Owen Hill joined us as our guest to discuss Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler. Owen is the author of three crime novels, two books of short fiction, and many collections of poetry. He has reviewed crime novels for the Los Angeles Times and the East Bay Express.
In 2005, Owen Hill was awarded the Howard Moss residency at Yaddo. He is co-editor (with Jerry Thompson) of Berkeley Noir for Akashic Press. A memoir, Hands on a Mirror, is also available from Bootstrap Press.
Owen was a buyer at a second-hand bookstore for many years in Berkeley. He is currently an organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). He lives in Oakland.
Owen Hill is also the author of The Giveaway: The Clay Blackburn Story (PM Press), an omnibus of his crime fiction. It includes three novels and a short story.
Clay Blackburn—poet, book scout, and sometimes detective—cruises the mean, and sometimes not so mean, streets of Berkeley. With his accomplices, a soldier of fortune, a “defrocked” FBI agent, and a smooth and sexy con man, he lives a life of bisexual sensation with a little crime solving on the side. As such, Blackburn is a sly, witty, and more or less reliable raconteur of the last thirty something years of the Bay Area’s radical bohemia and bookselling.
And in the tradition of Ian Rankin’s Edinburgh, and Jean-Claude Izzo’s Marseilles, bears uncomfortable witness to Berkeley’s descent from countercultural paradise to neoliberal inferno.
This omnibus collection collects the novels The Chandler Apartments (2002), The Incredible Double (2010), and the previously unpublished Mayakovsky’s Bugatti (2025), and includes the Blackburn short story “Righteous Kill” (2021).
In the Introduction to The Giveaway by Owen Hill, Jonathan Lethem wrote, “Yet the more we get to know him, the more we’re persuaded Blackburn is a Pure Product of Berkeley. He’s not only queer, but a queer sort of all else he declares himself to be: a queer sort of detective, a queer sort of Communist or Anarchist, and beyond—a queer sort of gourmet, ethical thinker, cat owner, and—for certain—a queer sort of narrator.”
About the book, Gary Phillips, author of Ash Dark as Night, wrote “Subtle and evocative, the compelling mysteries contained in The Giveaway: The Clay Blackburn Story feature a gumshoe-poet’s keenly observed forays behind the fabled façade of the Bay Area. A journey of reveals only a transplanted Southern Californian like Owen Hill, wry insider and outsider, could pull off.”
Owen is also the co-annotator and editor of the annotated edition of Raymond Chandler’s classic novel The Big Sleep (Vintage Crime, 2018). (His coeditors are Pamela Jackson and Anthony Dean Rizzuto.) The Washington Post called The Annotated Big Sleep “fascinating and essential” and Time Magazine referred to TABS as “a wonderful recent volume”.
(Read a Broad Street profile of the collaborative work of Anthony Dean Rizzuto, Owen Hill, and Pamela Jackson here.)
