What is a surf novelist? How can a fictional work find its way into the category of both "surfing" and "mystery" novel? These questions and others I ponder while cogitating upon post-modern author, Kem Nunn.


As I began to develop a love for surfing I naturally gravitated towards literature and film with wave riding as a focus, or at least as a subplot. The later becomes the case with Nunn's first novel published in 1984 entitled "Tapping The Source." On the cover, depending upon which version you happen to grab, there is a significant positioning of surf culture imagery. Both versions that I have seen show surfboards, one being ridden in what looks like a Pipeline barrel and the other held by an overt "surfer-guy" icon.


So does this immediately and inexorably classify "Tapping The Source" as belonging to the category that I never even knew existed until this was published in the early eighties -- "surf fiction?" I guess poor Nunn fell into league with other novelists who write a book with a horse in the title or on the cover, and that's it! They become LABELED from there on out and known widely as the 'horse novelist.'

Although a glance at the cover may conjure up an impression that the plot of the book centers on surfing, with a closer inspection of the text you will find that Nunn's novel is more of a mystery with a surfing backdrop. One top notch review of this work by Terry Rodgers states: " The unique novel -- imagine Surfer magazine editor Sam George getting a brain transplant from Raymond Chandler -- has attracted a cult following."


As if being likened to THE prolific champion of mystery novels was not enough, Nunn also draws praise from Elmore Leonard, no slouch in terms of notoriety in the self-same genre: "Nunn is one of a rare breed, a novelist who knows how to plot and tell a story. There is amazing energy here." What unfolds within the pages of this new American classic is a mystery that turns into a nightmare. Nunn reveals an intricate web of pages for the reader to be caught in, all the while dreading the inevitable fact that a spider WILL come.


A feeling of dread follows Ike, Nunn's 18-year-old protagonist, who searches for his runaway sister who has fallen in with the wrong crowd. I cannot help but think that the worst imaginable horrors await him, that he shall suffer the same grisly fate as his sister, and that his effort to find the truth would reveal a macabre scheme that could only be developed in the mind of a twisted, master story teller. Nunn is that kind of creator, but prepare to sift into the detritus of La America if you wish to read him. It is not all sun and surf in the underbelly of one of our nation's largest metropolitan areas.

Next up: Reviews of Nunn's other two "surf novels."

Sources: terry.rodgers@uniontrib.com
http://www.bookpage.com/9702bp/fiction/thedogsofwinter.html
http://trashotron.com/Agony/reviews/nunn-unassigned_territory.htm
http://trashotron.com/agony/reviews/2004/nunn-tijuana_straits.htm
http://home.earthlink.net/~gussheridan/id45.html
http://www.pifmagazine.com/2000/08/b_k_nemm.php3

ER Harris