, rather grave manner. You can imagine him as various things – reverend, academic, cellist – but it would be a while before you figured him for a surfer.

 

We chat briefly in the living room and it’s quickly apparent that this isn’t going to be one of those interviews where you can just switch off and let the interviewee roll out his patter. Nunn is friendly enough but definitely reserved, so rather than just pitch straight into an interview I suggest taking a drive along the coast, visit a few surf spots. Nunn assures me that there’s not much to see any more, but agrees nevertheless.

 

While he's getting himself together to head out, I take a look at his CD collection: heavy on the jazz and the country, plenty of Lucinda Williams and Gillian Welch, overall a high preponderance of records I own myself, which seems like a good omen.

 

Nunn says he’ll drive, so we head outside and climb into his Lexus. What with the house and the car it’s clear that Kem Nunn isn’t doing too badly. I suspect it’s not the books, which are more cult favourites than bestsellers, that have made the money.  And, though his manner might suggest it, he doesn’t have an academic job, as so many American writers do. So where has the money come from?

 

Well, it turns out that it’s Hollywood that has provided the bulk of his living over the last couple of decades. He's had one of those curious careers – James Crumley’s is similar – in which a writer makes more money wring pictures that never get made, or doctoring pictures for which he gets no credit, than writing the books that got Hollywood interested in the first place.

 

His latest gig is his first venture into television – no ordinary television show, though. Nunn has been asked to join the writing team for Deadwood, probably the coolest show on American TV right now, and he’s spent the last few weeks hanging out on set, soaking up the atmosphere. As if to prove the point he refers to a motorist who gets in our way as a hooplehead, then laughs and says that Deadwood speak is infectious.

 

From his house on the hill we drive almost straight down towards the sea, and pull up outside a Ritz Carlton Resort, built on the cliff top above the beach. This, he tells me, used to be known as Salt Creek. It's here he used to come on holiday with his parents. They used to camp on the beach, and it’s the first place he saw people surf.

 

From here we head on to Dana Point. Nunn asks me if I ever heard of ‘killer Dana’ I shake my head, Turns out it’s a legendary surf break. Legendary is the word though because it’s gone. Dana Point had been reconfigured as a yachting marina and the break no longer exists. Though its name lives on in a range of surf gear.

 

Just along from Dana Point is Doheny, one of the beaches immortalised in the Beach Boys’ Surfin’ USA. You can still surf here, more or less, but only at one end of the beach. There’s wi-fi throughout though. Kem Nunn is unimpressed.

 

The trip is in danger of becoming a parade of places that used to be great and are now gone or gentrified out of all recognition, so I ask Nunn if there’s anywhere he likes to surf these days. He looks tempted to say no for a moment, lost in the Eeyore-ish pleasure of rubbishing all the redevelopment – something I’m very sympathetic to as I tend to do the same  thing whenever showing people around Cardiff – but finally he nods and admits that there is a place that isn’t too bad.

 

So we carry on south till we get to the State Park at San Onofre, There’s a guy on the gate controlling access to the car park. Kem shows him an annual pass which suggests that the beach may after all be a little more than all right. And so it is. It's a perfect California beach backed by dunes, credible surfmobiles in the car park and credible surfers on the water. We sit in silence for a little while, contemplating the scene. I resolve to take lessons when I get back to Wales, learn to surf properly.

 

It’s only driving back out of the State Park that I notice the reason for this piece of coast’s relative lack of development. Two large nuclear reactors right next to the freeway might have something to do with it. It's a very Kem Nunn juxtaposition.

 

From here on Kem is notably more cheery. He drives me up to San Clemente next, this is another beachside town where he spent a lot of time in his twenties, we drive into a funky little neighbourhood that is apparently home to a lot of surfers and shapers  - guys who make custom surfboards. We’re looking for Commander John, one of the models for Nunn’s fictional crew of surf outlaws. There’s no sign of him today though, so we decide to get some food.

 

Nunn suggests a Mexican place called Olamendi’s right on Pacific Coast Highway and we head on up there, taking a brief detour for him to show me the place he gets his surf boards from.

