Chris D. began watching yakuza films, writing the initial drafts of GUN AND SWORD, the definitive encyclopedia of the Golden Age of Japanese gangster films, in 1990. In 1997, he traveled to Japan, doing research and collecting illustrations. With 95% of the main text completed in 2002, several publishers were interested but only if the book was cut by 300 pages. It still took another ten years for this astounding reference guide to come to final fruition in its unexpurgated form – a fount of fascinating insights and information for both the seasoned Japanese genre film fan and the curious newcomer. All types of the Japanese gangster movie made between 1955-1980 are covered: the swordfighting ninkyo sagas set in the 1890-1940 period, the modern jitsuroku ("true story") bloodbaths, the matatabi (wandering samurai gambler) pictures, plus the juvenile delinquent subgenres: sukeban (girl boss), taiyozoku ("sun tribe") and bosozoku ("violent tribe" or biker). Complete with the original 2002 foreword written by famed yakuza film director Kinji Fukasaku (The Yakuza Papers, Blackmail is My Life, Graveyard of Honor, Battle Royale), and literally hundreds of illustrations. "All movie genres deserve ardent completists as well as astute critical observers. With Chris D. the reader gets both. His informed passion matches an eagle's eye for small but critically important details and cinematic-literary-historical-industrial connections. Rich in primary, groundbreaking research, GUN AND SWORD is an invaluable reference." – Stuart Galbraith IV, author of The Emperor and The Wolf: The Lives and Films of Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune "Chris D.'s exhaustive research and dry wit gives us the sense of a dark city detective leading us through the dangerous terrain of an exotic mystery...packed with rare stills and essential, new information on the genre...it is an awesome tome in the true sense of the word." – Kier-La Janisse, author of House of Psychotic Women

GUN AND SWORD: An Encyclopedia of Japanese Gangster Films 1955-1980

Humor & Entertainment

D., Chris

Movies

Poison Fang Books

Half-sisters, schoolteacher Mona and junkie punk rocker Terri, are uneasy roommates while taking care of their sick mother, Consuela. When their boyfriends, deputy Johnny Cullen and killer Merle Chambers, clash due to labor struggles in their small town of Devil’s River, the two women are pulled inexorably into the fray. To make matters worse, jealous female sheriff, Billie Travers, decides Mona is intruding on her faltering love affair, and quiet small town life amps up into an apocalyptic nightmare of uncontrollable violence and destruction. “Imagine Thelma & Louise, Jim Thompson and punk rock folded together in a high-speed blender and you’ve got Volcano Girls. Chris D. imbues noir with a vibe that rocks hard.” – Alan K. Rode, author of Charles McGraw, Film Noir Tough Guy and Michael Curtiz, A Man for All Movies “The sound of a pick-axe, the smell of the half-drunk bourbon, the feel of the shock-absorberless truck, the sight of a head evaporating in an aerosol shower of blood – sensurround noir, by a writer who doesn’t hold back.” – Sylvie Simmons, author of the short story collection, Too Weird for Ziggy and I’m Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen

Volcano Girls

Literature & Fiction

Corrupt female sheriff’s detective, Frankie Powers, is treading water in her small desert hometown of Sweet Home, California. Burned-out and emotionally numb after losing her husband and child in a mysterious fire ten years before, her conscience is reawakened when her affair with a Bakersfield narc brings new facts to light. Frankie’s mob boss uncle, Jack Richman, has been kidnapping underage girls for his Vegas prostitution syndicate; he’s also been victimizing his own teen daughters, Frankie’s twin bad girl cousins, Valerie and Vanessa. Soon Frankie finds herself singlehandedly fighting tooth-and-nail against not only wicked uncle Jack but also his dominatrix wife, Marilyn and their degenerate hitman, Cal Nero. Can a lone she wolf survive against the bloodthirsty pack? "Chris D. has staked his claim on the modern Southwestern noir territory, a big, sun-scorched claim. Frankie Powers is a brutal anti-anti-heroine whose code of honor arrives too late with too little." – Craig Clevenger, author of Dermaphoria and The Contortionist's Handbook

