When hardboiled private eye Roy Scherer inherits an unwanted side-kick, in the nerdy form of Suzie Miller, they soon embark on a series of wild, way out and weird adventures.
Andrez Bergen’s Small Change is an interconnected collection of short stories and vignettes that smartly mixes up Raymond Chandler with Jim Jarmusch and Scooby Doo.
Small Change is sharp, witty and a hell of a lot of fun.
PDB: What’s going on now?
What’s not going on now is p’raps a better question, particularly overseas! In my own walled-up ballpark here in Tokyo my daughter is about to compete in her first ballet competition at age nine, while I’m set to release the 12-issue trade paperback of my noir comic book ‘Bullet Gal’ via Under Belly Comics in North America, just started a new noir series called ‘Trista & Holt’ (a ’70s crime-oriented revamp of Tristan and Iseult) via IF? Commix in Australia, and I’m working on my next novel ‘The Mercury Drinkers’.
PDB: How did you research this book?
‘Bullet Gal’ is my kiss-off homage to film noir and hardboiled literature of the 1930s and ’40s, mostly related to Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett —thrown in with the off-beat science fiction of Philip K. Dick and artistic sensibilities of Dada and Terry Gilliam. So, the research? Growing up with this stuff, along with comic book art from Jim Steranko, Will Eisner and Jack Kirby.
PDB: Which of your publications are you most proud of?
Jeez, that’s a toughie—they all have their moment in the sun depending upon the mood I’m in. But I think I’d swing with my second novel ‘One Hundred Years of Vicissitude’ (2012). There’s something there that I just really love.
PDB: What’s your favourite film/ book/ song/ television programme?
Fave film bounces between ‘The Maltese Falcon’ and ‘The Big Sleep’. Book-wise I’d best cite ‘The Maltese Falcon’ as I’ve read it thirty-odd times. Song? Easy—Ary Barroso’s ‘Brazil’. TV programme is tough. Let’s go with ‘Black Adder II’ for now.
PDB: Is location important to your writing?
Yeah, I think so—most of my stuff is set in my hometown Melbourne, even though I’ve lived in Tokyo going on for 14 years.
PDB: How often do you check your Amazon rankings?
Ha Ha Ha… shhh! Every now and then. Not to often, I swear!
PDB: What’s next?
Focusing on ‘Trista & Holt’ (I just finished #5, and I think the arc will be about 12 issues) along with the new novel, and working with Matt Kyme and a bunch of artists on our next ‘Tales to Admonish’ anthology. Otherwise applauding Cocoa at her ballet performance!
Bio: ANDREZ BERGEN is an expat Australian author, journalist, DJ, comic book artist, and ad hoc saké connoisseur who’s been entrenched in Tokyo, Japan, for the past 14 years.
He makes music as Little Nobody and previously ran groundbreaking Melbourne record label IF? for over a decade, before setting up IF? Commix in 2013 in collusion with Matt Kyme.
The duo do a comic book together titled Tales to Admonish.
Bergen has also written for newspapers such as The Age and the Yomiuri Shinbun, as well as magazines like Mixmag, Anime Insider, Australian Style, Remix, Impact, 3D World and Geek Magazine.
He’s published four novels: The noir/sci-fi novel Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat (2011), surreal slipstream/fantasy One Hundred Years of Vicissitude (2012), comic book, noir and pulp homage Who is Killing the Great Capes of Heropa? (2013) and the gothic-noir mystery Depth Charging Ice Planet Goth (2014).
Bergen is current working on novel #5 (The Mercury Drinkers).
In 2014 he unveiled his first graphic novel, a 144-page adaptation of Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat that Bergen both wrote and illustrated, along with the monthly comic book series Bullet Gal.
In 2015, all 12 issues of Bullet Gal have been collected together as a 348-page trade paperback, and he’s started a brand new series called Trista & Holt.
