NIGHT TRAIN TO SUGAR HILL - ICEBERG SLIM

Now this is bittersweet. I’ve finally completed the Iceberg Slim oeuvre. 10 excellent books; one quite famous, Pimp, while the rest linger in a sort of forgotten purgatory. Which is a huge shame. While other genre writers and/or crime writers have seen this stock rise and are now considered literary or high art or worth studying (like PKD in sci-fi, or someone like Ellory or Leonard in crime) Slim hasn’t really gotten this treatment. Rest assured though, he is as worthy of a reappraisal and rediscovery and a Library of Congress addition of his work as anyone. His crime stories are insanely original, fun to read even when they’re new moon dark, propulsive in the style of the best genre writing and possess that rare quality where they occasionally “open up” and illuminate larger themes about the Black experience in Amerika or the nature of Capitalism. Which is not to say they’re perfect, they are parts in all the books where the dialogue is a bit pat or stilted and there are often flat characters, but no more so than the aforementioned PKD. It’s just so sad he got pigeon-holed the way he did as the writer of a book about pimping that most people haven’t read and assume is an endorsement of the profession. But all that aside, on to this novel. Like Doom Fox, the other “final” Slim novel that was written towards the end of his life and wasn’t published until after his death, Night Train, is about Los Angeles, South Central specifically, and the crack trade. Slim lived out the last of his years in the city of angels, he saw firsthand the devastation of the CIA sponsored crack epidemic and died during the 92 riots. All of his work is more political than he’s given credit for but the last few novels are particularly so. Which is not to say that this book is polemic or dry, it’s really a fun, grimey crime story. It’s about a clear Slim stand-in character who’s trying to mentor a younger man who’s got an evil YT wife. She’s also involved with a gang-connected cocaine dealer who is himself connected with a cartel member who supplies the cocaine. As you can imagine, the situation gets out of control as various characters try to cheat and fuck-over one another. It’s bleak, almost everyone is dead by the end, the cycle of vengeance is a big theme. There are multiple deaths from smoking cyanide-laced crack, which had me wondering if this is possible. There is a voodoo subplot this not handled with the most sensitivity (the room where the practitioner calls upon the loas is full of “skrunken heads”) but it another entry into the category of Slim books that feature the supernatural or occult, a mode of his I really like and wish he’d explored further. You get the sense that he could have written 50 of these things, if his publishers hadn’t been stealing his money and he could have spent the last few decades of his life cranking out these pulpy genre novels we would have gotten a handful of total gems. I’m sad there’s no more Slim for me to read, but, on the plus side, I now have a complete list (perhaps the only one of its kind) of the Iceberg Slim street names. Check the “words” section of this webpage for the whole list.