Rhinestone Cowboy Gardening:
Vern Smith's Awesome New Novel, The Green Ghetto
from Run Amok Books
Review by Adam Van Winkle
Detroit ain't the only thing that'll make you think about Elmore Leonard as you read this force of nature of a novel. The Green Ghetto by Vern Smith slams two Leonard genres together, the western and the hardboiled urban crime thriller, and comes up with something wholly original. And damned good.
If the inner-city is so ignored, isolated, and cut-off, it's just another form of the rural. Where cowboys with enterprising spirits reign and rule the prairie. Enter Mitchell Hosowich, a handle-bar mustache sporting, Tops rolling, snap-button wearing city cowboy. In the abandoned and overgrown ghetto of Detroit, Mitchell has created his own agri-empire, masking his pot plants with some rows of corn and tomatoes. Mitchell muses "if there'd been a good thing about the great American rust-out, it was that this part of Detroit had gone rural again, wild." So prairie-like is Detroit's abandoned ghetto that coyotes and snakes swarm the weeds. It is even rumored, a white tail deer or two is loose in the city. Like any old cowboy in a western saga, Mitchell too sees the short window of his prairie, and how it closes: "Slowly it was said, the people were coming back, and Mitchell, he couldn't reckon how much longer he'd be allowed to go on like this." Of course, it isn't just the population boom that threatens his cowboy ways. His empire is illegal. He can go legit, grow legal weed, but that takes bureaucrats and forms, something no cowboy ever has time for. And, then of course, there's the law and other outlaws to be wary of.
(If that's not enough for you, in the novel's opening pages characters literally enter a burlesque through swinging doors, saloon style, in "shitkickers.")
So, in the novel, Detroit's remnants are a new frontier, a modern western landscape. One where men outnumber women, and land and crop are under fire. Of course the law, the DEA, is involved, and lots of folks come up dead.
Most surprising about the novel is not the western characters or setting or plot, all of which tickle my grit lit fancy plenty, but the relevancy of this Leonard-like story to our present culture. Somewhere in this caper, this Robert Rodriguez ride of a book, there's a lament for the further bureaucratizing of the bureaucracy in a city in a post 9/11 world. There's also clearly a commentary on the border town. Did you know Windsor is south of Detroit? Do you know what borders mean? What they actually divide, or don't. Pressing concerns in our times. Add in the legalization debate, and this cowboy noir becomes perhaps the most relevant new novel I've read in a while.
My personal favorite part of the book is the music. The likes of Stevie Ray Vaughn and Neil Young bookend the novel's soundtrack. Between them are sermons on the punk origins in Johnny Cash and Hank Williams. I suspect here the author is moralizing on his own style and themes. Urban punk and country Cash ain't all that different. In The Green Ghetto we find an agricultural empire inside the city, and contemplations of farm land and subsidy. This city ain't that different than the country.
It's enough to make you think the story of the rise and fall of urban Detroit and the rise and fall of the American prairie farm were linked in some way, that the same mythos is at work in the cycle of both. In other words, Vern Smith does what great writers do. He takes his own narrative, masterfully woven and orchestrated, and makes it matter beyond its own story.
This is a highly recommended new read.
Vern Smith's new novel, The Green Ghetto, was published by Run Amok Books in February 2019. His fiction has appeared in Concrete Forest: The New Fiction of Urban Canada (McClelland & Stewart), as well as the Insomniac Press anthologies, Iced, Hard Boiled Love, and Revenge. His Novelette, The Gimmick, was a finalist for Canada’s highest crime-writing honor, the Arthur Ellis Award. A veteran of four newspapers and three magazines, Smith’s non-fiction has appeared in The Detroit Free Press, The Ottawa Citizen, The Vancouver Sun, Eye, Broken Pencil, and Quill & Quire, among other publications. He most recently managed CJAM 99.1 FM, where he founded the twenty-four-hour radio marathon Joe Strummer Day to Confront Poverty in Windsor-Detroit. He now lives on the edge of Chicago where urban Illinois meets the prairie.
