Murder So Quirky Has Its Rewards

Jim Pascoe and Tom Fassbender didn’t set out to run a publishing house. Especially one that specialized in crime fiction. All they really wanted was to work as writers. Trouble was, they didn’t have any credentials. What they did have, in spades, was ideas. There was this jewel heist, see. And a young widow in a sheer red negligee. And a bourbon-swilling shamus with his own secret sorrow.

So Pascoe and Fassbender created an pseudonym/alter ego named Dashiell Loveless to put it on paper--216 taut pages of retro noir fiction they christened “By the Balls.” But instead of sending their manuscript off to an agent or publisher, the Silver Lake duo decided to publish it themselves. And UglyTown Productions was born.

Pascoe and Fassbender initially figured they’d use “By the Balls” as a sort-of three-dimensional business card they could hand out at meetings and conventions to showcase their talents. Not just writing, but the editing, visuals, packaging and retro sensibilities that extended all the way to the pulpy stock, typeface and UglyTown logo.

But a funny thing happened on their way to somewhere else. Pascoe and Fassbender decided that having learned so much about publishing, they might as well write another book. Then somebody sent them a third manuscript they liked. And a friend showed them a fourth. And so it went.

Three years later, UglyTown publishing, which was started on $6,000 worth of credit cards, is self-supporting, receiving critical acclaim and bringing out four to six original paperbacks a year that are distributed nationally. In an era of media consolidation, UglyTown is a testament to the fact that there’s room for individual and quirky voices in publishing.

“It’s healthy to have these independent presses emerging, and I’m just so impressed at how committed they are to finding interesting new writing and producing it well,” says Kerry Slattery, general manager of Skylight Bookstore in Los Feliz, which has hosted UglyTown book readings. “They’ve grown with each book, and their books can compete with any major publisher in terms of style, quality of presentation and attention to detail.”

Their workload has grown too. These days, Pascoe and Fassbender are inundated with 200 manuscripts a year from writers who dream of being the next Raymond Chandler or Jim Thompson. “Most aren’t very good, and a small number are good but need a lot of work. Then you get the gems,” Pascoe says. “Our one caveat is it has to be crime-based,” adds Fassbender. “We’ve got to be engaged by it. You’ve got to be able to tell a story, and the book has to have a certain amount of character. It’s a kind of intangible thing.”

But they know it when they see it. Like “Rat City” by Curt Colbert, a gritty tale about 1940s-era Seattle, or “Dirt” by Sean Doolittle, which unearths the dark secrets of a Los Angeles funeral home, both of which were published in 2001. Or “Gun Monkeys” by Victor Gischler, due out in early 2002, which begins with this bang:

“I turned the Chrysler onto the Florida Turnpike with Rollo Kramer’s headless body in the trunk ... “

But behind the campy noir prose and evocative cover art--”Rat City” features a vintage photo of a cop dumping out a box of guns--lies a fastidious work ethic and a quirky artistic sensibility that is uniquely their own.

“We both come from an oral storytelling background,” Pascoe explains. “We love to hang out in bars and tell stories, and we’ve tried to bring this rock ‘n’ roll attitude to book publishing.”

While they like Haruki Murakami, Umberto Eco, Don DeLillo, J.G. Ballard, Philip K. Dick, D.M. Thomas and Raymond Queneau, they complain that much of the fiction published by New York houses today is too homogenized.

“For so many years, we’d talked about how if only we were in charge, we’d do it our way. Well now we were in charge, and the beauty of spending our own money is that we’re ultimately responsible,” Pascoe said.

Not that they’ve ever had a lot of money. What they did have was a passion for comics, vivid imaginations and a compulsion that began at age 6 to write dark, horror-filled stories. They joke that such prose might earn them a visit to the school psychologist if they were growing up in today’s post-Columbine culture.

On this recent day, they dressed like neo-retro hipsters in natty jackets. For conventions, they favor slick suits and ties. Pascoe has punk green hair and a gold earring. They are droll and intelligent and so in sync that they finish each other’s sentences as they sip from enormously large ceramic cups of joe and politely request refills. It’s clear they are passionate and dead serious about what they do, but determined to inject it with as much performance art as they can.

Fassbender, 33, grew up in Wisconsin and majored in biology at the University of Wisconsin. After college, he managed a comic-book store and worked for Capital City Distribution, a pop culture firm, writing and editing catalogs and interviewing artists. He moved to L.A. in 1995 to edit comic books for Motown Animation, a job that ended when the division folded.