 

Olamendi’s may take the well contested prize for the Mexican restaurant with the loudest décor I've ever been in. The walls are covered in fantastically lurid religious scenes, generally featuring Christ on the cross, interspersed with photos of famous regulars. Pride of place goes to none other than the thirty-seventh President of the United States, Richard Milhous Nixon. Peering at a picture of Tricky Dicky shaking hands with the owner, it strikes me that the reason why the famous ‘would you buy a used car from this man’ jibe failed to hurt Nixon’s electoral results was that he looked so blatantly like a used car salesman that there was no need to point it out. Indeed it’s more than likely that people voted for him precisely because he did look like a used car salesman – what’s more American than that?

 

Then, over enchiladas and Pacifico beers, we get to talking about Kem Nunn’s journey from the California desert to Hollywood. “I grew up in Pomona, the Pomona Valley. I grew up in a tract home there,” he tells me. “My dad was a plumber.” He seems happy enough to leave it there, but a couple more questions elicit the fact that his childhood was not as prosaically suburban as all that.  “I had a kind of religious upbringing. My parents became Jehovah’s witnesses when I was very young. So for a while I actually had a ministerial draft deferment right out of high school, but I reached a point at which I was becoming increasingly unhappy doing what I’d always thought I should be doing.”

 

It’s an answer that takes a moment or two to resonate. And then I get it. The central character in Nunn’s second novel, the generally over-looked (it’s the only one of his books to be currently out of print, both in the US and the UK) Unassigned Territory, a freewheeling and fantastical tale set in the Mojave desert, is a young man named Obadiah Wheeler. He’s a youthful preacher brought up in a cult-ish religious organisation. He possessed grave doubts with regard to his calling, but was reluctant to leave the order, as his status as Minster has given him a draft exemption keeping him out of Vietnam. Aha, I think. There’s always a certain satisfaction, I find, in spotting where the author appears in their own fiction.

 

Once the real Kem Nunn, as opposed to the fictional Obadiah, had lost his belief in his calling he left the Pomona Valley and headed for the coast, drawn initially at least by a lifelong love of beaches and their attendant culture, and it was there that he spent the next decade “I lived in Santa Barbara for a while then, over the next ten years, lived up and down the coast, from Santa Barbara to Dana Point, I had always loved beaches and I discovered I could eke out a living doing work on boats, so basically that’s what I did.”

 

All of which sounds pretty much like what used to be called dropping out. So was it the whole sixties  things that had provoked his change of direction, I wondered. “Well,” he says, “part of what I was doing during those years was coming out from under the belief system I was raised with and trying to find my own way. So, with respect to the sixties, in a way I was set apart from it, though I was very much intrigued by the whole countercultural movement. But I was drawn to the spirit of questioning authority and the status quo, because that was something I was doing in my own life. Trying to find some authentic way of living instead of what you’d always been told.”

 

That authentic way of living, for Nunn, was very closely bound up with the ocean in general, and surfing in particular: “Surfing was increasingly part of my life, I had become interested in it when I was young in junior high, but I lived inland so it was hard to learn, That was one of my reasons for coming to the coast. I started to surf more, really learning how to do it. “

 

Along with the surfing and the boating, Nunn was also involved in the arts. He played mandolin in a bluegrass band, and had a long-standing affinity with the visual arts: “In high school I’d always loved to paint but I came from a family and a community in which that sort of thing wasn’t really encouraged. You were encouraged to find something more practical, to make a living.  So, I suppose, in some other life I might have gone to art school.”

 

In the end it was more poverty than anything else that persuaded him to turn his talents to fiction instead:  “During my mid twenties, when I found myself nickel and dime-ing it, working on boats, living on the cheap, I didn’t feel like I had money for painting supplies and a space to work, but it was easy to get a typewriter and some paper and start banging out some stories.”

 

At first, however, those stories were not about the beach world he was living in, but the Pomona Valley life he’d left behind: “In my last stint of ministerial work there I spent a lot of time with these bums and derelicts in Pomona. So I started writing some short stories about those people. Then I started to wonder if you could put them all together and make a novel out of them. It was kind of my first run at some of the material that eventually became my third book, Pomona Queen.”

