Created by Kathy Acker
(1948 – 97)
“Narratives are purely for shit. Here’s the information go fuck yourself.”
— Rip-Off Red
Can you say “post-modern”?
I knew you could…
Rip-Off Red, Girl Detective is a (discovered and published post-humously) from early in the career of legendary kamikaze slice-and-dice author Kathy Acker, supposedly full of the “raunchy and subversive wit typical of Acker’s more mature work,” according to Publishers Weekly.
The novel was “probably” written in 1973, at the very start of Kathy Acker’s writing career and reads like a sexy, bizarro take on coming-of-age tales and hard-boiled detective fiction; a sort of “Raymond Chandler for bad girls.” The author herself described it as “a pornographic mystery.” The eponymous heroine, RIP-OFF RED, is young New Yorker who decides on her 26th birthday to become “the toughest detective alive,” although her biggest case as a private eye seems to be herself.
That’s not really much of a surprise though, since Acker wasn’t above drawing on her own colourful past, which included stints as a stripper, a punk rocker and a college professor. And in fact, Acker’s style is already plenty evident here — the literary playfulness, the gutter (and gut) level view of New York City, the detailed sex and violence, the twisted genre conventions and the in-yer-face and up-yer-ass experimentation. She used profanity, poetry and even plagarism to bend, fold and mutilate literary expectations. According to Spin, she was “America’s most beloved transgressive novelist” and that sounds about right.
She sure knew how to throw a party.
Rip-Off Red, Girl Detective was published in a single volume along with The Burning Bombing of America: The Destruction of the U.S. in the fall of 2002, and sported a slapped-together cover shot of the author with the Twin Towers looming behind her.
Of course it did.
UNDER OATH
- “Kathy Acker’s trancelike writing style peels away the layers of reality.”
— San Francisco Chronicle - “Acker is a postmodern Colette with echoes of Cleland’s Fanny Hill.”
— William S. Burroughs
NOVELS
- Rip-Off Red, Girl Detective and the Burning Bombing of America (2002) | Buy this book
Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.
