Howard Owens calls Bakersfield a noir town in his review of Lords: Part One - By N.L. Belardes

I am honored by Howard Owens' review as well as his call for Bakersfield bloggers to create the next Blackboard.

Howard, former VP of the Bakersfield Californian writes, "I guess that leaves the torch for local alternative journalism firmly in the hands of local bloggers, with Nick being the primary mover there."

Such kind words...

Now read Howard Owens review of Lords: Part One:


Book Review: Belardes' Lords 1 - By Howard Owens

Bakersfield is a noir town. It is a hard, bitter town. It is the kind of town where any crime is possible, and with enough of a good-old-boys essence that cover-ups and conspiracies are easy to believe.

There are at least 400,000 noir stories to tell in this Kern-river city, but there's really only one that has to be told: The Lords of Bakersfield.

The Lords mythology, set in a hot, isolated valley town just hours from Hollywood cesspools, defines Bakersfield almost as much as the music of Buck Owens or Merle Haggard. If N.L. Belardes hadn't given Bakersfield the noir novel it richly deserves, then who would have done it? The only way to write this book is to believe in the conspiracy, fear the conspiracy, and then write it anyway. You're only bound to make as many enemies as you are to gain readers.

Lords: Part 1 is a good book. It's not great, and I'll tell you why shortly, but it is still a book people with an interest in the darker side of Bakersfield should read.

Belardes might like to think of himself as the Bukowski of Bakersfield, but judging by Lords: Part 1, a better comparison might be another Southern California writer: Raymond Chandler. Like Chandler, Lords wallows in psychosis and shadows. Like Chandler, Belardes aims at prose lyricism. To say Belardes is no Chandler would sound like an unfair and cruel overstatement. He's no Chandler, but his descriptive passages still ring with enough poetry to keep them effective. He is never callow nor maudlin. He is at his best descriptive powers when writing about the winter fog or the dust storm of 1977. The dust storm descriptions are, from a literary perspective, the creative height of the book.

Lords is based on a series of stories by writer Bob Price and published a couple of years ago in the local paper. The alleged lords were (and maybe still are) a group of perverted, powerful local men who lust for little boys and use their positions in the community to protect each other. Belardes takes liberties with the basic story to create what he calls a fantasy novel on the topic.

The book has scenes of hallucinations and dreams that pull in local Native American legends, but mostly it reads like a straight mystery novel... (Read the full article)

This entry was posted by N.L. Belardes, on Friday, September 08, 2006. You can leave your response.