.The Southside Sleuth

Berkeley eccentrics animate Owen Hill's mysteries.

Clay Blackburn gets to prowl around strangers’ houses and peek into
their lives. He does this under the auspices of not just one but two
different occupations: Blackburn, the bisexual Berkeley-based
protagonist in a series of mysteries by poet/novelist Owen Hill,
is a book scout: That is, he browses yard sales, estate sales, and
other venues seeking secondhand volumes that he can sell for a profit.
But he’s also a private eye: very private, in that “I barely
qualify. I don’t have a license, don’t carry a gun,” Blackburn muses
when about to meet a prospective client at the start of Hill’s latest
book, The Incredible Double. Books are his main gig. “But
sometimes I take these jobs.”

The job driving this novel, which Hill will discuss at Moe’s
Books
(2476 Telegraph Ave., Berkeley) on Monday, June 15, starts
when a drugstore-chain magnate claims he’s been getting snail-mail
death threats with a Berkeley postmark and hires Blackburn to scope out
their source. This magnate, whose not-so-subtle-reference surname is
Wally, “looked like Ross Perot, but with hair. … Soap-opera hair,
silver and sprayed.” Sure, he’s got his own crack security detail:
“Gleaned from the Special Forces, mostly. … They captured Saddam, for
heaven’s sake,” Wally boasts. But “Berkeley isn’t Iraq,” so he wants
Blackburn, who knows this turf — because “Berkeley gives ‘behind
enemy lines’ new meaning.”

That’s the first measure of a maze along which Blackburn hurtles
with his trusty clutch of Berkeley regulars: a conspiracy theorist, an
eloquent ex-druggie, and his best pal Marvin, whom he calls “my own
personal Jiminy Cricket. … He’s an unrepentant Communist, but it’s
easier for him. He owns his house.”

Blackburn’s bisexuality is remarkably rare in fiction. “Until
recently,” Hill says, “the ‘bi’ part of the gay-bi-transgendered
coalition wasn’t there. I had an agent tell me, ‘There’s a niche for
gay, but not for this.’ But I’m optimistic. Remember, Gore Vidal once
said, ‘Everyone is bisexual.’ I like those demographics.”

Writing about book scouting is easy for Hill, who has worked at
Moe’s for many years. He regularly assesses deceased persons’ libraries
that are offered up for sale by surviving relatives.

“Most people don’t really know what their books are worth. They
think they have ‘rare’ first editions.” When they’re wrong, “I try
to let people down easy.” When he does make a buy, “sometimes I
feel like the smiling undertaker.”

On the night of his reading, he’ll share the mic with Summer
Brenner, whose novel I-5 is, like Hill’s, new from
Berkeley-based PM Press.

Although his eccentric characters are admittedly often based on real
people, he says he’s had “no complaints so far. When I use real names,
it’s out of respect — Edward Dorn, Joanne Kyger. The scenes
I’m documenting are full of these offbeat, interesting characters.
Sometimes it feels like fish in a barrel. Any given day at Moe’s I see
enough characters to make up a novel.” 7:30 p.m., free. MoesBooks.com

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