Vern Smith's Awesome New Novel, The Green Ghetto
from Run Amok Books
Review by Adam Van Winkle
Detroit ain't the only thing that'll make you think about Elmore Leonard as you read this force of nature of a novel. The Green Ghetto by Vern Smith slams two Leonard genres together, the western and the hardboiled urban crime thriller, and comes up with something wholly original. And damned good.
If the inner-city is so ignored, isolated, and cut-off, it's just another form of the rural. Where cowboys with enterprising spirits reign and rule the prairie. Enter Mitchell Hosowich, a handle-bar mustache sporting, Tops rolling, snap-button wearing city cowboy. In the abandoned and overgrown ghetto of Detroit, Mitchell has created his own agri-empire, masking his pot plants with some rows of corn and tomatoes. Mitchell muses "if there'd been a good thing about the great American rust-out, it was that this part of Detroit had gone rural again, wild." So prairie-like is Detroit's abandoned ghetto that coyotes and snakes swarm the weeds. It is even rumored, a white tail deer or two is loose in the city. Like any old cowboy in a western saga, Mitchell too sees the short window of his prairie, and how it closes: "Slowly it was said, the people were coming back, and Mitchell, he couldn't reckon how much longer he'd be allowed to go on like this." Of course, it isn't just the population boom that threatens his cowboy ways. His empire is illegal. He can go legit, grow legal weed, but that takes bureaucrats and forms, something no cowboy ever has time for. And, then of course, there's the law and other outlaws to be wary of.
(If that's not enough for you, in the novel's opening pages characters literally enter a burlesque through swinging doors, saloon style, in "shitkickers.")
So, in the novel, Detroit's remnants are a new frontier, a modern western landscape. One where men outnumber women, and land and crop are under fire. Of course the law, the DEA, is involved, and lots of folks come up dead.
Most surprising about the novel is not the western characters or setting or plot, all of which tickle my grit lit fancy plenty, but the relevancy of this Leonard-like story to our present culture. Somewhere in this caper, this Robert Rodriguez ride of a book, there's a lament for the further bureaucratizing of the bureaucracy in a city in a post 9/11 world. There's also clearly a commentary on the border town. Did you know Windsor is south of Detroit? Do you know what borders mean? What they actually divide, or don't. Pressing concerns in our times. Add in the legalization debate, and this cowboy noir becomes perhaps the most relevant new novel I've read in a while.
My personal favorite part of the book is the music. The likes of Stevie Ray Vaughn and Neil Young bookend the novel's soundtrack. Between them are sermons on the punk origins in Johnny Cash and Hank Williams. I suspect here the author is moralizing on his own style and themes. Urban punk and country Cash ain't all that different. In The Green Ghetto we find an agricultural empire inside the city, and contemplations of farm land and subsidy. This city ain't that different than the country.
It's enough to make you think the story of the rise and fall of urban Detroit and the rise and fall of the American prairie farm were linked in some way, that the same mythos is at work in the cycle of both. In other words, Vern Smith does what great writers do. He takes his own narrative, masterfully woven and orchestrated, and makes it matter beyond its own story.
This is a highly recommended new read.
Vern Smith's new novel, The Green Ghetto, was published by Run Amok Books in February 2019. His fiction has appeared in Concrete Forest: The New Fiction of Urban Canada (McClelland & Stewart), as well as the Insomniac Press anthologies, Iced, Hard Boiled Love, and Revenge. His Novelette, The Gimmick, was a finalist for Canada’s highest crime-writing honor, the Arthur Ellis Award. A veteran of four newspapers and three magazines, Smith’s non-fiction has appeared in The Detroit Free Press, The Ottawa Citizen, The Vancouver Sun, Eye, Broken Pencil, and Quill & Quire, among other publications. He most recently managed CJAM 99.1 FM, where he founded the twenty-four-hour radio marathon Joe Strummer Day to Confront Poverty in Windsor-Detroit. He now lives on the edge of Chicago where urban Illinois meets the prairie.