Sixteen years later and I’m back in Fort Lauderdale airport, the place I started the original book. Has it changed? Probably a little, I’m sure there’s a Starbucks around here somewhere, but basically it feels the same – airport-like, you know? No, what’s really changed in the interim is me.

 

Last time I came here, I was twenty-seven years old and pretty damn sure I knew it all. I knew why I was here and what I wanted to do. I wanted to write a book about American crime fiction that was as fast and exciting as an American crime novel. I wanted to see everything, do everything. And I wanted the writers I was going to meet to be every bit as funny/drunk/wacked out/hard living/armed to the teeth as the characters they wrote about. And any time they failed to live up to my expectations I was pretty hard on them. Well, not hard exactly but unsparing – what I saw was what I wrote, with little consideration for how they might feel about it.

 

Now I’m forty four years old, and I’ve done nothing but write for a living for the past sixteen years, and I have a lot more sympathy for the folks I met last time. The frustrations and disappointments I saw on their faces then are now right there any time I look in the mirror.

 

To give you an idea of just how long ago it was since I was here last, they were filming Miami Vice right around the corner from where I was staying, and the place I was staying in was an art deco hotel and it was cheap and mostly filled with old people, and James Hall wanted to visit my room to use it as setting for nefarious drug-related activities. There was not a supermodel in sight. If you see Miami Vice now it looks like a relic from a bygone age.

 

Evidently I was just one of many visitors to South Beach who saw the potential in the place. The next time I visited, maybe five years later, the place was transformed. Gone were the retirees: in their place were implausibly good-looking young people on roller blades. The welfare hotels were all being refurbished and their prices quadrupled. It didn’t even come as much of a surprise to me: during the intervening years you couldn’t open a glossy magazine, of the kind I was making a living writing for, without coming upon a fashion shoot using South Beach as a backdrop. Sun, sea and art deco. Gianni Versace’s mansion, Chris Blackwell’s hotels.

 

Actually it was unsurprising in another way too. That’s to say that at a certain point in my life I couldn’t help realising that most of the things I liked, and felt like I’d discovered for myself – whether the art deco hotels of South Beach or the novels of Elmore Leonard or the earlier recordings of Dolly Parton – were actually being picked up on simultaneously by thousands of other people. There’s something weirdly collective about taste.

 

You can see it most clearly in the matters of names and houses. Names first: I remember when my first friends to have a kid called their son Max and I thought hey that’s a weird name for a kid. But over the next few years it emerged that a sizable percentage of all the other young educated types having kids had also somehow simultaneously alighted on the name Max. As for houses, well almost everywhere I've ever lived, when I moved there it’s been a run-down inner city neighbourhood with old men’s pubs and working men’s caffs. And by the time I've left it’s become full of gastropubs and boutiques selling designer children’s clothing. What’s happened in the meantime is that loads more people like me have moved in.

 

And of course people like me end up spending our time complaining about how much better things used to be before people like me showed up and ruined them.

 

So, anyway, this time at Fort Lauderdale airport the last thing on my mind is getting a cab to take me all the way down to South Beach. This time, I’ll be heading to Hollywood Beach, just a couple of miles down the coast.

 

Hollywood Beach is old school Florida, the kind of place people from the snowbird states come to spend their holidays, or come to live if their lives aren’t working out further north, and not to have their picture taken for European fashion magazines. And it’s where Vicki Hendricks lives. 

 

Vicki Hendricks is one of the very few women writing contemporary noir fiction. That’s noir as opposed to hardboiled or simply crime fiction. Crime fiction generally offers a crime and a solution: there is an underlying sense that the world is rough and tough but, if the right cop or PI walks down those mean streets, he may hold the badness at bay for a while. Noir allows no such thing. The protagonist of the noir novel knows that he or she is screwed from the off. They know the word is unfair and expects nothing more that what they get. Which is, of course, nothing.

 

The noir novel tends to be the most highly critically praised and least commercially successful of genres. It's also the most male dominated of genres. It's easy to speculate as to why. One might suggest that there’s something particularly masculine and self-indulgent about the perception that the world is screwed, the dice loaded against you. For women this is, for starters, not news and, for seconds, something you just have to get on and live with. By the same token, though, it’s actually rather mystifying. For, given the very real extent to which the dice are loaded against women, surely noir should be their natural habitat.

 

What I suspect it boils down to is the matter of escapism, for the most part people who really have things hard tend to prefer books that offer a measure of escapism, You’re trying to get by in a world stacked against you, you most likely don’t want to read a book that tells you you have no chance, what you want is science fiction or chick lit or Agatha Christie.

 

Anyway, whatever the reason, the simple fact is that there are precious few women writing noir fiction these days. And it’s not that there were many writing back in noir’s fifties heyday either – a Delores Hitchens book here and a Leigh Brackett there hardly add up to a movement. Otherwise the most truly noir female voice of the past century is that of Jean Rhys.

