Into the Badlands
Subtitle: Travels through Urban America
Publisher: Flamingo
Published: February 1993
Language: eng
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 240
ISBN-13: 9780586090183
Copyright date: 1991 John Williams
Subjects: 20th Century American Novel And Short Story; Travel - United States; Travel; United States - General; United States - Midwest - South Dakota; Crime & mystery; English; Travel writing; USA
Description: In the summer of ’89 John Williams donned a baseball cap and took off for the States to search out the mythical America of the crime writers, the nation’s most astute chroniclers — to find James Ellroy’s LA, Elmore Leonard’s sleazy South Beach of Miami, Sara Paretsky’s Chicago. Meeting, among others, George V Higgins in Boston and Leonard in Detroit, partying with James Crumley in Montana and undertaking an unnerving tour of New York’s underbelly with Andrew Vachss, Williams discovers an urban America at least as disturbing and mesmeric as the popular fiction of some of his interviewees and gives us an unforgettable, often hilarious commentary on his own predicament as a penniless traveller living in a string of roachy motels.
Table of contents: title: Acknowledgements
pagenum: 6; title: Introduction
pagenum: 7; label: 1
pagenum: 11
title: Miami: the City that Coke Built; label: 2
pagenum: 43
title: Southern Louisiana: Tell It Like It Is; label: 3
pagenum: 66
title: New Mexico: ‘The Uranium Was All We Had’; label: 4
pagenum: 84
title: Los Angeles: Looking for the Big Nowhere; label: 5
pagenum: 111
title: San Francisco: from the Frozen Yogurt Parlors to the Tenderloin; label: 6
pagenum: 132
title: Missoula, Montana: Saturday Night at Charlie’s Bar; label: 7
pagenum: 153
title: Chicago: ‘That’s About As Cold As It Gets’; label: 8
pagenum: 178
title: Detroit: Where the Weak are Killed and Eaten; label: 9
pagenum: 194
title: Boston: the Friends of George V. Higgins; label: 10
pagenum: 207
title: New York: Dead End; title: Epilogue
pagenum: 237; title: Bibliography
pagenum: 239