 

Once he had some stories written Nunn started taking night classes at a local community college. There he met a California writer called Oakley Hall who ran the writing program at UC Irvine, and he persuaded Nunn to go back to school. He also turned Nunn on to the work of Robert Stone, in particular Stone’s Vietnam novel, Dog Soldiers. This was to have a profound influence on Nunn, all the more so when Hall told him that Stone would actually be coming to the College the following year: “Dog Soldiers made a huge impression on me. I thought I could do something like that, and then I thought that no one had written about the surfing milieu in a very interesting way, so it was along about that time I began to think about Tapping The Source. I really wanted to have a draft of that finished by the time Robert Stone came”.

 

This time Nunn had decided to write about the world he saw around him: “I was working a couple of days a week with a friend of mine who had a furniture finishing shop. One day we found this guy living in a box in a lot behind the shop. The guy was a good surfer and he wound up working with us, and one day his younger brother, Brett, showed up. Brett was this kid who’d been living in Huntington Beach. He was a jailbird kind of a kid and he had these stories to tell about life there. He’d had this job working for this aging biker and his job kind of consisted of hanging out by the pier picking up runaway girls and bringing them back to this guy’s place to party, the idea being that the girls all got high and the guy would get laid. And if that didn’t happen the guy developed a habit of taking it out on Brett by knocking him around. 

 

“He was one of those guys who had a sweet innocent side but he was also had a street tough side When I met Brett he had this big black eye and there was something in him that suggested a character to me. I liked the idea, it’s kind of an archetypal idea, of the  kid taking on the quest that he's not really prepared for. So it was a combination of this kid showing up and my desire to write something about surfing culture as I had seen it. What I saw with this kid was a way into that - he would have to enter this world to solve a mystery.”

 

And that’s just what Nunn did: constructed a novel that effortlessly melded a coming of age story with a noir tale of Californian idealism turned sour, all set against the pristine fictional backdrop of the surfing world. And he did indeed finish the draft in time for Stone’s arrival. Not only that but Stone liked the book enough to recommend it to his agent and the agent succeeded in selling the rights. Next stop fame and fortune. Well, more or less.

 

“It never did well in terms of sales,” says Nunn, “ but it was nominated for a National Book Award, and it got a lot of attention in Hollywood. It had a fairly lucrative movie sale: they didn’t just option the book, they purchased it. And given the people who were involved it looked like it was really going to happen” - he laughs – “So far in my experience of Hollywood it amazes me that anything ever gets made. It's had a long and tortured history in Hollywood. People still talk about trying to make it, but it’s owned by Universal. I don’t know, I have a feeling that someday they will make it. Someone will show up who wants to do it and has the juice. It'd be nice to see it. At least I think it’d be nice to see it…”

 

Surely that would be tricky given that the world depicted had largely vanished? Not really, says Nunn. “You get a good location scout, you can patch things together and it winds up looking pretty good. There are places like Imperial Beach and Avila Beach. They shot most of Lords of Dogtown with Imperial Beach as Venice.”

 

Well, here’s hoping that Hollywood will indeed one day get round to it, rather than just ripping it off, as happened with the Keanu Reeves vehicle Point Break. Anyway, as first novels go, Tapping The Source had done a pretty good job of establishing Kem Nunn as a name to watch. All he needed to do was follow up with another tough noir tale of life on the edge on the California beaches.

 

Instead he came up with Unassigned Territory, a surreal jaunt through the Mojave desert that most Tapping The Source fans, myself included, found baffling and frankly disappointing.

 

Re-reading it now, and taking it on its own merits, I have to say I was completely wrong. It’s a terrific book, a funny and profound fable of the search for love and meaning amid a California where pulp sci-fi and religious cults were but a hair’s breadth away from each other (as L. Ron Hubbard very profitably discovered).

 

As Nunn has already intimated, it has its roots in autobiography. “Yes, that was me wanting to write something about my experiences growing up as a Witness. I should add that I have a lot of affection for the community I grew up in – I wanted to write about a guy who was conflicted about all of that. I chose this fairly crazy story: part science fiction, part coming of age, part mystery.”

 

The fairly crazy story involves the young minister Obadiah Wheeler ending up lost in a desert hamlet whose only claim to fame is that it’s the home of a hopeless roadside attraction that professes to be the home of the ‘Mystery of the Mojave’. In fact over the years it’s been home to a series of Mysteries of the Mojave – home made monsters constructed from papier-mâché and chicken wire by one Sarge Hummer. Oddly enough, however, the current monster, which appeared just before Sarge’s untimely death, does not appear to have been made of any recognisable materials.

