Ross Thomas
Part 2

Unfortunately, no one seems to have ever had the nerve to ask Thomas about the murkier side of his past. But Thomas was apparently not someone to whom you could easily address such questions. Though by all accounts polite and generous, with a dry sense of humour, there was a diffidence about him more reminiscent of a habitué of a London gentlemen’s club or refugee from an E.M. Forster novel than a writer of tough guy novels. With pale skin, piercing eyes and, in later years, thinning hair, Thomas spoke with a mid-American Oklahoman accent. He never particularly cared for the limelight, to the extent that when he attended the annual Bouchercon, he passed conference time playing poker with his fellow renegades. Then it was back to his writing desk in Malibu, where he and his wife, Rosalie, lived for most of their twenty-five years together, having met in Washington at the Library of Congress where Ross did his research and Rosalie worked as a librarian. In Malibu they were mainstays of the local Democratic Club.

Thomas’s comedy of manners existed in what might be termed a world that was post-Chandler but pre-Ellroy. After all, Thomas had lived through McCarthyism, the California real estate boom, the New Frontier, the Great Society, the rise of the middle class, inflation, recession, stagflation, consumerism, Watergate, Reganomics, and decades of American greed. Yet Thomas was smart enough to coat his politics with a surreal humour, which sets him apart from Le Carré, whose sombre tales of agents wrestling with their demons, self-doubt, loneliness and adversaries crippled by the pointlessness of it all. For Thomas’s characters, if not for the author himself, the Cold War and its immediate aftermath, whatever its effect on the culture, was little more than a series of obstacles to be overcome. As for Chandler, Thomas credits him with helping save his life. According to Thomas, a little over an hour after landing on an island in the Philippines in 1945, his first scout handed him a copy of Farewell, My Lovely. He was eighteen, and was surprised to find the book was set on the mean streets of L.A.. However, the scout was killed, after which Thomas lost the book on the beach. Taking over his job, Thomas spent the next 109 days wondering who Velma was. “I decided,” said Thomas in an article he wrote for the Washington Post in 1984, “I needed to be Philip Marlowe safely back in Los Angeles in that palmy year of 1940- in a time that would never change. It was a harmless enough notion that probably kept me sane.”

Regardless of how unsung he might have become, Thomas was able to exert considerable influence, if not in the US, then in France where the late great polar writer Jean-Patrick Manchette fell under his spell. After meeting at a writer’s conference in France during the last decade of Thomas’s life, the two men quickly became friends. As well as extolling his work in various periodicals, Manchette was to translate Thomas’s work into French. Moreover, his reading of Thomas contributed to Manchette’s decision to abandon crime fiction in favour of a type of espionage novel, perhaps not as humorous as Thomas’s, but even more political, exemplified by the excellent, unfinished and posthumously published, La Princesse du sang.

And Thomas also had his admirers in the world of cinema. Though, film-wise, he is still best known for co-writing Wim Wenders’s 1982 film, Hammett. In putting together what would become a worthy failure, Wenders went through some thirty screenplays before settling on Thomas’s and Dennis O’Flaherty’s. Through no fault of Thomas’s, whose script is workmanlike, the film contains none of the narrative drive, and only a fraction of the energy of Joe Gores’s novel. Yet the film contains some memorable moments and remains one of the few films to tackle the subject of writing on any level other than the most mundane. Thomas also had a small role in Hammett, playing a corrupt local politician. A decade later, in 1995, Thomas was credited with writing Damian Harris’s Bad Company starring Ellen Barkin and Lawrence Fishburn. Again, not exactly Citizen Kane, but an interesting effort, particularly when it comes to Thomas’s labyrinthine script. Six years before Hammett, there was also St. Ives, starring Charles Bronson and Jacqueline Bissett, adapted from a story by Thomas’s alter-ego Oliver Bleeck. But for the most part, Thomas’s heroes seem to be too duplicitous, his narratives too ironical and convoluted for most directors to easily adapt for the screen.

In 1993 Thomas lost his manuscripts, his books, including various foreign translations of his novels, as well as his typewriter (he hated computers) in the Malibu fire. Undaunted, he and Rosalie moved to Point Dume where, despite their loss, life continued as usual. For Thomas, that meant writing everyday. It was a persistence that marked his fiction- “I rewrite virtually everything, even notes to the guy who delivers the bottled water”- as well as his fictional creations. When he wasn’t writing Thomas liked to go to the movies. He once said that one of the benefits of being a writer was that he could go to the movies in the afternoon. Two years after the fire, and a few months after finishing his novel, Ah, Treachery!, Ross Thomas, age 69, died of lung cancer. It was the usual story; within a couple years most of his work had gone out of print and would remain so for the better part of a decade. Fortunately, over the last year St Martins has begun to reprint his work, beginning with Out on the Rim, Briarpatch, The Cold War Swap, The Fools in Town Are on Our Side, Out on the Rim and Twilight at Mac’s Place, each accompanied by introductions written by the likes of Donald Westlake, T. Jefferson Parker, Robert Parker, Sara Paretsky and Lawrence Block. Perhaps we are about to go through a period of Ross Thomas revisionism. It’s nothing less than he deserves. When a writer asked Rosalie what it was like being married to a writer, she said, “Very quiet.” And when she was asked if her husband was ever a spy, she simply smiled and said, “Not that he ever told me.”http://www.facebook.com/facebook-widgets/share.php