Love is a racket by john ridley

Reviewed by Richard Cross

"People say love is a beautiful thing. Maybe. I sure as hell wouldn’t know… As far as I can see, love hurts, love hates, love kills. Passion’s racked up more of a body count than anger ever will."

At first glance, John Ridley is an unlikely writer of noir fiction; unsuccessful as a stand-up comedian, he turned his talents toward writing comedy for others, and made his mark writing for American TV before branching out into film. He wrote the screenplay for Undercover Brother, a hip blaxploitation spoof, and provided the original story for George Clooney starrer Three Kings. All the more remarkable, then, that he has crafted such a haunting, effective noir novel as Love is a Racket.

And yet Ridley’s experience of the stand-up circuit, and the cynical brand of humour so often displayed by its practitioners, laces this leisurely plotted story with a dark humour that is ideally suited to the noir genre.

Set in present-day Hollywood, the storyline is primarily concerned with the attempts of Jeffty Kittridge, a small-time grifter and semi-alcoholic, to pay off his gambling debts to Dumas, an effete but ruthless loan-shark. Jeffty’s efforts range from shaking down three frat boys in Las Vegas in order to stake his one-time partner in a high-stakes poker game that goes disastrously wrong, to scamming a reclusive movie mogul into believing his dead love has been resurrected in the divine form of Mona. Plucked from the streets and transformed into the image of movie star Pier Angeli, Mona displays a healthy cynicism that soon has Jeffty falling for her, against his will and better judgement.

All the trademarks of the noir genre are present, and at first they give rise to misgivings that this will be another by-the-numbers homage to the likes of Chandler and Hammett. But Ridley merely flirts with genre staples before surpassing their limitations and treating the reader to a depth of character rarely found in modern genre fiction. This story doesn’t race in the manner of Chandler and Hammett – it ambles, takes its time, and draws you inexorably into the world of Jeffty Kittridge.

In Kittridge, Ridley has created a lowlife character the reader feels compelled to root for, even though he does nothing to deserve our support. Perhaps it is because he is the embodiment of another genre staple: the doomed anti-hero, struggling against seemingly inevitable defeat – or perhaps it is simply because, like the rest of us at some time or another, Jeffty is mercilessly teased by the symbols of wealth and status he so desperately desires: in the supermarket he’s flashed by the kind of Californian blonde he knows he will never have; the chauffeur driven Mercedes in which he briefly rides belongs to the loan-shark to whom he is heavily in debt; even Mona – the story’s Eliza to Jeffty’s unlikely Higgins – becomes cruelly unattainable once she has undergone her transformation.

Other books by Ridley that are worth catching: Stray Dogs (on which the movie U-Turn was based), Everybody Smokes in Hell, and A Conversation with the Mann

Copyright© 2003 Richard Cross

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By day, RICHARD CROSS, disguised as a mild-mannered desk jockey, lives and works in a small market town near Cambridge, England. At night he roams Noir’s jaded streets, looking for a woman like Lauren Braeder – and a damn agent.
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Read an extract from Eighty Thousand Eyes by Richard Cross