 

Jean Rhys specialised  in writing about women who have spent their youth orbiting around men, but without ever settling into family life, and find themselves adrift, unsure what they want from life.

 

Pretty much the same goes for Vicki Hendricks’ heroines. Well, except for the fact that they come from a rather more proactive generation and tend to look for answers in the world of extreme sports, and are possessed by the kind of full-on sexual obsession that is only hinted at in Jean Rhys.

 

Vicki’s first book, Miami Purity, of which more later, was published in a big way around ten years ago. Her American editor, Sonny Mehta at Knopf, no less, clearly had it in mind that female noir might be the next big thing.

 

I first met her when the book came out in Britain. I wrote a piece about the book for GQ and was rewarded with a meet-the-author lunch which saw Vicki talking happily about the new boat she’d bought with her advance, and the new novel she was just about to finish. All looked set fair.

 

But sadly the publishers’ big dreams for Miami Purity didn’t work out. Knopf lost interest and so too did her American agent and British publisher. By then I’d started working part-time as an editor myself, and was only too happy to have the chance to pick up Vicki’s work, starting with that second novel, a flat-out classic called Iguana Love. And since then I’ve been involved in publishing each of her succeeding novels: Voluntary Madness, Sky Blues and the upcoming Cruel Poetry.

 

In the modern world, however, the fact that I have been Vicki’s editor all this time doesn’t actually translate into a lot of time spent hanging out. Rather it’s been a matter of emails and phone calls, plus a rather jetlagged dinner in Miami five or so years ago.

 

So, when I come down the stairs to the baggage reclaim at the airport, and I see Vicki waiting there with her long blonde hair and strong, almost Native American, bone structure, there’s a look of relief on her face that we’ve managed to recognise each other.

 

Salutations over with and my bag rescued, we head out to the car park and into Vicki’s brand new SUV, which has neat faux leopard skin seat covers but is not, she stresses, really her kind of vehicle. She was talked into buying in it because she wanted a vehicle big enough to hold all her sky jumping gear. Sky jumping has become a big part of Vicki’s life over the past decade. She used the sky-jumping world as the backdrop for her fourth novel, Sky Blues, but the obsession has outlived the novel, and by now she’s now racked up several hundred dives, diving almost every weekend.

 

Or, at least, she had been diving every weekend up till recently. That’s when she got the bad news. Back in the summer, just when I was planning this trip, Vicki found out she had breast cancer.

 

When she’d first heard the news Vicki’s reaction had been to keep it quiet. She was concerned, as she put it in an email, about the impact of the news ‘on my persona as a sex and murder writer!’  A couple of months and a first dose of chemo later, combined with a positive prognosis, and Vicki’s attitude has changed. The treatment’s going well, she tells me as we head out of the airport, and it’s kind of become her new interest now – an internal battle to fight as a change from her sporting battles with the elements.

 

From the airport we swing around to Vicki’s new condo, in a gated community a little way inland from the beach. All around there’s evidence of Hurricane Katrina’s recent visit. The apartment complex itself, however, has come through intact. Vicki’s just bought the place to live with her boyfriend Brian. They met through skydiving, and have been together for a few years, but Brian has only recently given up his place in Chicago, and moved down to Florida to be with Vicki full time.  He’s a nice guy, bearded fiftyish, does something with computers and is, of course, extremely partial to sky diving. Once we’re sat down in the apartment he tells me they’re thinking of going up to Lake Okeechobee the next day for him to do some diving. Maybe I’d like to come along? And perhaps I’d like to try doing a tandem dive with him?

 

Well that’s a tricky one. Not the first part, heading up to central Florida to see the sky diving scene up close sounds fine. The second part, though, where I jump out of a plane strapped to some guy who seems very pleasant, but I have, let’s face it, only just met, and hope he remembers which toggle to pull before we plunge to our deaths? Well, it takes me a good millisecond to say thanks, but no thanks.

 

By now it’s lunchtime. Brian has work to do, so Vicki drives me back on to Federal Highway and up a little way north to a place called Ernie’s Bar-B-Q and Lounge for some traditional Florida cooking.

 

Tradition in Florida is of course a relative term, and what it means is a mix of blue collar staples – burgers and barbecue and beer - plus some local fish dishes, mostly based around the conch and all served with sweet Caribbean style Bimini bread, which makes me oddly nostalgic for Kensal Rise, northwest London, where I lived when I wrote the original Badlands, and which was well supplied with West Indian eateries, unlike Cardiff, where I now live.

 

The real deal with Ernie’s, so Vicki tells me, has to do with the eponymous owner, Ernie Seibert, one of those fellers who decided that being in Florida gave them carte blanche to impersonate Ernest Hemingway. Ernie was a self-styled anarchist, given to writing slogans along the lines of ‘Eliminate International Bankers, Eliminate War’ across the walls. Whether his anarchism extended to dishing out free food is another matter. Anyway, Ernie passed on a couple of years back and now his slogans have been turned into instant heritage set in frames on the wall. Which makes the funkiness a little faux, but still, the conch fritters are chewy, the beer is cold, and the bread sweet, and the company good, so what the hell.

