Doubtless you’ve never heard of him, but he turned out 59 (or 60 by some counts, but what’s one more book here or there?) non-fiction works and novels in his all too brief lifetime. Joe Gober Nazel died this past August of brain cancer at the age of 62. At one point, according to my friend the columnist Steven Ivory, Joe had studied to be a priest but somehow got sidetracked and wound up in the Air Force during the Vietnam War -- or maybe it was the other way around. How quixotically appropriate for a man who would eventually write paperback originals such as Black Exorcist, bios of Thurgood Marshall and crusading anti-lynching journalist Ida B. Wells, Death for Hire, and the Iceman series.

I first met Joe in the mid-seventies at a time when I was in college trying to break into the field not as a writer but as an artist. I wanted to do book covers, comic books, and especially TV Guide covers because in those days the publication had great illustrators like Bob Peak and Bernie Fuchs doing work for them.

Anyway, through a mutual friend we went over to Joe’s pad in L.A.’s Leimert Park. We talked about me getting in to see the art director at Holloway House, the local publisher for whom Joe churned out all those books for all those years. If my memory is right, he was in the middle of doing some sort of soft-core porn book that day we were over. For Holloway House enjoys a certain notoriety because it was also the publisher of Donald Goines, who in death has achieved recognition denied him when he was alive. Goines, who was a junkie and hustler, wrote with a elemental authenticity about that life and two of his novels, the direct-to-video Crime Partners and Never Die Alone starring rapper DMX, have been filmed.

Joe, Goines and the other Holloway House farm team member, Robert Beck, known to his stable as Iceberg Slim, a former pimp turned scribe, infused their works with an urban realism that has spawned what is today called Ghetto Lit. But it was Joe who captured the pulpness of the Blaxploitation era in his Henry Highland "Iceman" West books. How to describe this cat? Part private eye, part Punisher, part cool-ass Donald Trump, if the Donald were capable of being so. The Iceman runs a gambling and hedonistic playground called the Oaisis in the Nevada desert. His bodyguards are these deadly kung fu/explosive expert babes and his main man is the XXL Christmas Tree -- I kid you not.

"Ice put the wine glass to his lips. The wine was now warm. He turned and started back into his office. His steps seemed firm and sure. But he knew different. He could fool the rest of the world but he could no longer jive himself. The Iceman was melting from fatigue."

Joe got me in to see the art director at Holloway House, but the dude wasn’t exactly excited upon viewing my portfolio. Nor was his the only such opinion regarding my artwork and after a series of such rejections, I broke my pencils and threw out my acrylics and turned to words to paint my stories. It would be some years later when me and Joe’s paths would cross again.

By then Joe, who also did articles for local newspapers such as the Wave, the Post and the Sentinel, was also an editor at Players magazine. No, the title doesn’t refer to basketball or poker. But back in the day a player was, you know, a playah as in "Don’t hate the player, hate the game." It was (and still is) a black Playboy published by Holloway House’s parent company. Joe also did short stories for the magazine, and they ranged from his crime tales to science fiction.

Joe gave my first book, Violent Spring, some love in the pages of Players. This was the early nineties and by then he wasn’t writing his novels anymore. I asked him about this once during a phone conversation and he said he was tapped, but if a good idea came to him, he’d get back to it. Neither of us said it, but I’m sure that he was frustrated he wasn’t getting the attention that Goines was starting to get then, and the paltry advances he got from Holloway House didn’t bolster morale or the bank account either.

Like Jim Thompson and others before him, Joe toiled in the paperback grindhouse, and never escaped. That’s not always a bad thing, but given that Holloway House was the sort of title you’d find at Continental Trailways bus stations, Thrifty drug stores (which is where I bought mine growing up in South Central L.A.) and newsstands next to the porno racks, promotion was not much of a factor.

Recently it was announced that an outfit named Bandit Films had optioned one of Joe’s Iceman novels, the Spinning Target. The plot concerns Ice coming to Hollywood and having to deal with a group of gangsters running an entertainment company – "The Spy Who Loved Me meets Death Row Records" is the logline Leonard King, an editor at Holloway House, used to described the plot. Maybe it’ll get made or maybe not, but here’s hoping that Joe Nazel’s works carry on after him. That his paperback originals aren’t consigned to the dust heap but reprinted and repackaged for future fans of this tough, terse undiscovered writer.

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