The new edition of LONG HAUL by the late great AI Bezzerides is now available from 280 Steps. The book features my introduction to Buzz and his work.
Here's a preview:
Buzz just wanted to tell the
truth. He didn’t consider himself a crime writer, didn’t really consider
himself a genre guy at all. He just wanted to write the brutal truth about
struggling for survival in America. Proletarian
realism, they used to call it. The
truth, Buzz called it. He’d come up hard, had seen the world beat down his
old man, and he wanted to put that experience into works of fiction as clearly
and candidly as possible. Of course, the fascinating thing is the way that his
ambition to be honest just naturally led him to produce books that read like
crime novels. Maybe that’s because, to Buzz, life looked a lot like a crime in
progress.
He was born Albert Issok
Bezzerides in 1908 in Samsun, Turkey—which, at the time, was still part of the
Ottoman Empire—the son of a Greek father and an Armenian mother. “I can swear
and pray in Armenian and Turkish,” he later told an interviewer, but when he
was still just a boy, his parents packed up their son and headed to America in
search of a new life. The fruit fields of California might have been advertised
as a sun-dappled paradise, but A.I.—or “Buzz” as he was called—grew up working for
his father in the fresh produce industry in the San Joaquin Valley, a
hardscrabble experience that would mark him for the rest of his life. The young
boy’s worldview was forged in the fire of hard manual labor—picking fruit,
repairing shabby old trucks, driving all night, and fighting the shysters at
the produce markets. “Etched into my soul,” he once wrote, “was the poverty
that surrounded me as a child.”