 

After lunch Vicki drops me off at my hotel, which turns out to be an enormous pink and brown 1920s pile, right on the beach. The ground floor consists of a semi-derelict shopping mall and the corridors on the upper floors are long and dingy and the rooms have kitchen facilities and its hard not to be put in mind of a Charles Willeford novel. It’s the kind of place Willeford’s cop Hoke Moseley generally lived in. But it’s cheap and it’s clean and it has a pool and, by the time Vicki and Brian call to take me out for dinner, I’m feeling well refreshed.

 

‘You ever see Body Heat?’ Vicki asked as I climb in the SUV. ‘Long time ago’ I say and then ask why and she explains that it was partly filmed right out on the Broadwalk, just along from my hotel. Cool. Or, rather, steamy.

 

The weather’s steamy now, all right, hot and humid and right in the middle of hurricane season. Katrina passed over a few weeks earlier. It was just a baby hurricane then, a level one or two, not the level four behemoth it became by the time it hit New Orleans. And right now Hurricane Ophelia is parked just off the Florida coast, a little way to the  north. Watching the weather forecasts in these parts feels just a little bit more urgent that it does back home.

 

Next stop is a bar called Le Tub, right on the intracoastal, the canal that runs parallel to the sea in these parts. Le Tub’s a classic south Florida kind of place. The décor consist of old bath tubs and toilet bowls filed with flowers, there a pool table and a juke box inside, but in this weather we opt for sitting by the water, feeding the fish, drinking beer and listening to the locals complain about the article in GQ that said this place has the best hamburgers in the USA , which means that you now have a waiting time of about an hour and a half before you can get your hands on one.

 

So, rather than stay out here with the no see ‘ums for that long, we head down the road to Padrino’s, a Cuban joint with air conditioning where we all eat plenty of rice and black eyed beans, and Brian and I drink beer, and before long it’s hard to mistake the tiredness in Vicki’s eyes. Chemo evidently takes it out of you. Plus, she tells me, your tastebuds are shot and nothing tastes of anything. Alcohol in particular has no appeal at all.

 

It does have a certain appeal for me though, so after Vicki and Brian drop me off I take a walk along the Broadwalk. There’s a band playing in the outdoor bandshell and the tune sounds familiar, some kind of rock and roll standard. Then it hits the chorus and I know what it is. It's Marie, Marie, a slice of retro rock and roll originally written and recorded by LA’s The Blasters, but popularised by Cardiff’s own rock and roll legend Shakin’ Stevens. Shaky is a man with one of the oddest career trajectories in pop history. He spent the late sixties and seventies playing in a rockabilly band called Shakin’ Steven and the Sunsets, playing regular benefits for the Communist Party, before becoming a solo act and housewives’ favourite across Europe for most of the eighties, then disappearing from view almost entirely.

 

Just along the Broadwalk from the band shell there’s a bar called Nick’s, which is where William Hurt first claps eyes on Kathleen Turner in Body Heat. Nick’s Place is actually pretty cool. It’s dark and a little edgy, and outside the lurking hurricane is whipping up some odd, unsettling weather. Too unsettling to stay in one place for long. There’s a bunch of roadhouse type places along the Broadwalk, all with standard issue hard rock bar bands pounding out Bad Company tunes. Apparently this little stretch is particularly popular with French Canadians. Finally I settle on to a bar stool at a place that has a girl playing Neil Young covers at a volume that makes it possible to think. After a couple of songs, though, she gives up her guitar to a guy from the audience, who’s evidently told his buddies that he is a hot shit kind of picker. Which he isn’t. The girl who’s been playing gives him a look that says ‘asshole if you damage my guitar I’ll kill you’, and goes outside for a cigarette. Then the redneck on my left tells me I'm sitting on his stool, and the rain starts beating against the windows, and I get up and out of there before either I or the bar gets flattened.

 

Next morning, the wind has dropped and Vicki and Brian come by bright and early to drive up to the sky diving place. Or rather the ‘drop zone’ as sky divers apparently refer to such places. On the way up Brian reiterates his offer to take me on a tandem dive. I’m just flickering with interest, some part of me recognising that it must be an extraordinary feeling leaping out of a plane 13,000 feet up in the air. Then, however, conversation turns to last month’s World Freefall Convention in Illinois. This is the big annual sky diving get together, and Vicki and Brian were mortified to have missed it, due to the health troubles. Then Vicki mentions that she’d just received an email, saying that a guy they know from the Florida Drop Zone had died at the convention. ‘Parachute didn’t open apparently.’

 

‘Oh,’ I say, ‘his parachute didn’t open? Don’t they have backup?’

