In 2003 novelist and playwright Joe Meno, like Billy Argo, the protagonist of his new novel, The Boy Detective Fails, was about to turn 30, and he recalls feeling that “everything seemed really gray, not personally, but just looking at the world.” He felt America had made progress in the 90s and it had been wiped away by the Bush administration, the September 11 attacks, and the looming war in Iraq.
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This, he says, led to the formation in his head of a certain character, someone seemingly washed up early in adulthood. That might seem like an odd leap, but at the time Meno was probably also thinking a lot about the pressures of early success. He sold his first novel to Saint Martin’s Press at age 22, and his second, How the Hula Girl Sings, was published by HarperCollins four years later. Both did fairly well, but he was increasingly frustrated with the lack of control he had over the process, from editing to jacket design, and by the increasingly marginalized place literary fiction held in the industry at large. When his HarperCollins editor quit shortly after Hula came out, he says, “I felt like there weren’t a lot of options for me there either, unless I was going to become a professional wrestler.” He abandoned the New York publishing universe for the upstart local Punk Planet Books imprint in 2003. His third novel and first for Punk Planet, Hairstyles of the Damned, has since sold 70,000 copies, making him a hero of indie lit.
The fleshing out resulted in a play about a former kid sleuth confronting adulthood and the mysterious suicide of his little sister. It was far more complex than any Meno had written before, with numerous set changes, an introductory film, and onstage snowfall. He knew House Theatre of Chicago playwright Phil Klapperich through Columbia College, where both attended grad school (and where Meno now teaches), and had enjoyed what he’d seen of the company’s shows, expansive mythical tales like their “Valentine Trilogy,” which incorporated live music and video. It was “like seeing a blockbuster onstage,” he says. “And I thought, if anybody could produce this thing it would be these guys.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Marty Perez.
