Vol. 3, Number 2	Summer 2000

 

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In John Ridley’s third novel, Everybody Smokes in Hell, Hell is Hollywood, and Ridley is out to tarnish its image from the inside out-introducing the locale as “the city I hate more than cancer.” Although this is not the first less-than-flattering treatment the entertainment-industry mecca has received, Ridley presents a unique picture of desperation by focusing with sardonic intensity on individuals from every walk of life, from Hollywood Hills to the seediest parts of LA. In the city as he envisions it, no one trying to cash in on the California dream can escape; they all go up in smoke. Ridley, who was a successful sitcom writer for shows like Fresh Prince of Bel Air, became bored with this kind of fare and began satisfying his urge for something darker by writing hard-boiled, fast-paced crime novels. In his third novel Ridley essentially sticks to the formula of his first, Stray Dogs-Everybody Smokes in Hell is another road story with a large cast of characters, about anything and everything but redemption for anyone.

Paris Scott is the night manager at the 24/7 Mart and not happy about it. He’s a dreamer who’s tried everything-writing, directing, acting, etc.-to make it in Hollywood (and to win back the ex-girlfriend who calls him a loser). Trouble is, he lacks the drive to make any of it happen. He meets an even bigger loser in the form of Filthy White Guy, a doped-up vagrant who breaks the store’s microwave by trying to nuke one too many frozen burritos. Paris takes pity and gives him a ride home, and it turns out the bum is Ian Jermaine, alternative rock star. Ian pontificates on suicide and plays his freshly recorded final tape for Paris. Paris thinks (mistakenly) that the death wish is just hot air, but is awed by the tape and what it could do for him-it could catapult him out of his loser life. Paris snatches up the tape, and the story takes off from there.

Through some confusion, Paris is thought to be in possession not only of the tape of a newly dead legend, but also of a bag of stolen drugs, so two teams are after him-one headed by an agent, the other by a drug lord. The agent and the drug lord, both insecure, volatile, and desperate to secure a reputation, are the first to go. Each dies at the hands of a world-weary prostitute: Chad, the agent, is fondly dosed a lethal shot of heroin, and Daymond, the druglord, is less fondly done away with by a girl he has brutalized. The narrator adds for emphasis, “payback is a slapped-around-one-too-many-times bitch.”

However, each man has already dispatched his own team consisting of two men-one intellectual, ambitious, and careful; the other physically deficient but loyal. Ridley takes obvious cynical pleasure in presenting the two factions as two sides of the same coin, exposing agents as simply another brand of thug, just as caught up in illusions of power and domination as the stereotypical drug dealer. Paris is pursued out of town by an assortment of shady Hollywood residents, and he leaves, as the dust jacket proclaims in just the commercial Hollywood voice Ridley finds so ludicrous, “a trail of blood, bodies, and broken hearts.” It’s a world that alternately fascinates and annoys the author to no end, a world of which he is ultimately a part.

New voice after new voice jumps into Paris’ story as the chase gets underway. But although Ridley skips rapidly from the thoughts of one character to another, his direct, compact style gives the reader a real sense of why the characters think the way they do. Sordid as the whole thing may be, he makes us sympathetic to all the miscreants-they’re very fallible, but they’re all after something beautiful. Ridley adds a strange ambiguity to the story by making Ian Jermaine’s much sought-after tape contain genuinely beautiful music.

As paths tangle and one character after another dies, we begin to get the feeling we’re not supposed to be rooting for any of them, despite the humanity Ridley has endowed them with. None of the characters has any morals to clutch at amidst the chaos; they’re only out to survive, and they can’t even do that. Every time there is a hint of redemption, violence intercedes. And Ridley’s violence is over-the-top violence, wrenching to read, horrible to imagine, and more consistently present than the characters.

Still, even in a hard-boiled novel, the reader is usually allowed one guy to count on, though he may be a little morally ambiguous. So it’s tempting to count on identifying with Paris. Tempting, but unrewarding. Paris isn’t hard-bitten or wise. Even his stock trait, being a “dreamer,” starts to seem a lot less scrappy and innocuous when his faithlessness causes the death of the one likable character we meet. This author is out to dash expectations.

Ridley’s work has often been criticized for reading like a screenplay, and this is undoubtedly true of Everybody Smokes in Hell. This fact accounts for both the book’s greatest weaknesses and its greatest strengths. As in, say, a Tarantino film, it’s hard to find a moral center (or a center of any kind), and the violence is wearing, but in exchange we’re allowed quick, potent, glimpses into the lives of a multitude of characters, and some dialogue that crackles with wit or pathos. However, the rapid pace and the kaleidoscopic style keep any of the characters from becoming flesh and blood; instead, they come off as cartoons-just a little too colorful, a little too stereotypical, a little too disposable. The dialogue sometimes sounds forced, as if it needed a skilled cast of actors to flesh it out and bring it to life. As it stands, we don’t get to know any solid, unforgettable characters, and the book fades quickly from memory.

Yet, at his best, Ridley is worthy of his predecessors, writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. In fact, the novel’s epigraph is a quote from Chandler, whose sentiments on Hollywood (“the whole damn mess”) seem to have directly inspired the book. Like these writers, he knows this town from top to bottom, and he knows its citizens. He captures the genuine thrill of excitement we feel when something truly brilliant is within our reach, as in this description of Jermaine’s last tape: “It was his music and much more. It was glory. It was the sound the heavenly host made with nothing more than the noneffort of opening their mouths.” Ridley’s characters react to the tape with astonishment in the face of its beauty. They go slack-jawed before it the same way Hammett’s greedy crooks go for the Maltese Falcon-not so much because of real beauty, but because of what it represents to them. They’ve tied all their hopes to it and made it the embodiment of salvation.

But, sorry as Ridley might feel for dreamers, he thinks dreaming is destructive and hollow. His forte is the obvious enjoyment he gets out of irony. The rock star seeking glamorous death falls in a pile of manure. The chilling cold-blooded killer is a flip young girl who likes to dance to her work. And, again and again, the fear of being nothing causes people foolishly to lose everything they ever had. Paris certainly succumbs in our last glimpse of him, and the few characters Ridley spares are disillusioned working girls, sweating for what they have, trying their best to avoid exploitation.