 

Well, they explain, yes, in theory you do, but it seems it’s not as failsafe as all that. If a couple of other things go wrong you might be already too low to release the reserve parachute and then, well, you’re dead. Simple as that. And with this news whatever flickering notion of flying through the sky with Brian I might have been nurturing is promptly snuffed out.

 

Heading inland, Florida changes character pretty fast. The Everglades cover most of the inland area of Southern Florida, though the developers are doing their best to eat away at it year by year. However its sheer swampy inhospitality to man, and friendliness to alligators, give it a certain resistance to over development. Head north though, the way we are, towards Lake Obeechobee, and soon you’re in a different Florida again. This is scrubby, ugly, agricultural land.

 

The main town of Clewiston is home to the US Sugar Corporation and its subsidiary Southern Gardens Citrus – big sugar and big OJ. It's agribusiness on a spectacular scale – 196,000 acres of land producing 700,000 tonnes of sugar and a startling 42 million gallons of orange juice each year. 

 

Clewiston itself is a flat and featureless place with  a scattering of appliance stores and the odd motel, all of it kind of temporary looking. To the north of Clewiston, close by the Lake, are the ramshackle towns where the agribusiness workers, the fruit pickers and cane cutters, live.  We’re headed west out on Route 27. After a couple of miles we pass a bar called Judy’s Place, with a sign saying ‘bikers welcome’ – we’re clearly deep into Florida cracker country.

 

Another mile or so and there’s a sign on the left advertising ‘Air Adventures.’ We turn down a little farm road that dead ends at a tiny rural airport. There’s an airport office on the left but all the action appears to be in a hangar to our right. Vicki leads the way over and, once my eyes have adjusted to the light, I can see I’m in a large space full of people – well, men mostly – busy performing intricate folding operations with large objects made out of  brightly coloured fabric – parachutes, it seems reasonable to assume.

 

There’s a guy selling hot dogs over by the main entrance where the hangar opens up onto the runway. And around the edges there are clusters of guys standing around talking. There’s an amiable mix of biker types and regular guys. Some couples, the odd family. There’s not much posing going on. Sky jumping culture isn’t about talking the talk or walking the walk it’s about jumping out of aeroplanes at 13,000 feet with nothing but some parachute silk and some Velcro straps between you and oblivion. If you're prepared to do that then you’ve got all the respect you need coming your way.

 

More than that, talking to these people, Vicki’s friends – there’s a tall skinny guy called Sherm looks like a disbarred lawyer, there's good old boy Carl who tells me about the time he saw the Stones at Knebworth. and there’s Tom, a tattooed biker all sinew and skin and bone, he’s had the big C too and commiserates with Vicki about the vicissitudes of chemotherapy, before showing me the eye tattooed on to the crown of his bald head ‘for looking at the girls in the tittie bars’ - what is clear is that these are people not bound together by wanting to be cool or tough or any of that, but rather by addiction. These people, Vicki and Brian too, have jumped not once or twice or half a dozen times, but hundreds of times.  There’s a very clear sense that it’s only here that life really goes into Technicolor. The daily grind, once you’re a sky-jumper, is just monochrome, vanilla.

 

While Vicki’s introducing me to her friends, Brian has booked himself on to the next plane taking folks on a one way journey straight up into the sky, and gets down to the business of preparing his gear. Before long the plane, which looks small and ancient enough that I would be scared to get into it, let alone jump out of it, taxis to a stop outside the hangar, loads up with eager skydivers, and trundles down the runway.

 

It's going to take fifteen minutes or so before Brian falls to earth, so Vicki and I walk over to the office, where a bunch of college kids are signing up for tandem dives. They’ll all be strapped to instructors while another pro videos their descent. This kind of thing costs a couple of hundred dollars a head and provides the bread and butter income for skydiving outfits. For most people it’s a once in lifetime thrill, a video memory to shelve next to the one of you bungee jumping off a bridge.  There’s only a few, like Vicki, who are immediately hooked on the feeling. Once you are hooked though, and once you’ve spent several thousand dollars buying your own gear, the cost of a skydiving fix goes down to around $20 a time. Though that soon adds up if you make four or five jumps a day as some do.

 

Then we head outside and before long we catch sight of Brian’s blue and yellow parachute gently heading down to earth and for a little while I feel a certain regret at not being the kind of person who’s prepare to take risks with their life in exchange for moments of weightlessness.

 

Brian lands about as smoothly as a person can, and we head back inside while he packs his parachute away ready for next time. This is a job that repays concentration. If you’re lazy or inexperienced you can pay one of the pros to pack your parachute away for you but Brian reckons, and I can’t say that I  disagree, that when it’s a matter of life and death he’d sooner check all the straps are in the right place himself.

