{"id":1565107,"date":"2024-03-21T05:55:03","date_gmt":"2024-03-21T05:55:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/?p=316769"},"modified":"2024-03-21T05:55:03","modified_gmt":"2024-03-21T05:55:03","slug":"peter-plate-san-franciscos-now-noir-novelist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2024\/03\/21\/peter-plate-san-franciscos-now-noir-novelist\/","title":{"rendered":"Peter Plate: San Francisco\u2019s Now Noir Novelist"},"content":{"rendered":"\"\"<\/a>\n
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Photograph Source: Seven Stories Press – Link<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n

Where the hell is Peter Plate? And who the hell is he? His editor, Dan Simon, calls him a \u201cproletarian novelist,\u201d but that doesn\u2019t seem right. The author of ten novels, all of them set in the Mission District in San Francisco and all of them published by Seven Stories Press in New York, Plate was once a visible figure in the San Francisco literary scene. But years ago, he vanished into what his former agent, Elise Capron, calls \u201cthe aether.\u201d She adds, \u201cIf that\u2019s what he wants, it\u2019s fine with me.\u00a0 I lost track of him about ten years ago.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Dan Simon at Seven Stories calls Plate a \u201cproletarian novelist,\u201d but that doesn’t seem right. Plate doesn\u2019t write about proletarians. You might call him a novelist of the criminal classes and a neo-Marxist author. Noir is his chosen field.<\/div>\n
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In\u00a0Theories of Surplus Value<\/em>\u00a0Marx wrote that \u201ca criminal produces crimes, also criminal law, the police and criminal justice, penal code art, belles-lettres, novels.\u201d Marx added \u201cthe criminal breaks the monotony of bourgeois life.\u201d Plate would echo that perspective. His criminals produce nearly all of society as he sees it.<\/div>\n
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He breaks the monotony of bourgeois San Francisco by making the \u201cgutter look like paradise\u201d and by turning poverty into poetry and crime into the sublime. Along the way, he wears the fedora of a romantic.<\/div>\n
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Capron, his former agent, remembers having dinner with Plate at the home of the Chinese-American best-selling author, Amy Tan who once took him under her wing. Even Plate\u2019s publicist, Eva Sotomayor, at Seven Stories, knows little if anything about him. \u201cI have never met Plate,\u201d she wrote in an email. \u201cAll I do know is that he’s based in the San Francisco area and is a bit of a recluse. I believe he doesn’t have a phone or a computer and doesn’t grant many interviews.\u201d In fact, he doesn\u2019t grant any interviews at all.<\/div>\n
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Plate might have been famous. He might have been the talk of the town, but he turned his back on fame, withdrew from nearly all social life and is holed up in an apartment in San Francisco battling bad health and also writing his eleventh novel, as yet untitled. His editor, publisher and friend, Dan Simon, at Seven Stories doesn\u2019t rendezvous with Plate in person. \u201cOur director of operations, Jon Gilbert, who is based in Oakland, meets with Peter in public spaces that are anonymous,\u201d Simon tells me. \u201cSo there\u2019s a lot of intimacy and trust, but yes at the same time everything is essentially done in secret.\u201d<\/div>\n
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For a time, Plate was not only famous but also infamous. In 1978, he went wild in the streets of San Francisco during the \u201cWhite Night\u201d riots that followed the dual assassinations of San Francisco\u2019s Mayor George Moscone and gay supervisor Harvey Milk\u2014 and the light sentence ( seven years) for the shooter, supervisor Dan White.<\/div>\n
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That memorable night, at least a\u00a0dozen police cars were destroyed and eight non-police vehicles were torched. Plate, one of the most visible of protesters, was arrested, charged with “assault and battery on a police officer and burning police cars.” A flyer from that era, now a collector\u2019s item, bears the headline, \u201cPolice vs. Plate.\u201d That seems to be the way he views the world; himself versus the cops.<\/div>\n
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With the help of criminal defense lawyer Doron Weinberg, Plate \u201cbeat the rap,\u201d as one of his fictional characters would say.\u00a0The website, Good Reader, calls him, \u201cPerhaps the most important anarchist prose writer around today.\u201d True, if one associates anarchists with acts of violence.<\/div>\n
