Matthew Stokoe has been translated and published around the world, his books have set new boundaries in urban horror and gritty, pull-no-punches noir. After Cows, Stokoe turned his sights on Hollywood, producing the now-famous High Life – both a page-turning mystery and one of the most brutal critiques of Tinsel Town ever committed to fiction. Stokoe has continued to explore his uniquely dark view of lives lived in the modern world, and in 2014 was nominated for the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière – France’s most prestigious crime writing award – for his novel, Empty Mile. Colony of Whores, is his latest novel.
I wrote...
Colony of Whores
By
Matthew Stokoe
What is my book about?
When a failed screenwriter inherits a screenplay that may hold the key to both a sensational Hollywood murder and to his own sister's death, he is drawn into the dangerous twilight world that lurks at the edge of the movie business. Aided by a disgraced former journalist and a maverick female filmmaker bent on destroying the traditional Hollywood hierarchy, he begins a journey of revenge and personal salvation that will pit him against the owners of one of the most powerful and corrupt film companies in Los Angeles.
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The Books I Picked & Why
Last Exit to Brooklyn
By
Hubert Selby Jr.
Why this book?
Last Exit to Brooklyn tells the stories of a group of characters living on the edge of society in 1950s New York – drug addicts, prostitutes, transvestites, he-men struggling with their sexuality, and average Joes struggling just to survive. The prose is sublimely beautiful, and the world it paints is one rarely seen now in print. The book was a profound influence on me – it showed me how important it is to have compassion for your characters, no matter how dark or damned they might be.
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The Big Sleep
By
Raymond Chandler
Why this book?
Chandler wrote about Southern California, the 1930s and 40s, crime (generally amongst the wealthier classes), and personal honour. Add a good helping of Hollywood and the movies and what’s not to like? His hero, Philip Marlow, is the ultimate outsider, seeking not just a solution to whatever investigation he happens to have been handed, but also the answer to the question that haunts all of Chandler’s work – how to live life as a good man. There were many writers writing crime fiction alongside Chandler, but his superb, almost poetic, use of language, and the flashes of dry wit that he scattered like firecrackers throughout his books left them in the dust.
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The Man with the Golden Arm
By
Nelson Algren
Why this book?
Algren has been called a proletarian writer. Working primarily in Chicago from the 1930s to the 1950s, he was intensely concerned with the plight of the common man. His milieux were the gambling dens, the sawdust bars, the decaying hooker-prowled streets, the beat-down police stations, the shooting galleries, the slums, the cheap walk-up flats where broken men and women fought each other in desperate battles to survive one more miserable day. His characters were the poor, the ignorant, the addicted, tramps, bums, card sharps, petty crims, accidental murderers... But in all of them he found something human, something that might have been good, might have been worthy of a decent life – if only it had been given half a chance.
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Less Than Zero
By
Bret Easton Ellis
Why this book?
Living in London under Margaret Thatcher and seemingly permanent grey skies, Ellis’s tale of rich kids in Los Angeles doing little else but fucking, drinking, taking drugs, and hanging out at expensive restaurants and cool parties made me want to sell everything I owned (very little back then) and jump on a plane. I often regret that I didn’t. Ellis’s book captures perfectly the strange mix of manic determination and tranquilised-around-the-edges ennui that I later found so characteristic of Los Angeles.
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Post Office
By
Charles Bukowski
Why this book?
Bukowski was already known, in a small way, as a poet and underground columnist when he wrote his first novel, the autobiographical Post Office. It was given to me by a friend when I lived in London and it just blew me away. The book – an account of Bukowski’s ten years as a postman in LA – is a rollicking ride full of barroom brawls, boozy beddings, and battles with uncaring authority. Set in cheap, shitty rooms, populated by rejects and losers, I’d never read anything like it before. Bukowski seems to write about nothing in particular – certainly there is almost no plot – but he writes so well, and with such humour and humanness, that before you realise it, you’re fifty pages in and hooked.