 

In fact it looks positively extra-terrestrial. A whole cast of eccentrics are interested in acquiring the Monster, but before any of them can get their hands on it, it’s stolen by Sarge’s daughter, the lovely Delandra Hummer, and her accomplice, the mixed-up preacher boy Obadiah himself. Trouble, as one might suspect, ensues. Enlightenment, of a sort, also.

 

Not only was the book a disconcerting departure for his new found fans, it was also quite a long time coming. “It took me quite a while because I moved to New York and then came back to California,” recalls Nunn, “where I had to make up for lost time surfing all the waves I’d missed, so it took a long time to write and when it came out it wasn’t the book a lot of people expected. My editor and agent were happy but, if you look at it from a purely commercial angle, I had begun with this kind of mystery novel – I never thought of it as a mystery, but people saw it that way - and a lot of people expected me to carry on with the surfing and the noir kind of story. But I still get a kick out of the book, it makes me laugh. It has a small, somewhat demented group of followers.”

 

And while crime fiction aficionados may have been disappointed, Hollywood was  rather more enthusiastic: “Tapping The Source had opened doors for me in Hollywood. But Unassigned Territory was the book that led to me writing my first script. A producer named John Solomon, who was working on the Disney lot, was a huge fan of Unassigned Territory and he said ‘look none of the people I know are ever going to make this book, but do you have any script ideas?’ So I went to him with my first script and managed to get it optioned and that was the beginning of all that.”

 

‘All that’ is a screenwriting career that has kept the wolf away from Nunn’s door for the past couple of decades – even though none of his scripts have actually been made. The nearest he has come is probably 198l’s Wild Things, a twisty piece of modern noir set in South Florida, and probably most popular with viewers on account of the unusually explicit lesbian scenes between teen queens Neve Campbell and Denise Richards. Nunn doesn’t actually receive a writing credit, but describes his work on the script – originally written by Stephen Peters – as a ‘page one rewrite’.

 

And while the lack of tangible results from his screenwriting years is inevitably frustrating, Nunn is generally sanguine about the business “The nice thing about Hollywood is that I’ve made decent money writing scripts and doctoring scripts and it has enabled me to write the books I want to write. So if I don’t want to write about surfing I won’t. There was a point where someone might have suggested I write a series but I’m quite happy not to have done that. To get on that treadmill with your books, always chasing that carrot, well, I’d prefer not to. And writing scripts puts me in touch with the kind of stuff that I think feeds my work, puts me in touch with different worlds. I've been sent to New Orleans to hang out with vice cops, or to New York to hang out with homicide detectives. I'm now friends with a guy who spent 12 years in the Navy SEALS, because we worked together on a project. You come into contact with the kind of people that you don’t meet ordinarily. You especially do not meet them if you’re teaching.”

 

That said, it’s actually the case that Nunn’s work actually sticks pretty close to his own history and longstanding preoccupations. His third novel Pomona Queen for instance, returned him to his roots

 

“Pomona Queen was once again me going through my various experiences. Tapping had to do with my interest in beach culture and surfing, Unassigned Territory was me tapping into my Witness past, Pomona Queen was my ode to growing up in the Pomona Valley. I wanted to write about my family and the Valley. I didn’t know at the beginning that everything would be telescoped into one night.”

 

As odes go it’s a pretty backhanded one. The Pomona Valley depicted in the book is not one you’re going to go out of your way to visit. Unless you have really quite a lot of tattoos and the attitude to back them up.

 

Pomona Queen saw Nunn heading back towards the ballpark of noir, but it was only with his next book that the Tapping The Source fans really began to take notice of Nunn again. This was, not at all coincidentally, because Nunn’s fourth novel The Dogs Of Winter saw him venturing back into the surf. So what provoked the return?

 

“The surfing world has been a part of my experience and I had always been intrigued, because I grew up surfing in Southern California, by the kind of surfing that goes on in the Pacific north west,” says Nunn. “I was friends with a surf photographer who used to tell me these stories about going to the beaches up there. The surfers are very territorial and he would hide his camera because if these people saw a camera they were likely to punch him out and throw his camera in the water – they have these secret spots they want to protect. The funny thing about that is the idea that there would be a mass migration of SoCal surfers into these cold, shark-infested, incredibly rough, rugged conditions.