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Meanwhile, in his absence, a cottage industry has sprung up online to keep his memory and his work alive.\u00a0\u201cKinky Kevin Federline,\u201d as he calls himself, wrote, \u201cPlate is one of my favorite authors.\u201d Another fan who identifies himself as \u201cthe Fake Bruce Forsyth\u201d chimed in with \u201chasn\u2019t Plate done well without a computer!\u201d<\/div>\n
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Dana Smith, a successful San Francisco graphic artist, remembered that Plate, an ex-boyfriend, wrote years ago with a pencil. \u201cWhen I lived with Plate in the \u201880s I bought him an electric typewriter,\u201d she wrote online. \u201cHe refused the contraption and it was returned to the store. I think he eventually tackled the typewriter. I say this with love, respect and fond memories.\u201d<\/div>\n
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Yet another fan wrote online,\u00a0\u201cHe seems to see it [the internet] as a vehicle for police surveillance.\u201d He added, \u201che isn\u2019t easy to locate and right now doesn\u2019t even have a Wikipedia entry.\u201d A man named Dave Kelso-Mitchell accused Plate of \u201celitism\u201d and \u201csnobbery.\u201d<\/div>\n
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A longtime friend of Plate\u2019s, a retired public school teacher and a union organizer, who wants only to be known as \u201cKT,\u201d suggests that Plate might be paranoid and rightfully so. Even paranoids have enemies. In\u00a0Night of the Short Eyes,\u00a0<\/em>his most recent book, which boasts autobiographical elements, the narrator says,\u00a0<\/em>\u201cI saw fear in my own eyes. Fear of the cops. Fear of getting snitched out. Fear of cracking up. A fear that burned brightest when I was by myself.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0Now that he\u2019s living by himself and rarely ventures outside his apartment, that fear burns brighter than ever before,\u00a0according to KT.<\/div>\n
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A San Francisco private investigator, who first learned the art of detection 40 years ago by serving an apprenticeship with super sleuth, Hal Lipset, and by studying Hammett\u2019s novels\u2014 who wished to remain, anonymous\u2014 told me, \u201cI would help you find Plate, but I\u2019ve just been hired by a man with big bucks to learn if his mother is dead or alive. You\u2019d think a man would know if his own mother was dead or alive.\u201d He added, \u201cLooking for someone can be challenging, and then\u00a0bam<\/em>? All of a sudden they reach out to you.\u201d<\/div>\n
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Before his disappearing act, Plate often appeared in the pages of The San Francisco Chronicle. In 2001, while still riding the fame train, he wrote an op-ed piece titled, \u201cA noir author reflects on the Mission [District] as a center of public literary life.\u201d\u00a0In the photo that accompanies the story, Plate poses in front of the apartment building where Dashiell Hammett, the father of noir, wrote\u00a0The Maltese Falcon.<\/em><\/div>\n
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In 2004, he described, in another piece for The Chronicle, his Odyssey on foot across San Francisco: from the Ferry Building to the Castro. \u201cThe dialectic of Market Street is in the homeless with their shopping carts and the yuppies in their black leather jackets,\u201d Plate wrote. He added, \u201cAt the Powell Street cable car turnaround, pickpockets, pizza delivery men, nickel-bag dealers, jugglers, mimes, saxophonists, homeboys, exhausted tourists and office workers mingle.\u201d<\/div>\n
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In 2006, in\u00a0Soon the Rest Will Fall<\/em>, a prophetic novel which traces the fictional decline and near-total collapse of San Francisco, he wrote, \u201cThe police doubled their patrols. Christmas shoplifters were pilfering. Holiday customers had been jacked at gunpoint in the underground parking garages.\u201d<\/div>\n
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\u00a0In 2008, in his last piece for The Chronicle, \u201cS.F. Is Crime Central \u2014On the Printed Page,\u201d Plate observed that San Francisco is \u201ca time bomb of poverty and wealth. The perfect canvas for the new noir. For every skyscraper, there’s a tenement. For each yuppie, there’s a wino on Market Street. The contradictions are brutal. You have to write about them.”<\/div>\n
