Davey Davis on Their Novel X and the Queerness of Noir

In the catalogue of noir literature, crime queer/Trans and Non-Binary authors are the proverbial needle in the haystack. I’ve always had an affinity for hardboiled fiction, a genre of writing I found very appealing and engrossing because it engages with violence, eroticism and human despair (often told in, it would seem, wonderfully garish Technicolor). It would be folly to say that there was "something of the night" about heavyweights such as Derek Raymond, Raymond Chandler, et al.

Their vivid characters are people you may never want to meet but are captivating nonetheless. The worlds they move through are places where bodies lie rotting at the bottom of rivers. Places of cut-throat razors on skin, dead-eyed women walking cobbled streets in petrol blue shadows, cynical moonlight and the unrelenting amorous, often violent advances of Everyman. Bitter worlds of restless wantonness, fragile impulse and shattered ideals.

And yet Hardboiled and noir fiction no longer adhere to a strict blueprint, and in recent years we’ve seen a cross-pollination of genre-splicing and left-field concepts overlap, to terrifying, transgressive effect. Isn’t it about time we embraced the cross-genre flexibility that now exists in literature. Davey Davis Kafkaesque X (Cipher Press) is a radical new entry in the canon of subversive crime fiction.

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A torrid, unapologetically violent story of rising fascism, sex, ownership, relinguishing control and a bureaucracy cleaning house of undesirables in AmeriKKKA. X is a novel possessed of with and daring, with Chanderleresque plotting, shades of Dennis Cooper at his most insidiously human, the psychosexual tenacity of Pat Califa and Christa Faust’s kink and fast-paced

In this interview we talk noir writing, real world elements in crime writing, family and X’s elusive, almost mythical central figure….

When did you first realise that crime writing/harboiled was for you?

I never had an interest until I got into the Golden Age of Hollywood a few years ago. Discovering the roots of some of my favorite, more contemporary neo-noir and erotic thrillers—like American Gigolo or Basic Instinct—in classic film noir led to their roots in pulpy, campy, horny novels written by authors like James M. Cain or Vera Caspary. It was such a pleasure to find stylish, intelligent literature smuggled into a genre that’s often seen as one-dimensional, outdated, and corny. These artists of the past, I learned, weren’t stuffy or staid or even straight—they were heavily censored, as we are today. How were they creative and subversive under these conditions? The hardboiled noir, with its seediness and criminality, is an excellent framework with which to explore that, and what’s more, it’s deeply entrenched in queer literary traditions.

What do you dislike about the genre of crime/noir writing?

I don’t know that I dislike anything in particular, though I’m not really interested in police procedurals or Christie-style whodunits. With the former, I tend not to empathize with cops. With the latter, I’m just not smart enough to crack the case. I’m more interested in the sensibility than the jigsaw, though I wish this wasn’t so!

What are your thoughts on the genre, are trans/non-binary/genderqueer crime writers given as much attention as cisgender male, or female ones?

I can’t say that I’m an authority on the genre, so I don’t know that my thoughts are worth much here. I will say that “attention” or, put another way, “representation” isn’t particularly interesting to me, though of course it affects me, too. Straight cis people are granted more humanity than the rest of us are. Same goes for white people, people of certain class backgrounds, etc. This is true across the board. Now what?

“But literally every single evil governmental machination to be found in X already exists in the world, in this wretched country. As for a faceless bureaucracy that governs and disciplines by both arbitrary fiat and corrupt incompetence, well… I’m an American transsexual. That is my life.”

Tonally, X is Kafkaesque, the near-future setting is Chandler-esque, the plot structure/wrtiing style is not unlike Hard Case Crime’s back catalog, and the rest is all Pat Califa kink. Or am I barking up the wrong tree?

I think you’re right. Perhaps more subtle are the lesser-known queer and trans authors who share in these traditions without the glory of a Chandler or a Kafka (although I don’t think the latter will ever beat the charges of being some kind of trans, actually). Fag, dyke, and trans artists of a variety of profiles were heavily influential to me, people like Sarah Schulman, Chip Delany, Red Jordan Arobateau, John Rechy, Patricia Highsmith, Dennis Cooper, David Wojnarowicz, Manuel Puig, and Jane DeLynn. I like straight writers too. Graham Greene, Gayl Jones, Edith Wharton, John Berger…hetero stylist GOATs.

Do you consider X a slice of autofiction?

Absolutely not. I wonder why you asked me that question. I think if interviewers would like to know about my personal proclivities (Have I been waterboarded? Do I want to hold a knife to my girlfriend’s throat?) they should be straightforward. Though I almost certainly won’t be.

There are lots of (prescient?) real-world elements in X: forced mass migration, austerity measures, fascist paramilitaries. Pen-pushing bureaucracrats are the primary villains in X and remain faceless, for the most part, why?

I understand why people call my book “prescient” and “dystopian,” and I suppose they’re not all wrong in that. But literally every single evil governmental machination to be found in X already exists in the world, in this wretched country. As for a faceless bureaucracy that governs and disciplines by both arbitrary fiat and corrupt incompetence, well… I’m an American transsexual. That is my life.

Was it deliberate, keeping the elusive X a macguffin for most of the story? And Why?

I like this question. I don’t necessarily disagree with your thesis; X, as a character, is unknowable. As you say, she may not even qualify as a character. But I wonder if we would refer to a movie monster or a femme fatale as a MacGuffin. That’s how I think of her: as a hybrid of alien monstrosity and hard-femme beauty. The ultimate fantasy, in that she can never really exist. Is that a MacGuffin? I think there’s a little more to it with her.

What informed X, despite the obvious?

I would love to know what is obvious! X, as I’ve said elsewhere, is both a love letter to sadists and a meditation on domestic violence in the nuclear family and among dykes, where “family” and “lover” blend and blur. Incidentally, I wish more people asked me about that. I think of this novel as being in conversation with books like Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House. Somebody put us in a room together…

Any last words, Davey….?

Thank you for your questions :)

Interview by Alan Kelly | Photography by Jahtiek Long