Tightrope on Fire

Recovering addict and Nam vet, Milo, is resigned to his life as caretaker of St. Margaret’s cathedral in 1989 Manhattan. Guaranteed lifetime employment by Monsignor Aloysius, an old WWII comrade of his dead father, Milo’s life starts to unravel when ex-CIA friend Dave goes off the deep end. Not only is Dave the heist man whacking drug dealers in Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx, he’s also hatching a hare-brained scheme to plunder local mob boss Nunzio’s treasure trove of paintings and objets de art recovered from the Germans at the end of WWII – which is conveniently stashed in St. Margaret’s cellar. Complicating matters is ex-Viet Cong Yuen – a man with a very personal grudge against Milo and Dave – now working for the Hong Kong Triads. When he arrives in the Big Apple to do business with duplicitous underboss Carmine, just throw in hotheaded rehab priest Father Culkin, innocent single mother Marie struggling to stay straight, Nunzio’s homicidal daughter Sarah and Milo’s best friend, writer Jack, and you have a recipe guaranteed to erupt into a spiraling out-of-control urban holocaust.  "A healthy authorial sense of curiosity and generosity lends weight to No Evil Star’s intersecting lives, where Chris D. ably traces out the contours of human torment in a manner recalling American films of the 1970s."  – Grace Krilanovich, author of The Orange Eats Creeps

No Evil Star

In Chris D.’s title novella, a brilliant, alcoholic woman unable to find her place in Los Angeles’ downtown arts community, helps a Japanese-American girl escape forced prostitution, only to ignite a string of violent deaths.  Chris D. delivers more twisted love tales here, populated by desperate, lonely people searching for that intangible something in another person: a British policewoman inadvertently falls-in-love with a hang-gliding serial killer near the white cliffs of Dover;  a teen girl’s gang rape spurs a vendetta by an estranged  male friend in 1971’s Southern California Inland Empire; a high school teacher-cum-punk rock journalist is haunted by the beautiful ghost of a junkie suicide in 1977; the gory fate of a reckless drifter and a self- loathing brothel madam spurs a violent strike in a 1948 French mining town; plus two more sagas of amour fou set against private environments of emotional chaos.  “ Chris D. writes with a clarity so merciless, reality itself seems to shimmer with menace. Whatever the author survived to render these tales from the stark side informs his prose. His sentences evoke the dark truths of David  Goodis and the savage humanity of a 21st century Dostoyevsky or Zola. Already a cult icon, with DRAGON WHEEL SPLENDOR, the great  Chris D. should finally find the audience he deseves. This is a book that can kill the voices in your head – or make you love them.”                 – Jerry Stahl (author of PERMANENT MIDNIGHT, PLAINCLOTHES NAKED and PAINKILLERS)

Dragon Wheel Splendor

The year is 1987, and outlaw Ray Diamond’s mother Lorna is the queenpin of a cesspool of crime and perversion in Mystic, Georgia. When Ray is discharged from the Navy in San Diego, he absconds with a .45, planning to rob and drug deal his way east to his hometown. But when Ray arrogantly knocks over a mob-connected El Paso liquor store, he doesn’t count on the owner’s psychotic son Eli dogging his trail, and his life corkscrews deep into nightmare.                                               Back home in Mystic, Ray’s girl Connie Eustace resorts to stripping at Mama Lorna’s club to make ends meet. After witnessing a murder by the local sheriff, she goes on a drug and drink bender. Barely holding on until the long overdue Ray returns, Connie jumps from the frying pain into the fire. “It takes a sick mind to write a book as thoroughly warped as Mother's Worry. How lucky we are that Chris D has turned his pathological impulses to creative, rather than destructive, endeavors. This novel is of a piece with Chris' work in music, film, and poetry – a crazy dive into a universe populatedlargely by monsters – and is a classic update of the Gold Medal/Lion Library loser-noir tradition. Great work, man.”  – Byron Coley

Mother's Worry

A Southern Gothic Noir WesternPost-Civil War, embittered Confederate veteran and sometime bounty hunter Santo Brady drifts from town to town in the rural Deep South. He reluctantly rescues half-breed Indian prostitute Lucy Damien from a backwater whistle stop only to have the whole world fall in on his head. They embark on a freight train-hopping odyssey to New Orleans, unaware that Lucy's rich white father and psychotic brother from St. Louis are hot on their trail. Sidetracked by a band of sadistic train robbers, Lucy is kidnapped, and the wounded Santo goes on a harrowing mission to track her. Reminiscent of such classic period noirs as James M. Cain's Past All Dishonor and Cornell Woolrich's Waltz into Darkness, Chris D. delivers a tragic tall tale plunging headfirst into a wild heart of darkness. "One sinister serpent of a story, an old Republic Pictures western serial scripted by James M. Cain and reimagined by Sam Peckinpah. I loved it. Dive in and wallow in Shallow Water." -Eddie Muller, author of Dark City Dames, Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir and the novels The Distance and Shadow Boxer

Shallow Water

Genre Fiction

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