John Shannon and The Year of Five Liberations
by Nathan Walpow
I’ve known John Shannon since 1998, when I’d just sold my first mystery novel and was shmoozing the L.A. Times Festival of Books and someone introduced me. I’d taken a one-day class on Raymond Chandler at UCLA Extension, where David Ulin declared John’s Jack Liffey series was the best current L.A. crime fiction and that John was the logical successor to Chandler. I agree. You must buy and read John’s books.
A year or two later Andrea and I moved to Culver City and discovered John lived there too. (As did Jack Liffey, John’s missing-child-finding protagonist, and Joe Portugal, my dead-body-stumbling-over protagonist.) We took to calling ourselves Culver City Noir. Following John’s lead in having Gary Phillips’s Ivan Monk character in one of his books, I asked John if Jack Liffey could make an appearance in my One Last Hit, which happened to have a somewhat-missing child. He agreed. (He’s also had an ancient Philip Marlowe as a character.)
When FourStory started up, I asked John if he had anything for us. He had “What We Talk About When We Talk About What’s Gone," about San Pedro and much more. I’ve been bugging him since for more. He sent me “The Year of Five Liberations,” and we’ll be serializing it over the next couple of months. John’s one of the best writers I know, and I think it’s a sin that he’s relatively unknown while far-less-talented writers get fame, fortune, and movie adaptations. I’m proud to have him on our electronic pages.
