Author Brian Townsley celebrates the release of his new desert-noir novel “Under A Black Flag” this Saturday at Desert General
Crime fiction author Brian Townsley will be celebrating the release of his new novel “Under A Black Flag” published by Starlite Pulp, featuring Townsley’s notorious antihero Sonny Haynes’ jagged path between Palm Springs and Twentynine Palms in the early 50’s. Reporter Gabriel Hart chatted with Townsley about his recurring character and how the desert affects a noir story.
Townsley’s new novel is the third installment of his 1950s Sonny Haynes series, which started with the L.A. mob ties of Trunk Full of Zeros and the short story collection Outlaw Ballads. “Under A Black Flag” picks up in 1953 when morally conflicted ex-cop Sonny Haynes is now a house detective at the Starlite Hotel in Palm Springs. A famous director shooting a Western film in Twentynine Palms calls Sonny to investigate an assault on his actress, while two visitors are found dead in the hotel, and what follows is a race against time, leading to the heart of darkness in the southern California desert.
“It’s funny because a few people have commented that even though it’s detective fiction, crime fiction, or noir or whatever you want to refer to it as, in a lot of ways Sonny’s 1950 Mercury is just like a horse so feels like a western lot of ways. I think that’s kind of the paradigm that that we use a lot, the idea of the western is so ingrained in American storytelling that it’s one of those things where even though this is crime fiction, it sometimes has the feel of a Western, and so the desert plays into that,” said Townsley.
While the crime fiction genre is synonymous with a tense, suffocating atmosphere, Townsley says the desert opens up that intensity as well as the brutal language known in urban settings.
“I feel like the desert allows you to lose some of that claustrophobia and kind of open the environment and in doing so it also opens some of the language. With noir stuff there’s a real tight economy of language but I feel like that a lot of that comes from this very claustrophobic feeling that you often get, yet I don’t feel that when I’m writing about the desert, regardless of what kind of story it is. So I do feel like the language tends to open up and I get to have a little bit of fun, let it ease a little bit,” said Townsley.
Townsley is also the editor at Starlite Pulp, the multi-genre publishing house who also recently reprinted My Confession: Recollections of a Rogue by Samuel Chamberlain, the memoir of which Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian was based on. Townsley will be discussing this re-release as well as signing and reading from his new novel Under A Black Flag with Q&A to follow. Stevie From St. Lou (known to locals as “Smitty”) will also be performing slide guitar. The free event starts at 3:00 p.m. this Saturday (May 2) at Desert General, located at 6427 Mesquite Road in Twentynine Palms.