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After 2008, he continued to write about the contradictions of San Francisco, as he sees them, and he has turned himself into a kind of contradiction:\u00a0the preeminent bard of the San Francisco barrio, and at the same time the city\u2019s most furtive author. If cities get the writers they deserve and writers get the cities they need, then perhaps San Francisco and Plate form a near-perfect couple.<\/div>\n
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In his absence, his novels speak volumes for him and about him. They also read like today\u2019s deadline news.\u00a0\u00a0In\u00a0Night of the Short Eyes<\/em>, his most recent publication, California is on fire, people are testing positive for the virus, patrols of SWAT teams roam the streets.<\/div>\n
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At 153 pages, with short chapters, and wide margins,\u00a0Night\u00a0<\/em>can be enjoyed in a brief sitting. Plate\u2019s narrator\u2014 a bookish sixteen-year-old and the descendant of Russian Jews\u2014says of himself and his friends, \u201cwe were on the run from everyone in the world.\u201d That\u2019s pure Plate. Two of the characters\u00a0<\/em>have comic book names: Superman and The Lone Ranger; an alcoholic woman is \u201cFrankenstein.\u201d Yet another character, a bomb maker, is \u201cPutin.\u201d<\/div>\n
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Angels of Catastrophe<\/em>\u2014the title is reminiscent of Jack Kerouac\u2019s title for his big Beat novel,\u00a0Desolation Angels<\/em>\u2014 might be Plate\u2019s best work of fiction. It begins with pizzazz\u2014\u201cA policeman was gunned down by an unknown shooter,\u201d and it also ends with pizzazz. The main character, Ricky Durrutti, Plate writes, \u201cstayed awake through the night and listened to a police car\u2019s siren have a nervous breakdown on Mission Street.\u201d<\/div>\n
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Earlier in the story, he observes that Durrutti \u201cwas at that strangest of all crossroads, having lived long enough to make a lot of mistakes, but not long enough to fix any of them.\u201d That too sounds like pure Plate, who might be compared to J. D. Salinger, the author of\u00a0The Catcher in the Rye,<\/em>and the most reclusive of all the major male writers (Norman Mailer, James Jones, William Styron, and James Baldwin) who emerged in the aftermath of World War II.<\/div>\n
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Salinger published his own work in The New Yorker and became a best selling writer who decided, decades after\u00a0Catcher<\/em>\u00a0appeared in print, that \u201cpublishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy.\u201d He stopped publishing and backed away from fame and publicity, though he didn\u2019t hide his whereabouts. In New Hampshire, he paid workmen to build a high fence to protect his privacy. In a way Plate has built a wall around himself.<\/div>\n
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In an unpublished interview with me which was conducted nearly 20 years ago he wisely observed, \u201cWhat people are not saying is as important as what they are saying.\u201d\u00a0 What was Plate not saying? Read between the lines of his novels and in the margins and one can get a pretty good idea. In a way, he\u2019s not private at all, but rather hiding in plain sight. As an author with integrity and with a unique moral compass, he deserves to be read by fans of noir, Dashiell Hammett and those who belong to the precariat.<\/div>\n

The post Peter Plate: San Francisco\u2019s Now Noir Novelist<\/a> appeared first on CounterPunch.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Where the hell is Peter Plate? And who the hell is he? His editor, Dan Simon, calls him a \u201cproletarian novelist,\u201d but that doesn\u2019t seem right. The author of ten novels, all of them set in the Mission District in San Francisco and all of them published by Seven Stories Press in New York, Plate More<\/a><\/p>\n

The post Peter Plate: San Francisco\u2019s Now Noir Novelist<\/a> appeared first on CounterPunch.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":81,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1565107"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/81"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1565107"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1565107\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1566627,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1565107\/revisions\/1566627"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1565107"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1565107"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1565107"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}