I don’t know if Jim Knipfel presaged the conspiracy-laden epoch we find now ourselves mired in, or perhaps somehow helped to manifest it—a conspiracy theory in its own right. In 2003’s The Buzzing, we are treated to the sensational spinout of newspaper reporter, Roscoe Baragon, once a globe-trotting newshound who is now content with covering the “freak beat” for the New York Sentinel, itself a not-yet-failing enterprise, but the check is in the mail.
All the time-honored tropes of noir are present here. Part of the reason Baragon stays at the paper is “the fact that was working in what he assumed was the last office space in New York City in which he would be allowed to smoke at his desk.” Instead of a girl Friday, he has a city forensic pathologist, Emily, who also spends too much time holding down a stool at their favorite dive bar after work.
Of course, no noir would be complete without a city editor riding our protagonist’s ass about filing a story. Ed Montgomery revels in his roll, “sleeves rolled up, tie undone, a porcine face that grew a magnificent shade of magenta whenever he got angry—and he was almost always angry.”
As a former newspaperman myself, Knipfel’s time writing for the New York Press helps lend a certain credence to his depiction of the business at the cusp of the information age. Baragon still has to occasionally get off his prodigious posterior to—in the parlance—slap some shoe leather in order to put his increasingly unhinged copy together.
At one point, lost in conspiratorial mania, he steals an atlas (an atlas!) to physically connect the dots of a far-fetched theory. At this remove, it comes off as quaint, and leads one to wonder just what sort of insane shit someone could concoct if all of the world’s information was at your fingertips. Oh. Oh, yea.
It would be a disservice to lay out all of the disparate points that Baragon connects like some fucked up The Family Circus dotted-line recap, but let’s just say it ends up containing proverbial multitudes. Godzilla? Check. An undersea toga-wearing real estate cult? Sure, why the fuck not? It is all certainly no stranger than imaging that the Democratic party was running a child sex trafficking ring out of the non-existent basement of a DC pizza parlor.
It seems that Knipfel has slowed down, his last novel, Residue, was published in 2015. Perhaps the retinitis pigmentosa that has plagued him his whole life has finally caught up with him, although his website claims that “his other senses have been honed to almost superhuman levels, save for those dulled flat by years of chain smoking, alcohol abuse, and punk rock.” It would be a shame if he is sitting these days out as he certainly had our number from the jump.
“Oh, all the conspiracies were evil and horrible and terrifying, yes—but where would they be without them? There has to be a certain tingle of superiority in knowing you were the only person in the world who really knew what the score was. Conspiracies, mover, also help make the normal redundancies of life a little more bearable. More than bearable even—they made things exciting.”
Also by this author:
These Children Who Come at You With Knives, and Other Fairy Tales: Stories
Román Leão 