About 20 years ago Jack Clark fashioned a noir novel out of a string of vignettes drawn from his night job as a Chicago cabbie. Having failed to find a publisher for it, he tried to get it serialized in the Reader. When the Reader took a pass, Clark self-published 500 copies under the title Relita’s Angel and began distributing them from his taxi. For the next year or so, he carried a stack of the paperbacks in his cab, unloading them at $5 each—$3.14 more than his printing cost—on any passenger willing to say what the hell.
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Only two of those deals actually stuck. On the Home Front, Clark’s as-told-to collection of his mother’s stories about “everyday American life from Prohibition through WWII,” was published by Plume in 2002, and a detective novel, Westerfield’s Chain, came out the same year from Thomas Dunne Books, an imprint of St. Martin’s Press. But negotiations with Warner Books for an e-book edition of Relita’s Angel ultimately didn’t work out.
So far, Clark says, the reception has been gratifying. Washington Post reviewer Patrick Anderson, for example, called Nobody’s Angel “a gem” and wrote, “For what it is, it’s just about perfect. I won’t urge would-be novelists to forsake their writing classes and become hackers, but they would do well to read Clark’s story, which doesn’t contain a wasted word or a false note.”
Clark says everything in Nobody’s Angel was inspired by real life—though not necessarily his own. Despite the obvious parallels, he insists that his middle-aged, hack-driving protagonist isn’t autobiographical. The source for Eddie, he says, was something another driver told him years ago—a little piece of shithouse existentialism that stuck. “He said, ‘The great thing about the cab business is that it’s always there, night and day,’” Clark recalls. “‘So if you don’t have anything else in your life, you have that.’ A lot of editors said to me, ‘You’ve got to get this guy out of the cab.’ But I wanted that guy who doesn’t have anything else.”