 

“So really the thing that began it was that milieu. I spent a lot of time up there on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington where there’s only one surf shop and its called Tapping The Source. I was talking to this kid who worked there and I said it’s funny because I wrote this book called Tapping The Source and he said I’d better get the manager and he’s this big biker kind of guy, turns out Tapping The Source is his favourite book of all time, his brother in law had read it in prison so he had this old beat-up paperback. He wanted me to sign the shop so I signed the wall…. That was pretty trippy. And then I began to hear stories about this Indian reservation where there had been clashes between surfers and the people living there. I was introduced to a guy who was part Indian named Larry Matthews who got me out into the reservations up there.  That’s when the book really began to take off for me.”

 

It is indeed the milieu that makes The Dogs Of Winter memorable. The intervening decade and half between the two books had seen surfing go overground in a very big way. Surf theme clothing can be bought everywhere from Bangkok to a shopping mall somewhere near you. Towns like Huntington Beach have made surfing part of their economic base with shops and schools and regular competitions where  young men and women with serious sponsorship deals can battle it out front of the TV cameras.

 

For older hardcore surfers like the novel’s focal character, Drew Harmon, it’s a desecration of everything they loved in the sport, And so Harmon has been drawn to a place where the sea is cold and rough, the sharks hungry, the waves big and frankly dangerous, and even to get to the sea you have to battle across hostile terrain through an Indian reservation full of people who’d sooner you stayed off their land. Welcome to Oregon. This is real going gets tough, tough get going territory and Nunn brings it spectacularly to life. Especially when the two main characters. Harmon and a washed-out surf photographer called Jack Fletcher, come to the fore.

 

Jack Fletcher is something of a hardboiled fiction fixture, the guy whose thrown away his career in a welter of bad habits and worse marriages, but gets one last chance. Drew Harmon is a more enigmatic figure, I wondered how Nunn came up with him

 

“I was intrigued by the kind of individual who would surf in those places, so I went to visit Greg Knoll, a legendary big wave rider who was living up in that area. And one of the surfing archetypes is the guy who’s had the promising pro career but walks away from it, has this whole thing abut the bastardising of the sport. So I created the figure of Drew Harmon as this big wave rider who’s gone off and surfed these big lonesome waves in Northern California.”

 

Before moving on, I wondered whether Nunn had ever surfed up there himself

“I didn’t surf then as at the time I’d messed up my back,” he told me. “I did surf north of San Francisco later on, when I was living there, at a place called Shark Pits – a name which gives you something to think about!”

 

It had taken Nunn thirteen years to write another surfing novel after Tapping The Source. So when his next novel, Tijuana Straits, showed up, a leisurely seven years down the pike, it was quite a surprise to see surfing figuring prominently once again. “I had not thought of writing about surfing again, ‘ says Nunn.  “I’d imagined a book that would take place in the south west, another desert book like Unassigned Territory, but I wasn’t exactly finding the stuff I thought I was going to find, so the book wasn’t really getting off the ground.

 

“Then I began to hear stories about all the factory women who’d been murdered in Juarez and I thought that was fascinating.  One reason was the way this indigenous culture was being messed with by the intrusion of these foreign owned factories. Women were being employed in the factories while the men were unemployed. It was turning the culture on its head and some of the violence at least seemed to be growing out of that cultural inversion. For a while I even thought of trying to take on that story but frankly found it a little daunting.

 

“Instead I decided to go down and have a look at what I think of as my border – between Tijuana and Imperial Beach. So I drove down to Imperial Beach one day, I hadn’t been there since I was a kid, and I walked out on the dunes there, approaching the Sloughs, and I seemed to recall that this was a  surf spot I’d read about. Also, when you're standing there and you look back inland, you’re looking into a valley which is this kind of no man’s land between the two countries – if you look to the right there's the Tijuana bullring, to the left there’s the hills of Point Loma. You feel like you’re between two worlds.

 

“Then I called a friend of mine and asked him ‘what do you know about the Tijuana Sloughs?’ and he said ‘oh that’s a real Kem Nunn kind of place!’ He immediately faxed over an article and I realised there was all this great California surfing lore about this place, these figures like Dempsey Holder - who I renamed as Hoddy in the book. It was a big wave spot back when California didn’t really have big wave spots.

