The Kinkster Cometh

Richard Friedman was in a reflective mood. Not that it was wildly out of character. But this man has spent most of his life answering to Kinky rather than Richard, and led a left-field country band called the Texas Jewboys in the ‘70s, and for the last decade has written and starred in a series of unapologetically loopy comic mystery novels. Richard the Thinker often is overshadowed by Kinky the Clown.

So when he started talking about Japanese insurance companies and how they can gauge the world’s enduring art, it smacked of another in his endless string of one-liners (a string that once made Bill Clinton dash off a note begging for more of Kinky’s books: “I really need the laughs,” confessed the prez).

Leaning forward and sipping Chivas on the rocks in the lobby of his Beverly Hills hotel Saturday, having just wrapped up two hours of signing his latest adventure, “Road Kill,” at the Westside Pavilion (where he was joined at the signing table by another admirer, fellow country singer Dwight Yoakam), Friedman said he believes “the arbiters of greatness should be the Japanese insurance companies.

“They all want Van Gogh,” he continued between chomps on his ever-present Cuban stogie. “They don’t want Rembrandt because he was successful in his lifetime, and anybody who everybody likes, there’s gotta be something wrong with him, I think.

“I do not want to capture the mainstream mind. I want to make it on my own terms, which are not mainstream. I don’t want a bunch of engaging characters that you’re familiar with, part of the pop culture.

“Definitely, most of the people I’ve loved have gone to Jesus,” he said, his favorite expression for the hereafter. “The people I admire, the people I’m relating to, are not only dead [but] people who died broke and disenfranchised, out of step with their times. There are a lot of them--whether it’s Emily Dickinson or Mozart or Shakespeare or Jesus, or Father Damien or Anne Frank. . . .”

Hmmm. Maybe he wasn’t joking. But, durn it, it’s never easy to tell with the Kinkster, as Friedman is fond of referring to himself, both in his books and in the flesh. Indeed, his hat trick--through the 10 mysteries he has written since giving up aspirations of country stardom--has been interweaving the serious and sardonic sides of his distinctly idiosyncratic, distinctly twisted, distinctly American personality.

“There’s a very thin line between fiction and nonfiction,” quipped Friedman, who turns 53 on Halloween, “and I do my damndest to erase it. . . . Maybe the Lord has commanded me to write these books. When I’m finished, we’ll throw them all in a trash compactor and maybe we’ll have the Great American Novel. We’ll see.”

Already, readers have bought about 100,000 copies of each book--better sales than Friedman ever managed during his decade and a half leading the Texas Jewboys, whose recorded legacy includes such originals as “They Ain’t Makin’ Jews Like Jesus Anymore” and his country ode to the Holocaust, “Ride ‘Em Jewboy.”

He grew up in Texas with a psychology professor father, a speech therapist mother and a brother who wound up following in Dad’s footsteps. Young Richard graduated from the University of Texas with a liberal arts degree, then spent 2 1/2 years in Borneo with the Peace Corps. “But the only thing I ever wanted,” he said, “was to be a country singer.”

Failing that--and Friedman believes it’s necessary to fail at one thing before you can succeed at something else--he launched his persona as the world’s only Jewish Texas country singer-turned-New York private detective--”a hip hybrid,” as the Chicago Tribune put it, “of Groucho Marx and Sam Spade.”

He wears his Jewish heritage like a six-pointed badge, treating it with irreverent profundity. (“The difference between circumcision and crucifixion,” he wrote in “God Bless John Wayne,” “is that circumcision is where they cut the tip of the penis off; crucifixion is where they merely throw the whole Jew away.”)

He refers to a certain bodily function as “taking a Nixon” (critics say he makes this reference repetitively; Friedman prefers to call it “a literary echo”). He cracks wise about the lesbian dance class in the apartment above his. Yet for all the attention crude humor gets him, he also reels off meaty bits of homespun philosophy with seemingly deceptive ease.

(Actually, Friedman said, there’s nothing deceptive about it--he says he does very little rewriting, and that spitting out novels is far easier than writing a good country song ever was. “Mating the lyrics and the music perfectly,” he suggested, “is probably what killed Hank Williams and stunted Faron Young’s growth.”)

Just three paragraphs into “Road Kill” (Simon & Schuster), which is about a murder plot that unfolds during a Willie Nelson concert tour, is this passage about his New York environs:

I glanced down at Vandam Street through the frost and the grime on the kitchen window. It was not clear precisely how much of this mucous-like obfuscation was on the outside or how much was on the inside of the window. As far as the outside went, you could probably blame most of the crap upon cars, people, pigeons, and God, none of whom have been known to be greatly concerned about the messes they’ve created on the outside of windows.

“Road Kill” has approached New York Times bestseller status and his previous books have been translated into 16 languages. The Kinkster has developed fans in Poland, Germany (“my second favorite people--my first is everyone else”), Sweden, South Africa and various parts of South America.

“I can’t imagine,” he said, “how German and Dutch translations or Swedish translations will pick up on it. But I find it’s more cosmic than that. Like South Africa--the books are doing great in South Africa, and the reason is that the country was ostracized by the world for two decades. They understand what a Texas Jewboy is without having to articulate it. They know what it means to be alone out there on the prairie, to have a lot of wide open spaces between your ears--they understand that. . . .”

He is both hopeful and fearful of the momentum his career appears to be developing. As he put it, “I think I’m about to lose my precious cult status.”

Discussions of movie and TV treatments of his books have come and gone almost since the first book, “Greenwich Killing Time,” appeared in 1986, but Friedman said the prospect of something materializing is stronger now than ever.

After all, he did find himself at a White House dinner earlier this year, seated next to President Clinton and Paramount Pictures chief Sherry Lansing, with Clinton urging her to do a movie based on Friedman’s work. (“You’d think,” Friedman said, “that the most powerful man on Earth could green-light a [expletive] Holly wood movie. But I guess not. . . .”)

The most likely scenario, Friedman said, would be a one-hour weekly series for a cable network, where his rough-and-ready style wouldn’t have to pass commercial-TV muster. He said he is mulling three or four offers, all of which call for him to play himself.

He also is the subject of an in-progress tribute album, “Pearls in the Snow,” for which Nelson, Yoakam, Bob Dylan, Lyle Lovett, Delbert McClinton and others are recording Texas Jewboy songs.

“It’s coming before I go to Jesus, hopefully, which makes it unusual,” Friedman said. “Usually you have to go to Jesus first. We asked k.d. lang to do ‘Get Your Biscuits in the Oven and Your Buns in the Bed,’ but she passed.”