Into the Badlands - John Williams

In the summer of '89 John Williams donned a baseball cap and took off for the States to search out the mythical America of the crime writers, the nation's most astute chroniclers - to find James Ellroy's LA, Elmore Leonard's sleazy South Beach of Miami, Sara Paretsky's Chicago. Meeting, among others, George V Higgins in Boston and Leonard in Detroit, partying with James Crumley in Montana and undertaking an unnerving tour of New York's underbelly with Andrew Vachss, Williams discovers an urban America at least as disturbing and mesmeric as the popular fiction of some of his interviewees and gives us an unforgettable, often hilarious commentary on his own predicament as a penniless traveller living in a string of roachy motels. "An acute journey, alive with the stark and the surreal" GQ "Part travelogue, part interviews, stuffed with anecdotes, critical asides and astute observations, 'Into the Badlands' brings personality and pleasure into the stuffy and sombre world of literary commentary . a refreshingly vital approach" CITY LIMITS "I learned a few things. There is vital sociological and moral comment here too" PATRICIA HIGHSMITH "An interesting, engaging literary travelogue" INDEPENDENT "A vital mixture of literary criticism, personality profiles and imaginary geography" NEW STATESMAN AND SOCIETY.