CHICAGO — A Chicago cabbie’s self-published pulp novel is getting a new lease on life thanks to the endorsement of one of Hollywood’s most acclaimed filmmakers.
When Jack Clark wrote “Nobody’s Angel,” he was a cab driver working Friday and Saturday night shifts picking up fares everywhere from Downtown to the suburbs.
Clark’s experiences fueled his first novel, a pulpy page-turner about a down-on-his-luck Chicago cab driver named Eddie Miles, whose episodic life as a nighttime hack is disrupted by rumors of a serial killer targeting cab drivers and mutilating sex workers around the city. Like the best reluctant detectives, Miles does his best to keep his head down and do his job — but when the murders start getting too close to home, he takes it upon himself to track down the culprit.
The prose paints a picture familiar to any Chicagoan:
It was another quiet night—the tail end of that same winter—the last time I saw Lenny.
I was northbound on Lake Shore Drive, fifteen over the special winter speed limit, which was supposed to keep the road salt spray from killing the saplings shivering in the median.
The lake was a vast darkness on the right. To the left lay the park and beyond that a string of high-rent highrises climbed straight into the clouds.
It’s a short but stylish crime thriller in the grandest dime-store tradition, with hard-boiled dialogue delivered with sparseness and specificity by its rough-around-the-edges characters. Clark pulls from his own experiences as a Chicago cabbie: the colorful characters he’d pick up, the camaraderie of the Chicago cab community, the rapidly shifting racial and economic politics of the city.
“I’ve been trying to write a novel since I was a kid,” Clark said.
Clark’s love of writing was ignited when he read Nelson Algen’s “The Man With the Golden Arm” as a young man, and he grew up loving the works of Raymond Chandler, he said. Clark said he spent years trying and failing to write a detective novel, but when he turned 39 and read a newspaper story about 40 being the peak age for a novelist, he decided to try again.
“I thought to myself, ‘I don’t know anything about being a private eye, which is why I can’t write a private eye novel — so I’ll try a cab-driving novel,’” Clark said.
Clark would work weekends as a cabbie on 14- and 15-hour shifts, then spend the week writing. Eventually, after years of drafts, rewrites and requests for revisions from agents and publishers, Clark decided to self-publish the book in 1996.
“I figured that if I could write one novel, I could write another, and I wanted to stop rewriting this one,” Clark said.
Clark sold copies of “Nobody’s Angel” out of the back of his cab for years for $5 a copy.
Eventually, the novel found a home at Hard Case Crime, which published the book in 2010 to rave reviews from the Washington Post and other publications. After 10 years, rights reverted back to Clark, and he self-published it once again.
But while the book enjoyed a cult audience, “Nobody’s Angel” received a new lease on life in February 2023, when “Pulp Fiction” filmmaker Quentin Tarantino named it in an Amazon Celebrity Pick article as one of his favorite reads of 2022.
“My favorite fiction novel this year was written by a taxi driver who used to hand it out to his passengers,” wrote Tarantino. “It’s a terrific story and character study of a cabbie in Chicago during a time when a serial killer is robbing and murdering cabbies.”
Suddenly, Clark’s book that was selling five copies a month was selling five copies a day on Amazon.
“I have no idea how he got hold of the book,” Clark said.
At first, Clark thought the book’s surprising popularity in Los Angeles was due to word-of-mouth recommendations from a fellow cab driver/author friend of his there, he said. But now, he’s not so sure it wasn’t Tarantino.
Given the much-needed Tarantino bump, Clark re-sold the rights to Hard Case, which will publish a new edition on Feb. 13 with a new cover featuring pulp fiction-appropriate artwork by Claudia Caranfa — as well as Tarantino’s effusive endorsement.
In the years since “Nobody’s Angel,” Clark has continued the adventures of Eddie Miles in a follow-up novel, “Back Door to L.A.” He is working on a third adventure, “Blue Eddie Miles,” as well as other mystery novels that are still in the writing stage.
But Clark hopes a sign-off from a figure so closely associated with pulp fiction will give his own works a new audience. And isn’t about time for Tarantino to make a movie in Chicago, anyway?
You can preorder the book on Hard Case Crime’s website here.
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