 

“So then I’m thinking there’s the border, there's the no man’s land, and then there’s this surf spot. It all seemed to fall together and I thought this is a place I could write about. And I realised I couldn’t write about it without having some element of surfing in it – it’s part of the landscape. And then I thought, well I’ve written about surfing in Huntington Beach, and I've written about it in the northern end of the state, so if I write about it at the southern end, then I’ve covered the place, and this can be the third part of my Californian surfing trilogy.”

 

And so it is. This is the surf world come to the very end of the line. The hero Sam ‘The Gull’ Fahey is a sometime surf champ, now an ex-con drug dealer turned worm farmer, with a 300lb gorilla of guilt and self-disgust on his back.  It’s years since he’s been in the water and, anyway, the Tijuana Straits, the big wave spot just a couple of miles from his home, is now too polluted to surf.

 

His life is going nowhere when, early one morning, he finds a young woman walking on the beach, having narrowly survived death by drowning. At first he takes her for one more Mexican refugee, prepared to risk life and limb for a shot at the Yanqui dream. But it soon turns out that she’s part of something bigger than that. She’s an environmental and feminist activist, who’s been trying to help the factory workers protest against their working condition and also volunteering in a women’s refuge. These activities have brought her to the attention of some seriously bad guys who’ve tried to kill her.

 

Now it’s up to Sam whether he helps her or tosses her back to the wolves, Anyone who’s ever read a hardboiled crime novel – or been to a movie come to that – will hardly be surprised to discover that he does indeed help her, and it does indeed cost him dear.

 

But if the story occasionally follows predictable lines, and if Nunn’s fondness for biblical cadence, though no doubt rooted in his own religious upbringing, is occasionally rather too reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy, once again what strikes the reader powerfully is the milieu. Nunn does a wonderful job of evoking this strange no man’s land between US and Mexico, first world and third.

 

So good a job, in fact, that I resolve to spend the next day checking it out. Meanwhile our conversation winds down. We talk about the environment, which not surprisingly is a cause close to Nunn’s heart. I wonder if that’s definitely it as far as surfing goes in his fiction and he says ‘never say never’. And then its time to get the bill and head off.

 

Kem Nunn has his parents staying. I have time for a swim in the Motor Inn, before getting in an early night in preparation for an early start and a drive down Mexico way.

 

In the morning I stop for breakfast right in the middle of Laguna Beach. A little coffee shop – bagel, juice, sun shining outside. It’s idyllic: you can see just why people would spend millions to live the simple life here. Over to my left a couple of ageing surf dudes, all leathered, skin-cancered faces and long blonde hair going grey under their baseball caps, are talking to a bunch of youthful lifeguards and I can see the young guys are really into listening to the old timers telling them about how things used to be, and the radio in the café is tuned to an oldies station pumping out the Ronettes and Sonny & Cher, ramming home the point that this is a culture whose innocence had been well and truly lost over the last four decades.

 

On to the freeway then, and before long I'm skirting San Diego and its beaches and its naval dockyards, and the Mexican border is looming up ahead. I’d been planning on visiting Imperial Beach first, that last town before the border, but the lure of the unknown is too strong. At the border I park my car in a lot and then, rather than catch the shuttle bus, I decide to do as Sam Fahy does in Tijuana Straits, and walk into Mexico. This involves me in a wrong turn that leads me over the freeway on a footbridge. Worth it though, because sitting on the bridge, waiting for nothing, are two Mexican guys with guitars, singing something sad in Spanish; not busking, just singing.

 

Another overpass takes me back in the right direction and give me a good view of the whole border crossing area. There’s an elaborate system of fences and walls and barbed wire and guard houses, and it reminds me, inevitably, of the only similar structure I’ve even visited before: the Berlin Wall. And it can’t help strike me as odd that we in the west were so outraged about the Berlin Wall but so complaisant at our own walls. Perhaps there is some superior morality in building a wall to keep people out, as opposed to building one to keep people in, but there’s also a fair old dash of equivalence too.

