LOS ANGELES - Tom Epperson, a longtime Hollywood screenwriter and even more longtime aspiring novelist, is a gentle man who's just published a brutal book. Epperson, who has a shy Arkansas twang and a slight hangdog manner, was talking on a recent afternoon about his 1930s-esque noir, "The Kind One," at Musso & Frank's in Hollywood, a place he loves for its literary ghosts.
"I know the amnesia thing is standard in noir, it's a little familiar," Epperson, 56, said of the book's protagonist, who has no idea who he is. "But it's so much fun. There's a reason why it's used so often, because it's an investigation into the nature of your own identity. In a sense we're all doing that. I don't believe people who say they understand existence: I think it's a mystery we're all trying to figure out."
It's a comment you wouldn't expect from the author of "The Kind One," whose narrator, Danny, has a good heart but no evident inner life or philosophical yearning. He's interested in surviving from day to day, and that's not always easy.
Danny works for a sadistic gangster who's part Bugsy Siegel, part Mickey Cohen and part Lucky Luciano. This gang leader's actions - including an opening scene that is horrible without being at all graphic - were inspired by several contemporary Mexican gangsters.
LA writers Robert Crais and Carolyn See have endorsed the book. Part of what makes it appealing is the period setting, which comes from the author's deeply rooted love of the '30s. The decade has special resonance for an LA crime novel: Though the book doesn't directly echo the early work of Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain - and the author avoided revisiting the former because he feared Philip Marlowe's voice would overwhelm his own - noir casts its grim shadow. Epperson read Carey McWilliams's "Southern California: An Island on the Land," and books about bootlegging and crime, and watched every period film he could get his hands on.
"I spent two years on the book, and the first seven months was just research," said Epperson, who co-wrote the screenplay for 1992's "One False Move" with longtime friend Billy Bob Thornton.
As a small-town boy at the University of Arkansas, Epperson fell for Vladimir Nabokov's "Lolita" and later fell into "a daze" over the rest of the Russian-born mandarin's work. He also responded - on the other side of the spectrum of style - to "the poetry of simplicity" in Ernest Hemingway.
After college, he studied English, also in Arkansas, and later bumped into a neighbor, a buck-toothed kid he'd long seen as a younger brother. "When I got back from grad school, Billy had grown up."
The old friends reconnected and realized they were united by their ambitions - Thornton's dream to become an Elvis-like singer, Epperson's drive to make himself a famous Nabokov-like writer. They just needed to get out of Arkansas first.
So the two said goodbye to their girlfriends and mothers and moved to New York. They lasted all of 10 hours - and then returned home.
Epperson worked as a teacher and freelance journalist back in Arkansas, reading Proust, Milton, and Tolstoy and writing pages of stories he never published. But as he hit 30, his wanderlust - and sense of "a great destiny" - reasserted itself.
Epperson had been warned about the dangers of a "serious" novelist plunging into screenplays, and had read F. Scott Fitzgerald's Pat Hobby stories, but losing one's soul in Hollywood sounded glamorous. Thornton, who had just broken up with his first wife, was still playing music and, on Epperson's suggestion, considered acting. The two headed west.
"We wrote a lot of screenplays together," Thornton said. "Most of them never got made." Thornton brought a feel for lowlifes and drifters. "And Tom made up for my laziness and lack of discipline and lack of education about writing," he said.
"The nightmare ended in 1992," Epperson recalled. That year, a film they had co-written, and featuring Thornton as a villain, was saved from moving straight to video by the championing of critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert. "One False Move," a noirish thriller, ended up on year-end best lists, and the two Arkansas homeboys were soon taking meetings.
Though he makes a comfortable living rewriting scripts and has seen some of his projects shot, Epperson has not had a critical hit since "One False Move."
He could bring his two careers together if "The Kind One" becomes a film, which Epperson is hoping for. There is Hollywood interest.
Epperson has already finished another book - "a contemporary comic novel set in LA." For now, it's time to celebrate.
"Thank God I didn't know when I was 18 it would take me 38 years to get a novel published," he said. "It would have been very daunting."
