WHEEL ME OUT - Jack Clark

Before getting reissued last year by retro pulp publishers Hard Case Crime, author and cabbie Jack Clark originally sold his self-published novel, Nobody’s Angel, to passengers from the front seat of his cab. Less a whodunit than a melancholic paean to post-industrialism, Nobody’s Angel follows hack driver Eddie through the crumbling neighbourhoods of Chicago, as he becomes embroiled in the hunt for a savage serial killer. Wheel spoke to Clark about Chicago’s mean streets, which he’s been driving for over 30 years.

By Daniel Penfold
Cutout image from Nobody's Angel

Do you still sell Nobody’s Angel from your cab? Yeah. I printed 500 copies in ’96 and started selling it while I was working. There were nights I sold ten - $5 is cheap for a book. My sister out in Massachusetts was at a party back then and this woman says her son just bought “the most wonderful book” from a cab driver in Chicago. That was within a week of me first selling.

Why did you decide to write Nobody’s Angel? I sold a lot of journalism over the years but I could never write a novel so I just gave up. Then about 20 years ago, just as I was turning 40, I saw something in the newspaper that said the average age of a novelist was in the forties, so I thought well fuck, I’ll try again. I sat down and within two days I knew I could write the book. As for the plot, parts of it are autobiographical, but most of it isn’t. It was based on the real case of these suburban kids who were kidnapping girls, taking them out to the suburbs and mutilating them and then dumping them off highway ramps. But it didn’t happen to me, I’m just the writer.

Is cab driving as scary as it seems in the book? It’s a lot less scary than it used to be. Back in the 70s, 80s and 90s there were four to five drivers a year getting killed here. I’ve had two people leap out of the cab in the last couple of months and I’m sure one was gonna try to rob me, but I closed the window on him and locked all the doors.

I’ve been driving a cab down these streets for 30 years and I know bad neighbourhoods, believe me. Neighbourhoods where you wouldn’t wanna get out of the cab. Well those people need cabs sometimes too. But if it’s late at night and you've got a thousand dollars in your pocket, are you gonna walk past all those assholes on the corner? I mean they’re gonna smell that money.

In Nobody’s Angel Eddie is known for driving anywhere in Chicago, is that something you do too? Oh yeah. It’s the person that gets in the car that you have to worry about. Most guys here will go anywhere and, you know, they fine you if you don’t. Most drivers, if the person looks alright then we’ll take them anywhere so I exaggerated that with Eddie. You gotta take a good story and make it better sometimes.

In many ways it feels like the city of Chicago is the main character of the novel. I always wanted to write about Chicago so it’s nice to really know it well enough that I feel like I’m actually writing the truth.

And there's this palpable urban decay throughout... Chicago is like a lot of cities in the world. On the one hand it’s got gentrification going on with the suburbanites and we get college kids coming from all over the country. Then you’ve got these horrible neighbourhoods that mainly poor black people live in, and that just gets worse every year. They’ve pretty much torn down all the housing projects and chased a lot of the poor into what were middle class neighbourhoods, and they’re screwing up those neighbourhoods and the people who can get out are getting out, and more poor people are gonna take their place so it’s really a mess here. But I don’t think this kind of stuff is unique to Chicago.

Do you read much crime fiction? Not much. I don’t find most of it believable so I have a hard time with it. Donald E. Westlake was a wonderful writer, Elmore Leonard, and I love Raymond Chandler, but I guess everybody does.

He didn’t write his first story until he was 45. Oh I got him beat. I didn’t get my first book published until I was 52, it’s called Westerfield’s Chain and it’s a private eye novel. It’s out of print but you can find it for cheap or you can get it on Kindle. One good thing recently is if you buy Nobody’s Angel for $7.99 as a paperback I get like, 50 cents in about a year and a half’s time. If you buy if for $5.99 on Kindle I get four bucks and I get it in about a month and a half. I love real books, you’re not gonna get a beautiful cover on a Kindle, and you can’t hold it in your hand. But, four dollars in a month and a half versus 50 cents in a year and a half...

So you’ve written private eye novels? Yeah, St Martin’s published Westerfield’s Chain in 2002 and I’ve written two follow-ups that I haven’t been able to sell, The Highway Side and Dancing on Graves. I know they’re good books so anybody looking for a private eye novel, get in touch, I got ’em.

Do they feature cab drivers? No, but I have been coming up with a way to bring Eddie back for another book, set like, 20 years later. What’s happened to him after all this time? I think he hasn’t been driving a cab but he has to go back to it because he falls on hard times, which a lot of people have right now.

You’re a songwriter as well? Yeah kind of folk music or something. The last thing I wrote was this little love song called I Used To Walk That Gay Girl Home. WMO

Jack Clark at Hard Case Crime:

http://www.hardcasecrime.com/books_bios.cgi?title=Nobody%27s%20Angel