 

Crossing from The USA into Mexico – once you’ve figured out where the pedestrian access walkway is – is no problem. It’s only once I’ve passed through the gate and am actually in Mexico that it strikes me that this is - as the soccer player Ian Rush once said of Italy – a foreign country. And people speak Spanish, which I don’t, and use different money.

 

I'm completely unprepared. My  traveller cheques are all back in the car and I have eight dollars on me. Damn. I change the eight bucks into pesos, anyway, and carry on out of the border complex and into a peculiar modern marketplace, looks like a shopping centre in some hard-done-by corner of London. There’s a bunch of stalls and shops selling souvenirs  - Mexican hats, Metallica T-shirts - just what you’d expect at any busy border crossing.

 

More unusual though is the presence of a considerable number of pharmacies. Well, perhaps not exactly pharmacies in the sense of a place presided over by a pharmacist. Rather what we have here is a bunch of white painted shops with advertising boards outside listing the products on offer. These are the same names you see on a billion spam emails – Valium, Viagra, Cialis, Xanax, Ambien, Prozac, Propecia. Dollar prices marked beside the names - $20 for thirty blue pills, $30 for fifty white ones.

 

The shops are clearly doing good business. And look closely and you’ll realise that it’s not just the vanity products, the ones promising to restore your erection and your hair, that are selling here, but drugs for cancer and HIV and all manner of other ailments. Indeed in Tijuana Straits, Fahy comes here to buy the relatively workaday Betadine and Cipro to treat the ailing Magdalena.

 

And why? Because what this is, is a place for the USA’s poor, those unhappy souls without health insurance, to buy their medication courtesy of the free market. And they’d just better hope like hell that the young Hispanic guys in the white coats who don’t exactly look like pharmacists are at least selling genuine merchandise. It’s hard to imagine there’s anywhere else where economies of first and third worlds, normally kept at arms length, are shoved together so rudely.

 

Thanking my lucky stars that I’m not in need of urgent medication, I carry on through the marketplace to a busy dusty square full of buses and traffic and people everywhere. According to the map, which I’ve thoughtfully left in the car, the city centre, or at least the touristic part, is pretty close to the border, but there’s no obvious sign of it here. In the end I follow a bunch of backpackers and jump on the same bus as them hoping they’ll be heading for the centre. The bus is full of locals including two more guys playing guitars and singing. I had no idea this country was so full of music. And after a short while I see a big street looming up ahead and a sign saying Avenida De la Revolucion. Time to get off.

 

Walking down the Avenida, I remember one of my favourite unlikely Welsh heroes. As a Welsh person, you see, what with Wales being a small country and much overshadowed by England, we have a tendency to celebrate each and every achievement by a Welsh person not matter how odd.

 

One of the oddest of the lot was a feller called Caryl Ap Rhys Pryce, a.k.a. ‘The man who captured Tijuana’. Pryce was a career soldier who been serving as a Mountie in Canada when he read of the Mexican revolution and decided to offer his services. On arrival he turned out to be one the few people around with serious military experience, so he ended up leading a motley band of two hundred or so men, most of them not Mexicans at all, but American anarchists, members of the IWW.

 

He advanced on Tijuana and managed to capture it after a day’s bloody fighting, despite the fact that his troops were virtually out of ammunition. Their next target was the port of Ensenada, immediately to the south, but they were too broke to buy the weaponry needed to launch an attack, so Pryce set himself to the task of fund raising. This he did by legalising gambling, and turning a blind eye to all other kinds of related vices.

 

So Tijuana’s reputation as the vice den to end them all is actually the fault of Welshman. Funny, huh? As is the fact that Pryce went on to appear in early Hollywood cowboy movies, fought in the trenches in World War One, and then vanished for good in the mid 1920s.

 

Just the contemplation of such a life makes me feel tired, so I stroll down the Avenida De la Revolucion, enjoying the fact that, after a week of being surrounded by supersized Americans, I’m in a place where I feel average height going on tall, and looking for somewhere to sit down and drink a beer and get something to eat for less than however many pesos I've got left.

 

It takes a little while as the Avenida too is dominated by free market pharmacies and souvenir shops, but eventually I find a nice quiet cafeteria where I eat a couple of tacos and drink a Tecate. As I do so a couple of the guys in white coats who are dispensing 100 valium for $24.99 next door come in a for a drink. They’re surely still in their teens and if either of them know their bipolar disorder from their erectile dysfunction I’d be a mite surprised.

