Danger City One & Two

From The Believer 2/1/07:

You can read the whole fantabulous review right here. Here’s the part that you really care about, the part that pertains to me:

Without a doubt, the most crowd-pleasing story in Danger City is “Faggy on the Streets,” by Jeffrey Dinsmore. Like his fellow authors, Dinsmore likes his fiction rough, but he doesn’t take a word of it seriously. The title character, John Faggy, is a renegade investigator with an angry streak and “one badassss cracker.” Dinsmore writes, “He’ll take you downtown on the Brown line and when he do, he won’t buy you no breakfast or cook you no Steak-umms, no way, baby. He’ll take you down to where you need to go and he’ll say to you, ‘Look, there, that’s where you belong, you maggot.’” Faggy teams up with a sidekick named Squeamish to orchestrate a drug bust, and by the time the story is through, Faggy has used his sexual prowess to pry information out of a prostitute, gunned down several of the cops in his precinct, and told a convict who refuses to squeal that “if you don’t tell me everything you know about the Enforcers right now, I’m gonna introduce you to the sweatiest, meanest bulldog in this place and laugh as he fucks you in half.” More than any other author in the collection, Dinsmore is able to mine misanthropy for belly laughs, and he nearly upstages the rest of the contributors. (He also has two Contemporary Press novels of his own: Johnny Astronaut, which he wrote under the pen name Rory Carmichael, and I, An Actress, a mock-autobiography of a trashy Hollywood actress named Karen Jamey, born Karen Hitler. His story for the second anthology, also a winner, is titled “The Alcoholic Monkey Who Took Over My Mind and Turned Me Into a Cold-Blooded Killer,” which pretty much says it all.)

I, An Actress: The Autobiography of Karen Jamey

From Publisher’s Weekly, 10/24/05:

I, an Actress: The Autobiography of Karen Jamey
Dinsmore, Jeffrey (As Told to)

ISBN: 0974461490
Contemporary Press
Published 2005-11
Paperback, $11.00 (179p)
Fiction | Humorous
Reviewed 2005-10-24 PW

Dinsmore takes a cheeky look at the life and times of a tawdry B-movie actress in his entertaining pulp debut, written as the autobiography of Karen Jamey Hitler, a nonstarlet of the 1930s. A precocious, gorgeous German girl whose immigrant parents worked the minstrel circuit, Jamey drops her surname and injures a competitor to get her first significant part. Her career takes off in earnest once she moves from Baltimore to L.A. with her father, overcomes a corrupt agent and hooks up with Tony Tarantella. The seedy gangster introduces Jamey to the “big” names, gives her a job as a stripper and becomes her lover. When he catches her in bed with Fletcher Bisque and kills Fletcher, Jamey flees to Guatemala, where she quickly becomes a local celebrity and gets involved in revolution (and romantic intrigue with a pair of political rivals). A return to America to rebuild her career leads to monster movies, alcoholism and a breakdown. Dinsmore cobbles together a nice blend of Hollywood shtick and bloated narcissism for Jamey’s voice, and the result is a light diversion: dirty, low, funny and stylish. (Nov.)

Copyright © 1997-2005 Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved

From Grumpy Old Bookman, 2/08/06:

Jeffrey Dinsmore: I, An Actress

Subtitled ‘The Autobiography of Karen Jamey’, the title page tells us that the book was ‘told to Jeffrey Dinsmore’ — a writer who, incidentally, has also published as Rory Carmichael. (Concentrate now, this gets tricky.) And another prelim page tells us that ‘This is a work of fiction.’ And indeed it is. But it is one of Mr Dinsmore’s little conceits that he writes a blog as Rory Carmichael, and that on that blog Miss Jamey is allowed to give us her take on the James Frey affair.

According to Miss (or is it Ms) Jamey, James Frey was an obvious fake from day one. She mocks, for instance, his claim that he used to smoke 50 keys of crack a day, and that he once put so much cocaine up his ass that he turned purple. No one, Miss Jamey assures us, speaks of ‘keys’ of crack. And as for putting stuff up your ass, well, she tells us, from personal experience, that this has no effect whatsoever.

Ms Jamey goes on to say that ‘my autobiography, which is available at fine stores everywhere and right here, is 110% factual. It is more factual than the facts. It is certainly more factual than anything James Frey has to say, and, I’ll add, at least 55% more entertaining.’

See, I told you it got a little complicated.

Anyway, what of the damn book, since I went to the trouble of reading it. Well, Karen Jamey, we learn, was born Karen Hitler, in 1922. Hitler? Perhaps a distant relative; the German media certainly think so at one point. Anyway, young Karen turns out to be a remarkably articulate person. On the other hand, maybe her ‘ghost’ has made her more articulate than she actually is. And she, or her ghost, certainly has a pedantic way with words. E.g. ‘I nervously waited outside the door, not quite knowing into what I was getting.’

The story, to begin with, is fairly familiar from a thousand autobiographies of famous or long-forgotten actresses. Early hardship, the search for a break, experiences on the road, and so forth. But round about page 60 or so the book begins to look a little different from the average example of its genre.

When a gangster tells Karen that he can tell that she feels pain inside, she denies it. ‘I had no pain inside me. What did I care. Save for a few years of looking like a Halloween costume, a horrible tour experience, the death of my grandparents, the loss of my mother, the complete absence of friends, and my burgeoning propensity for alcoholism, I had led a charmed life.’

A statement which encouraged me to read further.

Much of the action takes place in the 1930s, including, of course, an account of making films with an eccentric European director. Were the book not soaked in such convincing period detail, and had I not Ms Jamey’s personal assurance that her book is 110% factual, I might have begun to suspect a certain degree of exaggeration at this point. But as Ms Jamey remarks, ‘Life is nothing but intemperate nonsense mixed with crushing disappointment and moments of despair.’ A thought which she attributes to either Freud or Charles Schultz; she always gets the two of them mixed up.

Later in the book our heroine succumbs to Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and alcoholism, spends two years in a psychiatric hospital, and for nearly twenty years does no acting. But eventually she finds happiness and a kind of serenity.

Now how, and why, you will be wondering, does a powerful book of this calibre come to be published by an obscure small press based in, er, Brooklyn. (I think.) Well, the answer to that may lie in another question, one that a mainstream editor would have asked himself, scratching his head thoughtfully. To whom would a book like this appeal?

And the answer to that is probably the kind of person who has an encyclopaedic knowledge of obscure B movies. Someone who can tell you the name of every character ever played by Ingrid Pitt or Kitten Natividad. One of those sad, nerdy, geeky types. (And I speak as one who, somewhere, possibly in a box in the garage or the loft, has a signed nude picture of Kitten Natividad. ‘To Michael, with love’, it says. Don’t ask. Just be assured that she signs all her pictures that way. Or that’s what I tell Mrs GOB, anyway.)

Well, I enjoyed I, An Actress. Let’s face it, it’s not a world-beater. but it’s a professional piece of work. It was fun.

Contemporary Press

“Publishing for the Hell of It” - Fresh Eyes Now, 2/8/06