You’re sayin' the FBI is going to pay me to learn to surf? - Keanu Reeves
Man, how big an impression did Point Break make on my teenaged sensibilities? It had everything I wanted from a movie (guns, nudity, guns, fisticuffs, sex, smart-assedness, guns, sex) plus plenty that I didn’t know I wanted yet (the very real and danger-enhancing possibility of the good guy-gasp-losing! and the ever-exciting there’s-a-girl-in-the-boy’s-club-house factor of director Kathryn Bigelow). A sun-drenched and salt-water-bleached bit of action pulp with a smattering of high-minded philosophical junk food (I know, which Patrick Swayze movie am I describing here? Yeah, same formula that made Road House an enduring rednexploitation classic). It launched a craze of extreme-sports based crime films (Drop Zone, anybody? How about Fast & Furious?) that delivered diminishing returns, and set me on a ten-year quest to find more surf-crime equivalents.
Little did I know then…Books, man.
Kem Nunn had been exploiting that nexus for years before Johnny Utah ever threw a football. Tapping the Source, Nunn’s debut novel is sometimes credited as the ‘inspiration’ for Point Break, but the murky legal/coincidental/shameless rip-off waters surrounding the cult book’s connection to the mass-media phenomenon are really another conversation. Can I just say ‘apples and oranges’ and I want more of both? (Also check out The Dogs of Winter, Pomona Queen, and Tijuana Straits from Nunn, who co-created that HBO existential surfin show John from Cincinnati with David Milch.)
Well, my wish is granted. This week, in the colonies, we can finally pick up Don Winslow’s The Gentlemen's Hour, (follow up to his surfing detective book The Dawn Patrol – which wasn’t his first either, California Fire and Life I think holds that distinction) though it’s been available overseas for a while now. Don, Kem and Bodi have taken a sport I have exactly zero interest in ever trying and held me rapt in passages about waves and the power of the universe and yeah, yeah, yeah. It seems to me an under-explored sub-genre, (one that Nunn and Winslow at least blur into the border-tension, drug-war-fiasco territory of folks like David Corbett and - I hope more to come from - Urban Waite. Johnny Shaw’s upcoming debut Dove Season touches down in this field too). It’s the wild-west, south, down under - wherever – it’s rife with potential when you combine anti-authoritarianism, outlaw culture, pseudo-modern-savages, jock philosophers, gun-toting poets, book-toting mercenaries, living off the grid and money money money.
There’s gotta be more good surf/crime books out there. Please educate my ignorance.
Jedidiah Ayres writes fiction and keeps the blog Hardboiled Wonderland.
