Poet, Sleuth, and Scout: The Noir World of Clay Blackburn
Owen Hill’s The Giveaway: The Clay Blackburn Story brings together three novels and a short story featuring the poet-sleuth-book scout Clay Blackburn—a singular character navigating the margins of Berkeley, California, where radical politics, literary ephemera, and existential mystery intertwine. This omnibus serves as both an introduction and a definitive edition of Hill’s genre-defying protagonist, whose adventures blend noir sensibility with bohemian intrigue.
Clay Blackburn is an unlikely detective. Unlicensed, introspective, and bisexual, he moves fluidly between poetry readings and shadowy investigations, driven less by justice than by curiosity, conscience, and the unfinished business of self-understanding. His literary sensibilities sharpen rather than dull his moral ambiguity, and Hill crafts his interior world with both empathy and irony. As a book scout, Blackburn combs through Berkeley’s vast landscape of used bookstores and forgotten shelves—an apt metaphor for his deeper pursuit of meaning in a city where every surface seems to conceal a subtext.
Berkeley is more than a backdrop—it’s a living character in these stories. Hill renders the city’s contradictions with affection and precision: its activist roots and academic pretensions, its street-level weirdness and weathered idealism. From well-worn cafes to bureaucratic corridors and anarchist bookshops, Hill captures a locale steeped in history and resistance, infusing the collection with a grounded yet dreamlike texture.
Supporting Blackburn is a rogue’s gallery of allies and foils that recall the tight-knit ensembles of Dashiell Hammett. There’s Marvin, a leftist mercenary with dubious scruples and surprising loyalty; Bailey Dao, an ex-FBI agent whose pragmatic edge complements Blackburn’s wavering moral compass; and Dino Centro, part Lothario, part trickster, whose charm barely conceals his opportunism. These characters move through Hill’s narratives with wit and pathos, elevating each case beyond mere plot mechanics into reflections on loyalty, ideology, and the shifting definitions of heroism.
Hill’s prose is taut yet lyrical, infused with deadpan humor and the melancholic tinge of classic noir. But rather than mimic the genre, he reinterprets it. The moral ambiguity of Hill’s world isn’t just a stylistic flourish—it’s a reflection of real, contemporary uncertainty. Questions of corporate corruption, identity politics, and emotional dislocation ripple through these tales, challenging both protagonist and reader to confront a world that refuses tidy conclusions.
The Giveaway isn’t merely a collection of mysteries—it’s a meditation on the act of searching itself. Clay Blackburn is forever investigating: people, systems, poetry, himself. In doing so, Hill gives readers a noir hero for the 21st century—flawed, principled, unsure, and deeply human.
Owen Hill has written a smart, stylish, and subversive contribution to contemporary noir. The Giveaway invites us into a world where the border between art and crime is porous, and where the most compelling mysteries are internal. For fans of literary noir and California counterculture, this collection is not to be missed.
You can purchase The Giveaway at PM Press
While a resident of New York City, Richard Modiano became active in the literary community connected to the Poetry Project where he came to know Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, William S. Burroughs and Ted Berrigan. In 2001 he was a programmer at Beyond Baroque Literary/Arts Center, joined the Board of Trustees in 2006, and from 2010 to 2019, he served as Executive Director. The Huffington Post named him as one of 200 people doing the most to promote poetry in the United States. Modiano is the winner of the 2022 Joe Hill Prize for labor poetry and is a Pushcart Prize nominee.