 

Suitably revived, I head back out onto the midday sun and stroll some more. There’s a street full of kickboxing academies off to one side, then I take a left and I'm in a street full of sex bars.  These are probably the most depressing looking places of their ilk I've ever seen, flyblown  and filthy. The women outside, notionally enticing the punters, are without exception aged, whether prematurely or not it’s hard to say, and all seem to have prominent facial disfigurements. The whole effect is like a public information film designed to put you off sex tourism. Maybe there are people out there for whom this level of desolate seediness is just what they’re looking for, but I'm sure as hell I wouldn’t like to meet them.

 

Still, it would be a misrepresentation to say this place is in anyway typical of modern day Tijuana. Rather it seems like the last vestige of a dying industry. There really must be more money in drugs than sex.

 

Back on the Avenida the atmosphere is for the most part bustling, there are big music bars, there’s a Hard Rock café and a spectacular Jai Alai fronton. I know I'm just scratching the surface here and there’s something dissatisfying about that. Time to get back over the border.

 

Sam Fahy has to queue up for an hour and half to get back into the USA, but I'm through the customs in five minutes. Back in the car I try and follow the line of the border to the sea.

 

Soon I’m in a valley, the Tijuana river valley. It’s quiet scrubby land broken up by an almost dry river bed and a similarly parched area of swampland. The only sign of life is a horse ranch. Eventually the road peters out at the entrance to something called the Border State Park. This is where the climactic events of Tijuana Straits take place as Fahy and Magdalena try to escape a gang of Mexican killers. It feels less like a park than a no man’s land, or one of these bleak bits of countryside the army use for training manoeuvres. There’s absolutely no sign of anyone else here, I wander about a bit, trying to get my bearings and find the way to the ocean,

In the distance I can hear a car. Before long an ancient Chevy Impala with blacked out windows comes into view. It pulls up next to my car and out get two young Hispanic guys in full street rig. They look me over, find me of no interest and walk off purposefully in the direction of the border fence.

 

I start along a path I hope will bring me to the sea. It’s quiet and frankly rather eerie ,. Finally there’s a rise in the path ahead of me and I climb up and suddenly I'm in a kind of picnic zone with heavily watered green grass, a couple of tables, plus a parking lot, even though there’s no access road that I can see. Straight ahead I can see the ocean. It’s flat today so there’s no sign of the big wave spot out in the Sloughs. And to my left I can see the  border fence, and beyond it the Tijuana bull ring. The juxtaposition is startling: all that life on the far side of the fence, and this deserted, surely purely for show, picnic spot on the other side, my side.

 

As I head back to the car a helicopter comes out of the sky and swoops low over my head. I've had enough of this, maybe it’s just the effect of reading too much Kem Nunn, but I can’t imagine anything good happening in this place

 

Once in the car, I drive the five miles or so to Imperial Beach, the southernmost outpost of California surf culture. And, as Nunn suggested, it feels a lot less developed, a lot less moneyed than places like Laguna Beach or San Clemente.

 

Instead it’s a dilapidated blue collar town that just happens to have a beach and, as a result, feels the need to have a couple of shops selling surfing gear, and a forlorn looking cafe offering cappuccino. Just outside the café, and opposite the pier, there are an odd assortment of neon coloured Plexiglas arches. I peer at them for a while, then find a plaque on the pavement announcing that this is SurfHenge, a monument to Southern California surf culture. Next to the arches are a selection of surfboard-shaped benches, these too bear plaques, celebrating local surf legends, amongst them Dempsey Holder, the model for Hoddy Younger in Nunn’s book.

 

It’s all rather bizarrely and endearingly amateurish. At one point in Tijuana Straits, Fahy takes Magdalena to Imperial Beach, and she asks him what the plastic arches are all about. ‘I believe they are meant to represent waves’ he says before giving in and declaring that they ‘look like a fast food restaurant, without the food.’ Which is about the size of it. I take a walk out on to the beach. There are still no waves and thus no surfers. Behind me a bunch of local teenagers are idly skateboarding around SurfHenge.

 

Fine, I’m at the end of the line. Nothing to do but go back.