Pascoe, 31, grew up in Pittsburgh, where he graduated from Duquesne University with a degree in English and philosophy. Then he spent seven years doing support work in a lab, exorcising his “mad scientist” tendencies, he says. He moved to San Diego in the 1990s for a job at a firm that puts on the United States’ biggest comic-book convention, where he designed brochures and wrote about artists and authors. “I thought that one of these days, I’ll have enough money and then I’ll be able to really write,” Pascoe recalls. “Then I had this epiphany that I had my priorities all screwed up. That I was working just because society and my parents told me I should make money, and that writing, the thing that I loved, was what I should do as a hobby on the side. So I just snapped. I said my first priority has to be writing.”

Not sure how he would pay the bills, Pascoe moved to Los Angeles in 1995. He worked temporary and freelance jobs, one of which eventually led to a writer-producer position for the Disney Channel.

Meanwhile, the two men, who had met at a 1992 comic-book convention in St. Louis and stayed up all night talking about their shared interests, decided to embark on a real writing career.

With no connections or work to show prospective clients, they landed several small-time gigs and optioned an Internet-based game show idea to a producer for $200. They also pitched the then-fledgling DreamWorks with the idea of launching a comics-oriented magazine to market DreamWorks characters. They had several promising meetings, but said the studio eventually told them to prove themselves as a publishing house, then come back.

No matter where they went, the inevitable question was: What have you done?

“It was frustrating,” recalls Pascoe. “It didn’t matter to them unless it was something they could see, had heard of or could hold in their hand.”

They can’t remember who came up with the name UglyTown. They know they were at the 1996 Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles, sitting around drinking coffee and brainstorming as usual, but they immediately liked its dark, ironic ring. Conventioneers were intrigued, too. When people wanted business cards, they claimed they had run out.

(Today their business cards evoke the toe tags that coroners use to identify corpses.)

Once they had a name, UglyTown needed a mission. And it was then that Pascoe and Fassbender decided to get back to their basics: words. They created Dashiell Loveless and began writing “By the Balls.”

They talked out the story before they wrote it, getting down the main points, then took turns at the computer. There were few creative clashes.

“Even though we both have incredibly large egos, when it comes to [going to] the table to write, there’s no ego,” Pascoe says.

In fact, they even live next door to each other in Silver Lake. Fassbender, who is married, works full time for UglyTown out of his house, while Pascoe keeps his day job at Disney. A friend from college who teaches writing at Carnegie Mellon University helps with the editing, and each manuscript is circulated for comment to the ever-growing UglyTown creative “family” of authors, editors and graphic designers.

“It’s one of the ways that UglyTown cleverly maximizes their resources,” says “Dirt” author Doolittle, who did a line edit on “Gun Monkeys.”

Not that he’s complaining. UglyTown propelled him into the ranks of published authors, and “Dirt” onto Amazon.com’s editors’ list of Top 100 Books of 2001.

“Getting someone to take a chance on you is sometimes so impossible,” says Doolittle, who found UglyTown online and sent them his manuscript cold. “But it was uncanny right off the bat how on the same wavelength we were. They got it, what the book was, what I was writing.”

The duo is also getting more savvy about marketing, both to the big chains and the independents that can be crucial to new authors. “Those two guys were hungry and eager to reach out to indies, and they got books out there for booksellers to read--which is still the No. 1 marketing tool after all this time. Quality always wins out,” says Carl Lennertz, director of publisher programs for Book Sense, an ongoing national marketing campaign by the American Booksellers Assn. on behalf of 1,200 independent bookstores.

UglyTown has also gained the respect of other small independent publishers.

“They really put a lot of energy into it and are very serious about what they’re doing,” says Robert Rosenwald, president of Poisoned Pen Press in Scottsdale, Ariz., which publishes mystery fiction.

“The consolidation [of the publishing industry] in New York has created a tremendous vacuum, and there’s room for a lot of specialty presses.”

Poisoned Pen and UglyTown say they publish 3,000 to 5,000 copies of most titles, which is enough to make money, but not to get rich.

But at least right now, that doesn’t seem to be UglyTown’s aim. Ironically, in light of a new publishing venture, “By the Balls” has also brought them closer to the Hollywood of their original dreams.

An editor of a comic-book publisher that licenses properties from movie studios called UglyTown after reading “By the Balls” and offered them a job.

“I realized they had really great insight for immediately deconstructing a genre and figuring out what it was really about, and I thought if they could do it with a detective novel, they could do it for a TV show,” says Scott Allie of Dark Horse Comics in Portland, Ore.

The UglyTown duo has now written four “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” comics and one “Star Wars” spinoff, as well as “Creatures of Habit,” a Buffy illustrated prose novel that Dark Horse will publish in February.

“Our plan worked; it just took three or four years,” Fassbender muses. “Now we have two careers and no free time. But we love running our own business. We think there’s a need for good books. We need them. And we want to publish them.”