He’s further published short stories and sequential yarns through Crime Factory, Shotgun Honey, Snubnose Press, Solarcide, Weird Noir, Big Pulp, 8th Wonder Press and All Due Respect, and worked on translating and adapting the scripts for feature films by Mamoru Oshii (Ghost in the Shell), Kazuchika Kise and Naoyoshi Shiotani, for Production I.G.
Over the past three months I’ve rammed through Ed Brubaker and Steve Epting’s entire run on Captain America, their superb reconstruction of the birth of Marvel heroes in the ’40s (The Marvels Project) and the duo’s recent work on espionage thriller Velvet.
I also rifled through issues one to twenty of Brubaker’s horror-noir Fatale with artist Sean Phillips, all of Matt Fraction’s insanely cool take on Hawkeye with artists David Aja, Annie Wu and Francesco Francavilla, and other recent comics like Black Science, Red Sonja, From Above, New Avengers, and Day Men.
Along the way I backpedalled into classic stuff like The Spirit by Will Eisner, Miss Fury by Tarpé Mills, the Jim Steranko run on Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., Kazuo Umezu’s Orochi Blood, Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s V for Vendetta, Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaä, and Hergé’s Tintin.
I also stumbled once more into the fairly hilarious (and dated) Avengers comics from the mid 1960s by Stan Lee with Don Heck and Dick Ayers — I mean, in #25 alone Wanda (the Scarlet Witch) has a crush on Captain America. Hawkeye is jealous and calls Cap an over-aged square. Pietro (Quicksilver) is kind of like background wallpaper. And Hawkeye then defeats Doc Doom with a “Sneeze-Smog Arrow”. Of course. The Fantastic Four from the same period (by Lee with Jack Kirby and Joe Sinnott) has aged far more gracefully.
Meanwhile, book-wise, I was being buffeted by Jedediah Berry’s The Manual of Detection; a hundredth reread of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, and way too many Dr. Seuss tomes to count (with my daughter Cocoa).
Thing is, at the same time, I’ve been making my own comic books with artist Matt Kyme (our Tales to Admonish series), assembling an anthology of sequential art noir by a bunch of other artists (the Black/White project we just released), and finishing up my fourth novel.
That’s titled Depth Charging Ice Planet Goth, will be published mid-year via Perfect Edge Books, and is no doubt subliminally influenced by all of these things (above) along with nudges and winks at three of my favourite comic book artists (Kirby, Mills and Steve Ditko) and a whole wealth of 1980s post-punk/goth music. The cover painting, by French artist Kmye Chan, was chosen as much because of its references to manga and gothdom as it was for the likeness to the art of Ditko.
I think my head is a bit of a mess, but messiness has its good points since you’re not exactly thinking straight, and creativity bounces off at right angles.
Which brings me back (in black?) to Black/White, that comic book anthology I mentioned, which captures the mind-bending artwork of guys from the UK (Andrew Chiu), the USA (Nathan St. John), Canada (Drezz Rodriguez, Michael Grills) and Argentina (Marcos Vergara) — messing with my hack words.
It’s the art that speaks volumes here.
Their focus? Noir, tongue firmly in cheek on some occasions; withheld in others. Set in a near-future Melbourne, these yarns veer into the territory of crime, graf, femmes fatales, assisted suicide and post-apocalyptic dystopia — and that’s just for starters.
Black/White is being published by our indie Aussie comic book house IF? Commix in March 2014, with the digital version available already to pre-order online — for just $1 — at the website: iffybizness.weebly.com
Bio: ANDREZ BERGEN :
AUTHOR PROFILE @ AMAZON
http://www.amazon.com/Andrez-Bergen/e/B009I1QB2I
Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat / Who is Killing the Great Capes of Heropa? / Tales to Admonish
MUZAK as Little Nobody and Funk Gadget
http://www.beatport.com/artist/little-nobody/69970
Senior Writer/Editor @ Impact magazine (UK)
Writer/Editor @ Anime Update / Gaijinpot / JapaneseCultureGoNow! / Yomiuri Shimbun
Comics @ IF? Commix
http://iffybizness.weebly.com
And it includes my yarn Murphy’s Bright Spark.