 

Half an hour later and we’re pulling up outside Judy’s Place and while the sign outside still proudly says ‘Bikers Welcome’, right now in the middle of a hot slow Saturday afternoon, they’re ready to welcome just about anybody. The jukebox is full of good rabble rousing tunes from George Thorogood to Lynyrd Skynyrd, but the joint is scarcely rocking. The bar staff have tattoos and attitude, but frankly things could hardly be more peaceful. It's like the atmosphere in the classic Spaghetti Western bar, just before Clint or Lee Van Cleef walks in. Torpid.

 

This is clearly the art house version of the movie, though, because Clint never does come in. The sun keeps shining and the geckos keep basking. A couple of Coronas only increase the lethargy and Vicki takes one look at me and Brian ready to nod out and announces she’ll be doing the driving.

 

-----------------------------------------------------

 

Back at her place and revived by a liberal injection of caffeine, we get down to talking, starting at the very beginning. “I was born in Covington Kentucky,’ Vicki says, “but I don’t remember that because we moved into Ohio when I was really young. I grew up there, in Cincinatti. We lived in the suburbs. We had a bomb shelter in our basement made out of sandbags…it was kind of a strange childhood. I went to all Catholic schools all the time. My mother didn’t work. My father, he started out as an insurance man but then he sort of sold things. I remember one time he had  like  a thousand wool blankets in our basement. People would call and say how many they wanted. I loved that, answering the phone, telling people what colours we had. Later on he had some apartment buildings in downtown Cincinnati. I think he sold to people who didn’t have much money and just collected on it once a month. I’m not really sure what kind of business this was, I never heard much about it.  Then, when I was seventeen, he died.

 

“I read all the time. I went to college in Mt Saint Joseph, on the Ohio, an all Catholic girls college for two years, then transferred to Kentucky for one year and Ohio State for the final year. I did  almost all my college reading in high school which was probably a good thing as then I found other things that were more fun. Like drinking and running around. I graduated, got married, and moved to Florida, for the weather really. I’m the kind of person who freezes and I always wanted to live in a warm climate.

 

“I came down here on Spring Break with my boyfriend and we decided to get married and move down here to live and that was… okay for a while. I was married for ten or eleven years here, had my son, got my masters in English, then I got divorced and went back to college at Florida International University. Meanwhile I did a lot of scuba diving and you know, other… fun things.

 

“I always wanted to write but didn’t for years and years, apart from some non-fiction in the early eighties, on lobstering and manatees. I thought I was just being lazy, but then I did classes in creative writing and figured out how to do it. As a child I read Nancy Drew then Agatha Christie but I really didn’t read any crime fiction after that till I taught a class in mystery fiction. I did my thesis on Henry James. But when I got to Florida International University and  was introduced to James M. Cain I went crazy on him.

 

“At FIU I had two crime novelists, James Hall and Les Standiford, for tutors.  Lynne Barrett, though, was actually my mentor. She was the one who recommended James Cain to me. Then, in James Hall’s class, he had us pick a model and write a third of a novel based on that model.  I picked The Postman Always Rings Twice. Mainly because it was very confined and short and had a first person narrator – it seemed a lot easier then Lolita or Catch 22 which other people did. I only had 52 pages to write! You had to follow the original very closely, write the same number of pages, same number of characters, look at how much summary there was and how much dialogue, and use the same proportions. See how many locations there were, really just analyse it for that kind of stuff. So you learned how to structure.

 

So when did she realise that this exercise was taking on a life of its own? “Probably never. When I started to write I didn’t have much time – I was working and looking after my son - I didn’t like to waste things and I had a third of a novel written, so I thought okay I’ll use it for my thesis. I never had any expectations for it, it was just fun to write. Then someone suggested sending it to Nat Sobel, who was Jim’s agent and Les’s agent at the time.  So I sent him a few chapters and a synopsis and he wrote back, said I should make it into an updated version of the Postman Always Rings Twice! He didn’t ask to see the rest, though. But I sent it back to him anyway – which was really unlike me – and he read it and he called me, he didn’t like some things about it, He thought it’d be better set in a coffee shop and I should make the man the murderer and don’t kill the dog!

 

“I couldn’t really do those things without writing a new book but I didn’t want to say forget it because this was the first agent to ever pay any attention to me. So I told him I was going to a workshop over the next weekend and I would think about it. Then I was at the conference and I got a message that my agent called. I was like ‘My agent! Who might that be!’

 

“But he left a message and he said that Sonny Mehta was interested in the book.  It was Friday afternoon and too late to call back and I’d never heard of Sonny Mehta, so everyone else at the workshop was more excited than I was. Then when I got back I had less than a week before I was off on a trip to the Peruvian jungle. So he had to wait a month till I came back before we could finally meet.

 

The deal was for what Vicki has described elsewhere as ‘more money than I could have imagined, if I’d had sense enough to start imagining.’ However it was something of a mixed blessing. One immediate consequence was that she discovered she was all of a sudden a ‘crime writer’, something she had never aspired to be. “It never occurred to me that once I’d written something that was in the crime category, everything I wrote would be crime after that.”

