Reading noir way past dark: A review of Barbara DeMarco-Barrett’s Pool Fishing
By NANCY CARPENTER
Laguna residents may recognize the name of author Barbara DeMarco-Barrett from her appearances reading at The Festival of the Arts from her work in Art Inscribed, Third Street Writers ekphrastic collection. In addition, over the years, her private writing workshop had numerous readings at Laguna Beach Books. In a different vein (and a darker note), she recently launched her new short story collection Pool Fishing, which is a study in the art of noir.
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Photo by Nancy Carpenter
Barbara DeMarco-Barrett’s latest book “Pool Fishing”
“In noir, the main characters want better things for themselves, and feel they deserve them. But try as they might, they continue to make wrong choices and things go from bad to worse.”
Barbara DeMarco-Barrett can explain the genre of noir, because she has been writing as well as editing noir for years. Her most recent book – Pool Fishing – pulls together 15 short stories dripping with…well, not all of them dripping with that. But as the genre’s name suggests, they are all dark.
Noir can be viewed as a stand-in for life itself when reducing life is a series of choices, forks in roads and coins being flipped. Noir options are no more mysterious or capricious than most genres with characters who mostly stay within societal boundaries.
Noir protagonists are faced with a tangled web of previous bad decisions and the quest to resolve them. Readers of noir might recognize their challenges. “Oh, yeh, I did those things.” But the stakes are higher with key elements such as sex, greed, even murder, to complicate resolution.
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Courtesy of Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Spending time with readers at a noir event
Characters
Writing noir gives DeMarco-Barrett the go-ahead to safely explore characters living on the edge. She makes this clear: She doesn’t want to be her characters. She insists, “These people that show up in my stories fascinate me, and I do have empathy for them.” She cultivates their experiences at arm’s length and without all the fuss of living through their outcomes.
She admits she borrows from her own youthful experiences, though not always personally. She dabbled in drugs, like many of her friends from the ‘70s. None of that was without risk. Some survived; others did not. Unlike many, she was never arrested or jailed. She draws from those days and their stories. Her characters are often composites of friends.
Not as easy to dodge the perils of her home life. Her father was a bigamist. Her parents divorced only to later remarry. Regardless, marriage didn’t prevent him from participating in serial affairs. He eventually died from emphysema, which seems a mere footnote. Noir makes it clear – we all are at risk of dying. Conveniently or otherwise.
A writer’s adage: In a well-constructed story we need to like, or failing that, relate to our characters. DeMarco-Barrett contends compassion is what is required. Her characters are not one dimensional. They do good deeds. Perform acts of kindness. Volunteer. All the familiar stuff that makes us who we are.
Exploring a New Genre
Orange County Noir (Akashic, 2010) was her first exposure as a writer to the genre. Gary Phillips, writer and editor, invited her to contribute based on her many other writing successes including Pen on Fire, an acclaimed self-help reference book for aspiring writers. Slipping into noir isn’t like slipping into a pool. “I was familiar with noir movies and the novels of James M. Cain, but I was green about the form,” she admits. She spent that summer researching and writing.
And writing.
And writing as her characters took on their own lives. And then…something more than smoking and drinking and swearing without apology happened. They got into that gray area of misdeeds that escalated and pushed them into roles and actions that cross the line. Actions that cannot be excused with an apology and “I’ll do better next time.”
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In Real Estate, It’s All About Location, Location, Location
As the name of this first anthology implies, an Orange County setting was required. Often the settings in any genre matter as much as characters and plot. Mean towns, sophisticated cities, rooms in motels versus rooms in hospitals, bars, even streets and alleyways and endless highways can be so integral to the story they come off as another character. A sun-drenched day in beautiful Palm Springs can provide a stark contrast to a drama unfolding in a mid-century home backing up to the San Jacinto Mountains. A striptease night club decorated in innocent pink underscores a dancer whose aspirations were to perform in legitimate theater until that was taken away.
The Plot
Where do story ideas come from? What is the seedling that takes root and turns into a thorny bush? (At least in noir, it’s pretty thorny.)
Indeed DeMarco-Barrett’s teen years answers some of that, but her stories in Pool Fishing embrace very adult themes. She does not hesitate. “Real life seeds my writing, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.” A great writer is a great observer and she’s always observing. That some of what she sees is grounded in shaky morals or morphs into criminal activity, well so be it. Let the fun begin.
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Photo by Nancy Carpenter
“Pool Fishing” waiting on my nightstand
What’s on My Nightstand
I read Pool Fishing at night propped up in bed over a period of four days, and can report back, not one nightmare. This isn’t horror. Elements of suspense – yes, along with some very fine writing.
All the stories take place in California. Order matters to a writer. “I put the stories in geographical order. I wanted to end with the title story, so I started with desert stories, went north to San Francisco, then came south to Orange County.”
By the time I finished all 15 of them I felt like I’d been on a spontaneous road trip.