The Tobacco- Stained Sky is an anthology edited by Guy Salvidge & Andrez Bergen, published by Another Sky Press and based around the noir/dystopia of Andrez Bergen‘s novel Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat.
WRITERS
Andrez Bergen
I’m pretty damned chuffed to have a story in K A Laity’s WEIRD NOIR anthology.
‘Black Moon Rising’ is a DRUNK ON THE MOON yarn which gives a bit more back story to Detective Ivan Walker and Duffy.
The full cast list for WEIRD NOIR is :
Introduction
A Kick in the Head by Chloë Yates
Violets and Furs by Richard Godwin
Sins of the Brother by Karina Fabian
Across the Border by Hector Acosta
Corkscrewed by Jan Kozlowski
East of Écarté by Andrez Bergen
3 Kings and The Mark by Carol Borden
Black Moon Rising by Paul D. Brazill
The Darkness Cult by Jennifer Martin 
[untitled] by Katherine Tomlinson
A Diabolical Liberty by Jason Michel
Evil and Life by Asher Wismer
Gus Weatherbourne by Michael S. Chong
Wonder Woman Walks into a Bar by Leeyanne Moore
Charred Kraken with Plum Butter by Christopher L. Irvin
Yao Jin by Joyce Chng
Train Tracks by W. P. Johnson
Find out more about WEIRD NOIR at K A Laity’s gin joint.
Off The Record 2- At The Movies is an anthology of 47 short stories, based on film titles, from some of the best and most bad-bum writers around.
And all proceeds go to charity.
Find out more in my latest Brit Grit Alley column which is, as usual, over at Out Of The Gutter Online.
Looking tasty, eh? Great cover by Steven Miscandlon. More info and cast list at Luca Veste’s Guilty Conscience.
Last year, LUCA VESTE put together a terrific charity anthology called OFF THE RECORD.
The deal was that 38 writers would come up with stories based on song titles.
And a corker of a collection it was too.
Well, LUCA has decided to put together another charity anthology.
OFF THE RECORD 2 will feature stories based on film titles. All sorts of hep writers are involved, including Adrian McKinty, Andrez Bergen. And me.
The title I’m using for my story is SILVER DREAM RACER.
So, if you haven’t already, pick up OFF THE RECORD as an ebook at AMAZON or AMAZON UK and in paperback from LULU.
And, here is the story that I contributed to the first OFF THE RECORD, to get you in the mood.
PDB: Is it possible for a writer to be an objective reader?
Short answer this time! Yep, I do think so – although occasionally I get a bee in my bonnet about how I would’ve handled a character or situation myself. I’m more like that with movies and TV shows. My wife swears I’m psychic since I always pick the killer in the whodunnits.
PDB: Do you have any interest in writing for films, theatre or television?
I’ve done some music for stage performances and short indie films you’ve never heard of, but I would love to have a shot at writing for film or TV. I actually started out as a student writer/director just after I finished uni, but realized I was a crap director and I didn’t have any money to pay for it all – and my mates were poor actors who weren’t committed. Bah!
PDB: How much research goes into each book?
Funnily enough, with ‘Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat‘, not much at all by the time I finished the final manuscript – most of it was sources from my own head space or influenced by movies I’d watched a hundred times. When I started the editing process with Another Sky Press, however, Kristopher Young and Bob Young were far more focused on accuracy (thank god!) and made sure I got a ton of things right.
With the new novel, ‘One Hundred Years of Vicissitude‘, I’m doing a lot of legwork and research since most of it is based in Japan, from 1929 on.
PDB: How useful or important are social media for you as a writer?
These tools are insanely useful, something I discovered in recent years while I was doing the promotion for my music (as Little Nobody, etc.), but unfortunately I do believe they’re starting to tire and become less effective. Probably this is down to the glut of options (Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Soundcloud, even MySpace still hanging round like a bad smell) and the proliferation of people like me hawking their goods. People get jaded. Still, they’re free and they’re fun – and I’ve met a lot of very cool people via these platforms.
PDB: What’s on the cards in 2012?
