Underbelly Tales : Lowlifes Loom Large in Huntington Beach Author’s Literary Landscape

Earl Dean, the 40ish vacuum-cleaner salesman in Kem Nunn’s new novel, “Pomona Queen,” was getting nervous driving through the south Pomona tract, “the sort of neighborhood in which a good many of the citizens were probably wanted by someone, a collection agency, the law, an estranged mate. . . . “

So Dean, the down-on-his-luck heir to the last acre of orange trees in Pomona, was not exactly expecting his next hot prospect to be Ozzie and Harriet. But what he encounters at his final stop of the evening is enough to make even Rod Serling blanch: A menacing, bare-chested biker with a three-day beard, a “No Guts No Glory” tattoo on his forearm and a long pink scar running over his hip.

This stoned hulk with the silver front tooth is named Dan Brown and he is in a foul mood. Only hours earlier, his younger brother Buddy was knifed to death and Buddy’s naked white body is now stretched out on a bed of ice in a large red Coca-Cola freezer in the dining room.

Like the dog mess he stepped into walking up to the Browns’ shabby stucco house, Earl Dean finds himself caught up in something he can’t shake loose. And for the reader it’s the beginning of a long night cruising through Nunn’s favorite literary landscape: the dark and seamy underbelly of Southern California.

The Huntington Beach author, who grew up in Pomona in the ‘50s and ‘60s, acknowledges that he knows his share of lowlifes.

“Unhappily, I do,” said Nunn, 44, with a grin. “In fact, everything that I attribute to Dan Brown in the book I knew somebody who had done something just like that.”

Marginal characters loom large in Nunn’s literary landscape.

“Tapping the Source,” his critically acclaimed 1984 debut novel, which earned him an American Book Award nomination, was a gritty tale of violence and retribution set among the world of surfers and other outcasts in Huntington Beach.

His 1987 second novel, “Unassigned Territory,” dealt with fundamentalist religious cult members and assorted outlaws and desert rats in the Mojave Desert, prompting the Washington Post to dub him a “latter-day Flannery O’Connor appearing in the American West.”

Reviews for “Pomona Queen” (Pocket Books; $19), the author’s long-awaited third novel, have begun to trickle in.

A favorable review in the Los Angeles Times praised Nunn for doing for Pomona “what Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain and Nathanael West did for Los Angeles.” But the Washington Post checked in with an unflattering review, calling “twerpy” Earl Dean a “terminal muser” and a mostly passive hero.

“The (review) process is just starting,” Nunn said with some amusement, seated on a sofa in the living room of the tiny wood-frame rental unit-turned office in the back yard of the home he shares with wife, Kathy, and their 7-year-old daughter, Jessica.

While acknowledging that it’s nice to receive attention for a book and to be taken seriously as a writer, Nunn said that “you have to basically just keep doing what you do.”

The Nunns bought the modest, ‘50s vintage three-bedroom house a half mile from the Huntington Beach pier nine years ago with money Nunn received from “Tapping the Source.” That included the sale of the movie rights for an as-yet-unproduced film. (An independent French film company has already optioned “Pomona Queen.”)

The five-year gap between “Pomona Queen” and his last novel is the result of Nunn’s own screenwriting projects, including the unproduced screenplay for “Unassigned Territory.”

Nunn, who earned a master’s degree from the UC Irvine writing program in 1984 with the intention of teaching writing, said he instead “opted for writing screenplays as a way of sort of bankrolling my novel habit.”

Although his three screenwriting projects have helped pay bills, Nunn said he does not find screenwriting particularly satisfying and it also takes time away from his first love: writing novels. He believes his contract with Pocket Books for a new novel, however, “will make it possible for me to concentrate more on just the book.”

The author, who borrowed the title of his new novel from an old orange crate label, said “Pomona Queen” grew out of the same “impulse” that prompted him to begin writing short stories in the mid ‘70s: “to write about the area I grew up in.”

For Nunn, who once sold vacuum cleaners and whose great grandfather, like Earl Dean’s, was a pioneer Pomona citrus grower who died at the peak of his success, tapping his own experiences for his writing “is a given.”

So is writing about characters who live on the fringes of society or who are, as Nunn says, “someplace outside the American dream.”

“I think most of the time we live fairly insulated lives,” he said. “I grew up in a tract home in Pomona in the ‘50s--a very insulated age--and there was always something intriguing to me about people who, by whatever set of circumstances, had that insulation stripped away.”

The starting point for him as a writer, he said, is “to get down to that kind of primal condition. I guess one of the ways in which I try to do that is in dealing with these characters that are not particularly well insulated, that are sort of ‘up against it,’ as it were.”

Nunn said he didn’t have to do much research for “Pomona Queen,” but he was curious to find out why the orange groves in the Pomona Valley had been sold off so rapidly to developers in the late ‘40s and ‘50s.

Although a number of factors were involved, he said, he discovered that the citrus trees had been quarantined after being struck by a virus. And when a developer came along who was willing to offer money for what was in effect a useless grove, he said, the growers were more than willing to take it.

The virus was called the Quick Decline. And, notes Nunn, “you couldn’t find a better sort of metaphor for what’s happened to much of Southern California.”

That was another motivation for writing “Pomona Queen.”

“I’ve seen a lot of change, as has anyone who has grown up in Southern California--not all for the better--and certainly there was a desire to say something about that in the book as well,” said Nunn, who concedes he’s nostalgic for the bygone Southern California of his youth.

“Much of what I grew up loving about Southern California has been obliterated,” he said, adding, “I don’t feel like there’s that much left here for me.”

Nunn, in fact, is planning on following other disgruntled natives and moving.

The Central Coast of California is not out of the question, he said. Or the Seattle area. Or even Taos, N.M., where a good friend he grew up with in Pomona is relocating.

This summer he plans to combine a research trip to Northern California and the Pacific Northwest with an exploration of possible living areas.

Regardless of when or where the Nunns moves, Nunn said his next novel will be set somewhere in Northern California or in the Pacific Northwest.

“I think there are some interesting elements in that part of the country,” he said, mentioning depressed logging towns, radical environmentalists, Indian reservations and “various vestiges of the ‘60s” counterculture.

But a change in venue for someone who is considered one of the premiere chroniclers of the underbelly of Southern California apparently won’t alter his writing.

“I think some of the themes that interest me in that part of the country are also themes that have made appearances in my first three books,” Nunn said.

And yes, he acknowledged with a laugh, that will include “more marginal characters.”