The Giveaway: The Clay Blackburn Story

Clay Blackburn—poet, book scout, and sometimes detective—cruises the mean, and sometimes not so mean, streets of Berkeley. With his accomplices, a soldier of fortune, a “defrocked” FBI agent, and a smooth and sexy con man, he lives a life of bisexual sensation with a little crime solving on the side. As such, Blackburn is a sly, witty, and more or less reliable raconteur of the last thirty something years of the Bay Area’s radical bohemia and bookselling. And in the tradition of Ian Rankin’s Edinburgh, and Jean-Claude Izzo’s Marseilles, bears uncomfortable witness to Berkeley’s descent from countercultural paradise to neoliberal inferno.

This omnibus collection collects the novels The Chandler Apartments (2002), The Incredible Double (2010), and the previously unpublished Mayakovsky's Bugatti (2025), and includes the Blackburn short story “Righteous Kill” (2021).

“Yet the more we get to know him, the more we’re persuaded Blackburn is a Pure Product of Berkeley. He’s not only queer, but a queer sort of all else he declares himself to be: a queer sort of detective, a queer sort of Communist or Anarchist, and beyond—a queer sort of gourmet, ethical thinker, cat owner, and—for certain—a queer sort of narrator.” —Jonathan Lethem, from the Introduction

Praise

“The Giveaway tetralogy is a nasty, rat-a-tat-tat twenty-first-century noir, cynical as hell, which is where most of these characters live, or try to. Nobody is happy or satisfied, adrift as they are in their squirrelly, self-contained universe, having given away the Big Chance without realizing it. Sometime detective Clay Blackburn is one of them but he’s squirming to escape, and like the fatalist crime writer David Goodis, Owen Hill is wise to the perverse pleasures derived from watching people squirm.”
—Barry Gifford, author and poet

“Subtle and evocative, the compelling mysteries contained in The Giveaway: The Clay Blackburn Story feature a gumshoe-poet’s keenly observed forays behind the fabled façade of the Bay Area. A journey of reveals only a transplanted Southern Californian like Owen Hill, wry insider and outsider, could pull off.”
—Gary Phillips, author of Ash Dark as Night

“The mystery is real, the stakes are high; some people make it through while others . . . well, let’s just say they’re compromised. Here we have the essence of noir, a sense of life lived at the edges, which is, come to think of it, a pretty good description of Clay’s world.”
—David Ulin, Los Angeles Times, on The Incredible Double

“Very well written, well paced, well timelined, and well charactered. I chuckled seeing so many of my poetic acquaintances mentioned in the text.”
—Ed Sanders, on The Incredible Double

“Is this Berkeley noir? I’d call it lustily readable. And such reading set me to thinking about tone and that to get it right is a saintly gift (which Owen Hill has) of hearing and lavishly staying on one wiggly and implausible note throughout passages of poetic lore, pretty hot sex, action (of all things!) and multimusings on ‘the life’ of book writing, book selling and humbly accepting oneself as condemned to love the many leaves we turn with aimless passion before we ourselves rattle and blow away down these raunchy beloved streets.”
—Eileen Myles, author of The Importance of Being Iceland, on The Incredible Double

About the Contributors

Owen Hill is the author of three crime novels, two books of short fiction, and many collections of poetry. He coannotated and edited The Annotated Big Sleep (Vintage Crime), and coedited Berkeley Noir (Akashic Books). He was a buyer at a secondhand bookstore for many years, and now is a union organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World. He lives in Oakland.

Jonathan Lethem is the author of numerous books including The Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn, as well as more recent best sellers, The Feral Detective and The Arrest. Several of his novels have been made into major movies, and his shorter works can often be found in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, and many other venues. One of the MacArthur “genius” grant winners, Lethem is well known and widely respected for his vivid literary style, sardonic humor, and deep understanding of American culture.

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