The first short story is titled “The Water Holds You Still,” The water is in Greta’s mother’s pool in Palm Springs, a pool kept pristine clean with the help of a very handsome pool man whom Greta meets when she comes to visit. But alas, there’s also a hapless brother who stops by when he wants something. Soon enough the inevitable is apparent, but the author puts page-turning spins on it.
And then there is “Rowboat” and Nina expertly navigating what is little more than a floating piece of wood christened Jailbird among the party boats and opulent yachts moored in Newport Beach. She has her issues. She was recently released after a year in jail for embezzling. (“Rowboat” was nominated for a Pushcart award.)
DeMarco-Barrett’s younger brother was the inspiration behind both stories. I leave it to you to fill in the blanks, bearing in mind that inspiration can cross gender lines.
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Courtesy of Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Barbara DeMarco Barrett taking a break from writing
Pool Fishing employs the classic trope – a message in a bottle, although this bottle is scooped out of a pool. Two words are written on a piece of paper: Help me. Washed up on a beach, that might make sense, the curiosity brief. But a pool and no one is around?
DeMarco-Barrett’s own experiences are not above being tampered with. Years ago, her involvement with an animal rights group and a raid in a fur store went into the writing blender. “Animals” is a fast-paced raid, this time in an animal testing lab.
In this same story she borrowed from an incident decades ago. She was walking to a baseball game with her young son Travis. (No better time to acknowledge the book’s provocative cover was created by Travis Barrett and Christian Cladio.) Baseball bat perched on her shoulder, they stumbled into an escalating argument between one kid’s father and another kid’s mother over, of all things, a nanny. Bat in hand and with little forethought, DeMarco-Barrett assumed a threatening position shouted at the man, “Back away!” He did.
In the context of a story, the protagonist swings.
In short, DeMarco-Barrett’s stories are not intentional in that she doesn’t set out to write about embezzlers or baseball bat swingers.
Some stories seem prescient. Take “Hunting Season,” a pre-COVID story. The fictional events include the collapse of the Internet. Journalists as well as equipment necessary for the creation of newspapers, newsletters and magazines are banned. The lead character collects vintage typewriters which just may be the only solution.
DeMarco-Barrett collects typewriters, at one time owning 35 of them. But the story itself causes one to pause and draw parallels with today’s world events: dictatorships, information control and monopolization of the media. As she states, “Writing dark fiction is one way to deal with the terror we feel when we watch the news. We create scenarios to purge ourselves. We also get to observe situations to see how things turn out.”
Hard for a reader not to relate to “Noise.” Every neighborhood has that person who can imagine why ordinances for no jack hammering at 7 a.m. doesn’t apply to them. That this neighbor is darn handsome doesn’t excuse him. Never mind that Coco hasn’t had a meaningful relationship in years. She and her friend plot the perfect revenge. Or maybe too perfect.
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Courtesy of Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Provocative cover by Travis Barrett and Christian Cladio
Movies also inspire, acting as elaborate writing prompts. “Sandman” is every parent’s worst nightmare – a child gone missing or otherwise taken. A horror anthology put out the challenge to write a story based on a horror film from the early Hollywood days between 1919 and 1931. She chose M. Actor Peter Lorre knows how to spin horror. In this case he played a pedophile.
Child custody can take on the same ear markings of missing children. Again, DeMarco-Barrett drew from experiences of friends, penning a story with the unlikely title “Making Peanuts at Pachanga.”
DeMarco-Barrett concludes: “Our mental filing cabinets crave order and truth, to make sense of the world’s nonsense.”
Reading can feel like voyeurism. Rubbing elbows with these people who are safely locked in a story, on a harmless page, is gratifying. Seeing someone else’s moral breakdown gives us the ability to say, “I’d never do that.” How different is it to lead the vicarious lives of the wealthy or the famous or the woman who is destined to get the man, than to lead the same kind of life of those who push the envelope?
While safely tucked in our beds.
Barbara DeMarco-Barrett’s noir fiction began with “Crazy for You” in Orange County Noir, later anthologized in “USA Noir: Best of the Akashic Noir Series, and her work has appeared widely in literary journals and magazines including “CrimeReads,” “The Los Angeles Review of Books,” “The Los Angeles Times” and “Poets & Writers.”
Her first book, “Pen on Fire: A Busy Woman’s Guide to Igniting the Writer Within,” was a “Los Angeles Times” bestseller and received the American Society of Journalists and Authors Outstanding Book Award; she was also nominated for a Pushcart Prize for her story “Rowboat.”
A former journalist, she teaches creative writing at Saddleback College’s Emeritus Institute and online at Gotham Writers Workshop, previously taught at Chapman University’s Dodge Film School, and leads private workshops and Palm Springs retreats. She is the founder of the Pen on Fire Speakers & Writers Salon, creator and host of the award-winning podcast “Writers on Writing” (which began on KUCI-FM) and a past president of Sisters in Crime, Orange County.
Pool Fishing is available at Arvida Book Co. in Old Town Tustin. Signed copies are available at Barnes & Noble in Bella Terra Mall, Huntington Beach, anywhere online and on www.penonfire.com.