 

Part of the reason Knopf paid such a handsome sum for Miami Purity, Vicki believes is the perceived shock value of having a female lead character who positively revels in sex and violence rather than shying away from it. I wondered if she’d consciously set out to shock. “I wish I had more purpose,” she says. “ It just appealed to me to make the woman the murderer. I wasn’t thinking that I was making her a masculine character or anything but I got all kinds of people saying I was trying to make a woman like a man. One reviewer said I had the mind of a gay man because I objectify men and women don’t do that! Another reviewer on the NYT said he checked to make sure I was a woman and not a fake.”

 

Inevitably, given the fact that the lead character was a stripper, and that the novel offered a convincing picture of the world of Miami lowlife, there was plenty of speculation that this new writer must have emerged from this same demi-monde herself. And such speculation that was no doubt fuelled by a James Ellroy cover blurb that described the book as ‘an instant redneck idiot savant classic’.

 

It's a somewhat backhanded accolade that initially had Vicki bridling. After all, the fact was she was a college teacher, not a semi-literate stripper. That said, Ellroy wasn’t the only one to figure that the verisimilitude of the setting, and the sureness of the character portraits, were signs that Vicki herself must have lived the life. So, it seems reasonable to ask, how did she come by her knowledge of the lowlife? Did she really not have much direct experience of that world?

 

“Not a whole lot,” she replied, “but you don’t really need all that much. Know a few people, hear a few stories. My boyfriend at the time had dated a dancer for a while before me, so he told me stuff about that scene. That seems to work really well for me, to get something second-hand about somebody else. So that’s how I started on the stripper thing. I didn’t hang out in strip clubs much though, I went to more after I wrote the book because they always wanted to take my picture in them.”

 

The arrival of a fat cheque for a first novel can often paralyse writers, making it particularly hard to write the next one. Fortunately Vicki was already embarked on her second book, Iguana Love. To my mind it’s her finest work to date, an utterly compelling study of sexual obsession and alienation.  Its heroine, Ramona, is a woman who, as the book opens, doesn’t quite have it all, but certainly has what most people might consider enough: a good looking husband called Gary, an apartment with a pool in Miami, a job as a nurse, a cat called Snickers. But it’s not enough for her. In particular, Gary is not enough. Ramona craves wildness and Gary is happy with domesticity. She start hanging out with the divers at a local bar, has a fling and eventually kicks Gary out and replaces him with a pet iguana.

 

Step by step her life loses its moorings, she becomes infatuated with a diver called  Enzo who’s clearly not making all his money from giving scuba lessons. And as she loses control of her emotional life, her physical being also starts to mutate, A fondness for going to the gym becomes an obsession which she feeds with steroids which start to have a startling effect on her sexuality.

 

Iguana Love is a book that doesn’t so much challenge gender stereotypes about love and lust, as beat them to a bloody pulp. It’s also a book, it transpires, that did have its roots a little closer to home than her debut.

 

“The idea for it came because I had this relationship that was like that. And around that time I got an iguana. I get these cravings for pets and then I go out and get one. And when you get an iguana, all of a sudden you meet all these other women who have iguanas. It's a very strange thing. So I called this particular woman whose iguana had died  – she was trying to sell this $3000 cage that was like ceiling high, six foot in diameter, with a water fountain in the bottom. The iguana’s name was Chupa and she had this kind of gravestone on the windowsill where he used to sit. I didn’t buy the cage but I got some books from her, and as I was looking through one of the books I saw that she’d decorated it with hearts and written ‘I love you Chupa’ and stuff like that. Anyway I got to know her a little and she showed me videos of her dancing with Chupa round her neck.  He had been dead a couple of months I think by this time but she still had these sucker bites on her arms - iguana kisses. It was really a little bit scary. Plus she had some problems going on, some kind of boyfriend problems, she started calling me in the middle of the night...

 

“That’s where it started. And the idea of iguana love – love as a kind of challenge – I came up with that from the relationship I was in, I guess. Some people just don’t know how to love, like an iguana. There was a line in the book this woman lent me ‘no matter how much you love an iguana, he will never love you back.’ You know, because they’re reptiles! And I thought of this woman who was desperately trying to get this iguana to love her…

 

“I was doing some bodybuilding at the time, a lot of gym stuff, so that got in there too. I had this vision of Ramona as this really big, developed woman. I've always hated the idea that women aren’t as strong as men. I can work out every day and some guy that’s never done a push-up in his life is still stronger than I am. It’s only if you really bodybuild and take steroids and all that you can get past that. And that’s always been really irritating to me – so I had Ramona go for it and try to be stronger than a man.

