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INTRODUCTION

by Tony Reveaux

“In the city, time becomes visible.” …Lewis Mumford

Time and the motion picture are rivers. Too swiftly they funnel us along until the movie says “The End” and our final credits scroll to the bottom of the screen. In Dick Lupoff’s fiction, past and present are twisted currents swirling with paradox and contradiction. Fate plays the part of a projectionist who shuffles the reels and inserts outtakes as trailers for phantom features. Are you seeing stars, or are they stand-ins and stunt doubles? Like a motion picture, each novel becomes a transitory imitation of life, propelled by its pursuits of some terminal logic. In The Sepia Siren Killer, lost and found strips of film, vignettes of memory and acts of will flicker and flow in a montage of alternate realities.

Lupoff is no stranger to cinema. He has had hands-on experience moving images around as a writer-director of technical films for IBM in Poughkeepsie, New York in the late sixties, working with projects that included the capture on film of holographic virtual visions. Dick has walked the Hollywood walk as a script doctor for 20th and has served creative time at Paramount.

In 1989 his story “12:01 PM,” that was written in 1973 for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, was produced by writer-director Jonathan Heap, starring Kurtwood Smith. The thirty-minute drama can still be caught on Showtime-TV and has experienced limited theatrical release, and garnered an Oscar nomination in 1990. New Line Cinema backed a feature-length version opening as 12:01. Directed by Jack Sholder and produced by Chanticleer, the cast included Martin Landau, Helen Slater and Jonathan Silverman.

If the intricate plots of his Killer mysteries expose the intertwining of doppelganger identities and copycat modi operandi, one reason may be because of Lupoff’s own experience in the “real” life of Tinsel Town, where illusion is a commodity. In the last decade, there has probably been a greater quantity of screenplays written and submitted by more people—even besides waiters and cab drivers—than than ever before. Despite the richness of all of that bounty to choose from, some Hollywood “creative” types continue to rely upon remakes, sequels, adaptations and the infinite Roman numeralizations of other properties in order to grasp at the grail of “bankability.” This persistence of revision has even been known to extend to the “unconscious and coincidental” mimesis of another film—without the inconvenience of attribution.

To his amazement and dismay, Lupoff confronted that very same creationist phenomenon when he saw Groundhog Day unreel on the big screen, well turned out by Bill Murray’s performance. It was certainly flattering to see so much of his “12:01” remain intact, from the Jorge Luis Borges-worldview of time itself repetitively looping, day by day, trapping the protagonist in a xeroxism of immortality, and to many of the framing details of the story. But, studio politics being what they are in the Greater Los Angeles Basin, Goliath here shall always remain unDavided.

The alternate realities that seize, shanghai and betray the characters in his Killer novels are no less abrupt and conceptually unsettling. Events, roles and identities are often only as far apart as the thickness of a mask. It is an unquiet past that, like a riptide under the ripples, catches at insurance agent Hobart Lindsey to drag him into the deeper waters of criminal investigation. The pasts—and there are often more than one—can come alive and walk again to speak, to reveal, and to kill.

Bart’s home life is dominated by an anxious mother who is helplessly adrift in her own multiplex theater of the mind, where she is able to keep her dial frozen at circa 1953 in a cocoon of old movies, vintage magazines, and the perfect denial of her projectionist fantasies. His own sense of the present is continually blurred and eroded by his devoted support of her. But, in the course of the four novels, she slowly but surely finds her own way from a bright and misty then to an in-your-face now, just as Bart discovers his own independence, professionalism and sexuality.

The evolution of Lupoff’s Hobart Lindsey/Marvia Plum mysteries is also a richly rendered guided tour through American popular culture. Each novel focuses on the shibboleths and ceremonies of a different tribe of collectors. The Comic Book Killer (1988) brings us in between the span of sensibilities of the juvenile-fueled underground and the investment-driven elite who fight over paper heroes. The Classic Car Killer (1992) revolves around not only the romance of the classic auto, but of the cultivation and preservation of an Art Deco decade whose style and panache can help its devotees to keep the awful nineties at bay. The Bessie Blue Killer (1994) takes us to a revisitation of vintage World War II warplanes and the Tuskegee Airmen, the African American fighter pilots who flew them. The Sepia Siren Killer (1994) cuts through the surface of the classic silver screen to reveal illusions that are not what they may seem, and that some of them may be black.

Each community of collectors is a microcosm of society. In their cabalistic zeal and devotion to their collectibles, they describe a minority vertical interest with all of the hermeticism, unique jargon and value set that puts them often at odds with a society that is systematically destroying or scattering the old comic books, used cars, sheet music, motel ashtrays and silent films that they revere. But at the same time, these groups’ operational survival is dependent upon the industrial-retail infrastructure that manufactured the artifacts, and all the resources and tools of publishing, communication, education, regulation, documentation, preservation and exhibition to support and further their hobbies.

Another, deeper meridian of understand is drawn and developed through this series. American Popular Culture is as much a quotient of black life as it is of the white majority. They contradict and complement each other even as they mimic and deny. The developing relationship between Bart and Marvia that moves from professional rivalry to life partnership is driven along the jagged border between their two lifestyles that, even in ultra-liberal Berkeley, are worlds apart.

In this, Lupoff’s fourth Killer novel, we are introduced to the parallel universe of an era of motion pictures—from the twenties to the forties—produced by blacks that were destined for black audiences. Like “race” records and the Negro baseball leagues, they were carbon copies of the white institutions and production and distribution structures, with the emphasis on the “carbon.” Black stars were described and understood in terms of their black/white analogs: “A Chocolate Cowboy;” “The Bronze Buckaroo;” “The Bronze Venus;” and some featuring “high-yallers and sugar-cured browns!” But the jive went both ways. Oscar Micheaux’s Ten Minutes to Live (1932) featured nightclub acts including black comedians—in blackface.

In Jean Cocteau’s surrealist film Sang d’un Poet (Blood of a Poet) (1930) the truth-seeking artist dives through a mirror (a camera and set both tilted and the mirror frame filled with water) to emerge in another parallel dimension of both mystery and understanding. Bart Lindsey’s “whitebread” persona, safely wrapped within his white collar job and suburban shell, is hurtled into a realm just as alien to him as Cocteau’s poet in his Zone, as he finds himself on the quicksilver side of the cultural mirror of biracial America. In the cultural and sexual frisson he encounters with Marvia, Bart’s whitebread is toast, and he achieves a greater humanity in meeting the challenge.