Book review #38: One Shot

Open and shutter case?

One Shot: A Beat Generation Mystery by Oliver Harris (Moloko Print, 2024)

I’M NEITHER a regular reader nor a reviewer of detective stories, but one thing my native intelligence communicates fairly instinctively: to give away the outcome for consumers of this popular genre would be an unforgivable, possibly fatal, error. I might even end up in the East River.

So I approach Oliver Harris’ One Shot, the account of his latest, and quite meticulously pursued, academic investigation with great care. After all, the title is a sharp pun in itself and could easily serve time as the name of a genuine private eye thriller.

The shot in this case, however, is not the fictional discharge of a handgun nor the imagined crack of a sniper’s rifle, rather the actual click of a camera shutter many, many decades ago.

But the subtitle of this piece – A Beat Generation Mystery – maintains the deception, continues the conceit, suggesting we might have a Chandler-esque challenge or a Hammett-like head-scratcher on our hands. And perhaps we have…

Of course, if you know a little bit of the subcultural background, there were several significant incidents that emerged from the wrong side of the law which the Beat crowd were forced to manage in a frantic mid-century: criminal blowups which might have wrecked the possibility of a new literary scene ever emerging at all.

Think David Kammerer’s unlawful killing by Lucien Carr with Kerouac as accomplice; consider Ginsberg’s incarceration in a mental asylum as penance for his attachment to a stolen goods ring; remember Burroughs’ accidental yet deeply reckless behaviour that would lead to Joan Vollmer’s tragic demise. And that’s not to mention the frequent threat of drug busts and the various jail terms endured by Huncke, Corso and Cassady around this time.

Thus matters of whodunnit – and why – are never so far away from the lives of the central Beat family. Yet Harris’ attractively-presented and helpfully-illustrated work presents a mystery with a different spin: no illegality but key information about this quixotic literary group tangled in the knotty ball of a single photograph.

The kind of tangle that Harris attempts to extricate is esoteric indeed as our esteemed Eng Lit professor chases answers to questions apparently frozen and locked in the aspic of time, pursuing arcane angles which you might well assume have been washed away in the inexorable tide of the past.

The field researcher is all too ready to concede the scale of the task. In a dear reader moment, very early on, our smart, yet always readable, sleuth remarks: ‘I know what you are thinking. What! A whole book about this one snap that everybody already knows? He really has lost his mind or at least all sense of perspective…’

Pictured above: Hal Chase, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs framed in Harris’ ‘Group Picture’ in 1940s New York City

And I have do have to say this: the conundrum at the heart of this mini-drama is not the stuff the general reader is going to happily chomp on. This enquiry concerns the quest for Beat facts so esoteric, so minuscule at times, that you will probably have to be a fully signed-up member of this literary movement’s fan club to want to dive in.

Yet, if you are, you will! For the snapshot that Harris examines with an eagle eye, a mental acuity, an academic’s loyalty to the truth, is pretty damn gripping if you are already a willing wanderer on the wild side inhabited by these radical, would-be novelists and poets in the New York City of the 1940s.

For – and this is one of the few minutiae I will share – this particular project focuses on the only, yes the only, image which captures all three of the unholy triumvirate – Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs – in the same frame, a fact that most certainly surprised this scribe and may shock you, too.

But when was it taken, where was it taken, why was it taken, who took it and what other evidence can be teased from this fairly standard portrait of a gang of friends lining-up before any of them were famous?

The image Harris categorises as the ‘Group Picture’ will be familiar to most followers of this subterranean world but its actual genesis is tricky to identify and its associated meanings, you will discover, are multiple yet far from easy to pin down.

The author, one of the world’s most respected Burroughs specialists and an expert on the Beat scene more generally, follows these queries with a dedication and a commitment that is fascinatingly obsessive, breathtakingly thorough and, in the end, pleasingly productive.

Suffice to say that once Harris has worked out the slant of the sunrays on the sidewalk setting, the angle at which the Isle of Manhattan sits in relation to the global north-south axis, calculated the fall of snow stats for various seasons and interrogated every facial, physical and sartorial component on display, a slice of enticingly engaging and deliciously original psychogeography is laid before us. Or maybe we should dub it more accurately photoarchaeology.

Yet, throughout the trawl, as the lead investigator visits archives and libraries, writes to transatlantic friends, stares at contact sheets, fires off speculative emails and paces the very sidewalks featured in the black-and-white pic under scrutiny, he remains refreshingly down-to-earth and reassuringly honest with his audience.

At the end of his mission and towards the finale of the book, Harris candidly remarks: ‘What would my therapist say, if I had a therapist? Maybe they would ask: what is the secret in the form of One Shot? Depending how you look at it, this is either a triumphant tour de force, a virtuoso performance of scholarly ingenuity and passion, or an indulgent self-parody, a reductio ad absurdum of academic work.’

I suspect that keen followers of this history will see this not as an OCD indulgence, a dead-end odyssey of fine details but ultimate futility, rather a careful unpacking of a multi-faceted visual riddle of which we were barely aware until Harris turned his avid attention to the hidden layers of an iconic image. For them, this dedicated decoding will prove a treat.

See also: ‘Queer thinking: Harris’ movie takes’, January 16th, 2025