 

“And the scuba diving came in because I had just gone through the whole business of getting a rescue diver certificate, so that seemed to work in well as part of her goal. I always wanted to scuba dive from the time I moved down here, I started when my son was a year old. But I didn’t have the money to buy the equipment so I didn’t get to do it that much the first ten years, I guess. Then when I got divorced the first guy I got as a boyfriend had a boat! And that helped a lot and I started to scuba dive all the time.

 

“I never saw it as anything extreme or scary. I've always loved swimming, loved water. Then when I got the money from Miami Purity I felt like I could buy anything I wanted and so I bought a sailboat. That was hard to keep up; it quickly became clear I wasn’t going to be able to keep coasting on my writing. I had to go back to work. Though I did get to sail to the Bahamas several times which was fine, and good research. It was fun while it lasted.”

 

So when did she realise that the promised fame and fortune wasn’t going to work out, at least not right away? “Well, it took Sonny seven months to tell me whether he wanted Iguana Love or not, I think he was waiting to see how many copies of Miami Purity came back.  So seven months and then he turned it down..”

 

Nevertheless the Miami Purity money had given Vicki time not only to finish Iguana Love but also to write her third novel, the quirky and rather less noir Voluntary Madness, in which a girl called Juliette goes to Key West with her much older boyfriend, Punch, a failed writer, whose only interest is in drinking himself to death. Juliette, meanwhile, spends her time trying to dream up plans to distract him from this aim.

 

“Once I got the Miami Purity money I decided ‘I'm a writer now I should go and live in Key West for a while’. So I went down and rented a little cottage in a compound. Turned out various writers lived there. It was really fun and I used to go out to the bars virtually every night and I would ride my bicycle. Then one night I had it stolen and I had to walk back and I was walking down Caroline Street from Duval and it was dark and a little spooky, and this guy passed me exposing himself. And I thought why don’t women ever do that?”

 

So the book starts with Juliette flashing bemused passers by, hoping her escapades will entertain Punch. This is no easy task, as Punch is a chronic alcoholic, little interested in anything that can’t be ordered at a bar and drunk. “The whole alcoholic writer thing I got from a past boyfriend,” Vicki explains. “He also taught in the college where I did and was a really bad drunk and he died a few years after we broke up, from diabetes.

 

“Punch, in the book, was kind of that character except when I got into it he was almost unrecognisable except for his drunkenness and his diabetes. And I put the much younger woman in there because, making him such an extreme drunk, she had to be pretty naïve to fall for him. I started gathering drunk stories like the one about the guy whose friends bring him home from the bar – and the wife opens the door and says ‘thanks, but where’s his wheelchair?’ That’s a true story I had to put it in there.

 

“Then I went to this really weird place called Coral Castle. It was built by this little scrawny guy for this woman who wouldn’t have anything to do with him. Everything made out of coral, even the tables and chairs. He did all this then invited her down and she wouldn’t go for it. It kind of reflected the whole love thing I was trying to get across in the book, how hard she tried to get Punch to love her.”

 

With Voluntary Madness Vicki hoped to break out of the whole crime/noir pigeonhole in which she’d been placed. However pigeonholes are tricky to escape and the fact that this was basically a picaresque love story with a dark heart, it probably only confused readers looking for more harsh erotic noir, without attracting any new audience worth speaking of.

 

For the next book, Sky Blues, Vicki decided to return to the kind of novel that had made her name. And so we meet Desi Donne, a woman whose life is devoted to caring for animals and keeping well away from dangerous men, until she meets a guy called Tom who introduces her to sky diving, And one or two other things, but let’s deal with the sky diving first.

 

“Sky Blues, well that was inspired by the whole sky diving, of course, and that was the result of having extra money and just doing anything I thought would be fun. I met these two people in the hot tub at a nudist camp in Florida, Laurie and Chick.  I was doing research into some guy who was meant to be using steroids at the nudist camp. It was a really strange place. It wasn’t like a naturist thing, it was more like a sex thing. Laurie and Chick had been to other nudist camps and they said normally if you get near anyone else there’s like someone saying ‘no touching’ – but this place it wasn’t really like that!

 

“So I got to know these two people. They’d been graphic designers for years, never taken a day off, and then they’d decided they were going to start doing crazy things. So the nudist thing was one thing but they’d also taken up sky diving. They also did broken glass walking, fire walking, metal bending as well which is a whole other thing.  They developed these whole nights where you would do one face-your-fear thing after another. Anyway, I went up to Clewiston to go sky diving with them. And after I did the one jump I really wanted to do more. I started  taking classes and going regularly and I was really sucked in. 

