“Trust me, Johnny.”
These words are passionately delivered to private investigator Johnny Wadd who lives in a world where trust is hard to come by. It’s a world where lifelong friends take paths that twist in different directions but end up in the same bottomed out gorge of Los Angeles in 1972, a world of painterly sunsets, sex, drugs, and murder. It’s a place the tortured Vietnam vet can navigate, but not without getting banged up and broken along the way.
Eight years after he wrapped production on his last feature, Bob Chinn decided to burn some creative energy by trying his hand at writing the kind of pulp detective novel he devoured by the dozens. With an established IP in Johnny Wadd, a character made famous in a series of films written and directed by Chinn and starring John Holmes, he was halfway there. And even with their meager budgets and limited shooting schedules, his detective films had been mostly set in exotic locations and were rife with two-fisted action to go along with the sex. From LA Chinatown to the Hawaiian Islands, and then to Mexico and back up to San Francisco, the Johnny Wadd series was much more geographically expansive than anything that could be found in adult cinema. So, for Bob Chinn, the ingredients that made for an entertaining detective yarn were familiar, but now there were only the four corners of a page to stop his imagination.
In Bob Chinn’s Flesh of the Lotus, the first in a planned series of detective novels that marks the filmmaker’s debut as an author of fiction, Wadd goes on the hunt for the murderer of ex-girlfriend Sheila Ross who washes up on a lonely beach one December morning with her throat cut from ear to ear. With the assistance of LAPD Detective George Lee, also close friends with Wadd and Sheila from early childhood up through high school, Wadd encounters high profile businesswoman Suzy Huang, crime kingpin Frankie Funai, and runs afoul of a couple of agents from the FBI and BNDD looking to muscle in on the case.
Obviously, there is a fair more room to fill in narrative details in the 200+ page novelization of Flesh of the Lotus than there was in the 60 minute film from 1971, most especially when most of those cinematic minutes were eaten up on sex. But Chinn doesn’t use the film’s framework to tell his story so much as he takes it down to its most essential elements and rebuilds it completely. The novel shares a few crucial details with the film such as the corpse being Wadd’s old flame, the lesbian roommate with a specific kink, and a shadowy Chinatown crime cabal. But Chinn unrolls and builds so much that most of the cinematic similarities burn off relatively quickly and the novel becomes its own beast entirely and falls completely in line with the type of literary pulp noir that influenced it. In the novel, Sheila is given a much richer backstory that lends itself to the overall story rather than her being a mere plot device as she was in the film, and her sad decline into rack and ruin is painted with more color and verve.
Chinn takes a great deal of time to soak in the natural beauty of 1972 Los Angeles, rendering it as its own character that’s recalled like a lost love. He uses a whole lot of El Lay space to expand the world of Wadd to include real locations and landmarks and an almost E.L. Docotrow approach to his characters mingling with historical figures (including, in one delicious piece of self-reflexiveness, Wadd showing up on the set of a Bill Margold shoot). Chinn sets us in warmly familiar territory by giving Wadd a beachfront pad that barely functions with its sparse selection of food, booze, and accoutrements, a lifestyle familiar to many a private eye living paycheck to paycheck. Chinn’s actual immersion into this setting, though, gives the book a little something that gets close to a sort of journalistic nostalgia. The interiors of everything come alive because Chinn, a man of great recall, frequented these places and soaked up enough of the atmosphere to where the opening of the floodgates of his mind causes every set piece to have a realism that’s lacquered with an adoring memory. Not for nothing, but this isn’t too dissimilar to what Quentin Tarantino would do years later with the novelization of his own film, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, itself a valentine to a long vanished Los Angeles, penned by its director where, quite coincidentally, Musso and Frank’s acts as a nexus location for both works.
During his entire run in the adult film industry (which was more or less the entire run of the adult film industry as its understood and known), story was key to Bob Chinn, and here he gets to lay it all out without any time constraints or budget to keep him back. If this causes him to get shaggy every now and again, so be it. He still has a keen sense of pacing where it counts. His narrative voice is direct and matter of fact but so earthy and friendly that his traverses into details about dishes, Chinese culture, and the interiors of restaurants and bars are like welcome off-roads traveled in trust, guided by someone who was in the thick of it all and remembers the parts worth remembering. And so much of Chinn’s own history is in Flesh of the Lotus, as well. The coin and stamp shop harkens back to one of Chinn’s earliest enterprises as a stamp magnate when he was barely into his double digits. Likewise, the book and record collection in Kathy Heller’s apartment mirrors the author’s own penchant for keeping a massive library of books, records, and the other finer things that make the world go round.
Additionally, Chinn speaks with a great authority when it comes to exotic dishes and food in general. Though Flesh of the Lotus sports a few steamy sex scenes that should be expected in a Johnny Wadd adventure, Mario Puzo’s original novel of The Godfather is probably a smuttier and trashier read. For about halfway through Flesh of the Lotus, the sex is mostly dropped altogether as the mechanics of the plot become the priority and the book becomes more culinary than carnal. As even his memoirs are festooned with exquisitely drawn passages about a wide variety of food and drink, I dare anyone to read anything Chinn has put to paper and not go away hungry.
Flesh of the Lotus is a very special novel that does great work establishing Chinn as a fine author in his own right, but also one that peels back some of the veneer to show just how much depth and detail could be mined in what was once thought of as disposable entertainment not fit for a polite society. The ultimate compliment that could be paid to this is that it be adapted into a mainstream period noir film with the sex scenes muted even further. This would prove Gloria Leonard’s theory that the Johnny Wadd series stood head and shoulders above a lot of adult films insofar that, if excised of its explicit material, there would still be a story left over. Not that this needed proving any further, mind you. Bob Chinn was always a great storyteller. But I’m glad he proved it again anyway.
Welcome back, Johnny Wadd.
(C) Copyright 2023, Patrick Crain
Apollo Twin 