Blood, Sweat, and Semen: That's What Southern Boys Are Made Of

Bad City Blues
by Tim Willocks
p. 1991

Somewhere down south in a stale, sweaty bayou-adjacent Louisiana slum, a bunch of dudes engage in neo-noir charades and Tim Willocks wants us all along for the ride.

Bad City Blues is a story about some troubled men and dark family secrets and a suitcase full of stolen money and duplicitous women and any other things you’d expect from a noir-style story set in an unnamed southern city. It took a few chapters for me to get into because at first, all I could think was that this was essentially the equivalent of a romance novel, but for men. There is a lot of smut I wasn’t expecting, and it’s certainly not of the sensual, passionate variety typically found in romance novels, but rather angry, lustful sex full of self-loathing and confusion. In fact, every woman in the story has at least three sexual partners and you can bet that if one comes up in story, it will be only a paragraph or two before she’s sexualized.

The inherent misogyny in the fact that the only female characters in Bad City Blues are either sluts or prostitutes would unnerve me, but I had a really hard time taking Willocks seriously. The melodrama, the clichés, and the extreme alpha-ness of every male character in this novel were just too much for me. It felt more like overcompensation than anything. That doesn’t make the misogyny okay, it just set my brain straight to interpret this novel, which is nothing more than a blustery homage to noir fiction.

It can be fun, if you learn not to take it seriously. The characters are intense and their interaction is layered. I’ve never personally read an Elmore Leonard novel, but if his novels are anything like they are depicted in the series “Justified,” then I am wont to compare Willocks to Leonard, because reading this book felt a lot like watching an episode of “Justified,” from the antihero with a tortured past and a penchant for femme fatales, to the bumbling criminal lackeys, to the explosive and fatal finale when everything comes together.

Willocks may have a way with language and dialogue, and it was refreshing to read a story centered around characters rather than concepts, after reading so much pulp science fiction lately, but I won’t be delving into his limited repertoire any further. While I love the neo-noir genre, I can probably root out a few that don’t feel like I’m reading pornography for people who hate women.