 

“At first I just thought I’d take a couple of classes and then I’ll write about it. But I found there was so much more to it. After a couple of classes I realised I still didn’t know what I was doing.  I started the book then, anyway, so you get all her impressions as she starts sky diving. But it took a couple of years to finish, with me doing more sky diving and less writing, Actually for a while there I had thoughts of just leaving my job and becoming a sky diver. I've seen people do that.’ She pauses, ‘ but it generally doesn’t turn out too well…’

 

Once again though, despite  the inherent drama of the setting, the public remained widely indifferent: “A lot of people don’t even want to hear about sky diving. You start talking about it they say ‘no, no my stomach feels funny’. And sky divers generally don’t read a lot! So…”

 

So she decided to keep on keeping on. Her new book Cruel Poetry is currently in manuscript form. It’s longer than her other books and employs multiple narrators, including for the first time a man. “In Cruel Poetry there are three narrators. And it was so much fun to get away from the whole voice thru one book. I always enjoy writing men and I think I know men really well, but even so it’s such a creative venture. The three protagonists are a poetry professor – of course I know lots of those. A girl who wants to be a writer - I know lots of those.  And Renata – I kind of modelled her on someone I met at the gym.’

 

Renata is the central figure. A close cousin to Ramona from Iguana Love and  Sherise from Miami Purity, she is perhaps the least conflicted Hendricks heroine yet when it comes to her sexual appetites. Renata is very fond of fucking. She’s especially fond of fucking her boyfriend Francisco, but she s got plenty left over for friends and acquaintances. And what’s left after that she sells on the open market. Renata doesn’t mind, as far as she’s concerned pleasure is all there is. Life isn’t quite that simple for the other two protagonists, though. Poetry Professor Richard (a.k.a. ‘Dr Dick’) is completely obsessed with Renata, wants to throw his life away for her. And then there’s Jules. She lives in the room next to Renata in the rundown Miami Beach hotel they both call home. She’s trying to write a novel, but mostly she  just listens through the wall to Renata’s non-stop sex life. Then one evening she hears something terribly through the wall and events are put in motion that turns all three lives upside down

 

“The theme this time was really the evolution of sexuality.” Vicki comments, musing on Renata’s total (if ultimately calamitous) ease with her sexuality. “Things are so much looser now -  men being with men, women being with women, and women and men just mixing it up – the younger people now have so much less gender orientation than they used to.  I've seen it a lot at the drop zones and my students will write essays about how they all went out and… to them it’s like everyday stuff.”

 

She pauses here. Then she says “I’m only really interested in obsession as motivation, I think this is a problem, it makes the books too similar. They all have the same motivation – obsession, But it’s hard for me to believe that people will kill each other for money. To me no other motive makes more sense than some obsession that takes you past sanity. To me obsession is the most interesting thing in human nature, and this book it was time to have a male obsessed. I really like Richard, he's kind of disgusting but I like him. He feels real to me.”

 

This I think gets right to the heart of what makes Vicki Hendricks such a powerful, even important writer. Just as the great fifties noirists, the Jim Thompsons and Charles Williamses got right to the heart of the dark obsessions of their time, Vicki Hendricks seems to me to plug into the dark sexual obsessions of our own time like no other contemporary writer, male or female.

 

It also seems like a pretty good note to end up on. Time to head on out to dinner.

 

We drive to downtown Hollywood Beach, through the kind of heritage section, which must date back all the way to those far-off 1950s days when Charles Williams and John D Macdonald sold hundreds of thousand of books via the nations drugstores.

 

We end up at a fairly generic American place, looks a bit like the one William Hurt runs into Kathleen Turner, plus about to be murdered hubby, in Body Heat. As we eat Vicki talks about her future plans. Disillusion with publishing is evidently weighing heavy on her.

 

She has another novel of contemporary Floridian obsession mapped out, but right now she’s not sure if that’s what she wants to write: “The next novel may be historical fiction which is a whole new area for me - and you seem to get a better shot when it’s your first book in an area and they don’t know what its going to do. Plus historical fiction is more popular than noir…”

 

Once again Vicki’s tired by the end of the meal and they drop me off, back on the Broadwalk. I stroll up to Nick’s for a couple of drinks, but when I head back outside the weather is turning strange again. There’s a wind, the likes of which I’ve never encountered before, whipping up. There’s rain sleeting in from odd angles. I decide to head back toward the hotel and on arrival contemplate a nightcap at the beach front bar, but now the wind and rain are really starting to lash so I head inside where someone tells me that’s an honest to god tornado outside.

 

I head upstairs admiring the way Florida provides so many natural metaphors just made for noir writers – sun and sand, hurricanes and swamps. Light and shade all right.

 

Upstairs I try and get a bottle of water from the drinks machine, stuck away in a little laundry room. It takes my money and hands me a Diet Coke in return. Not ever having had a taste for Coke, I’m about to leave it there and stomp off when a tough-looking young Hispanic guy with plentiful tattoos shows up. I tell him to beware the machines erratic dispensing technique and offer him the Diet Coke, and he looks at me like I’m crazy – ‘I would never give my little girls caffeine’ he tells me. And I head for bed thinking about how easily we stereotype people, and listening to the tornado whirling its way west, same way I’ll be headed in the morning.