Down and Out on Murder Mile: A Novel

After exhausting their resources in the slums of Los Angeles, a junkie and his wife settle in London's "murder mile," the city's most violent and criminally corrupt section. Persevering past failed treatments, persistent temptation, urban ennui, and his wife's ruinous death wish, the nameless narrator fights to reclaim his life.In prose that could peel paint from a car, Tony O'Neill re-creates the painfully comic, often tragic days of a recovering heroin addict.

From Publishers Weekly

Novelist O'Neill (Digging the Vein), a recovered heroin addict and lapsed rocker, draws on his experiences for this fast-paced, compulsively readable (if occasionally self-indulgent) portrait of a young would-be rocker junkie. After most of his belongings are repossessed (or sold for drug money) and his wife Susan admits to embezzling thousands of dollars from her company to support their habit, the unnamed narrator and his wife flee Los Angeles for his former home in England. There, he tries frantically to plug back into the London drug and music scenes and struggles to get clean. Fighting violent withdrawal symptoms, living in squalor on London's infamous Clapton Road (aka Murder Mile) and grappling with a sadistic and controlling rehab doctor, O'Neill's antihero paints a grim, bloody picture of compulsive self-destruction. As veteran of half a dozen bands (including the Brian Jonestown Massacre), O'Neill gives himself too much space to voice his professional grievances, and there's a tendency to name-drop. Still, the novel's consistent tone of urgency and desperation creates a gritty world of its own that compels despite its flaws. (Nov.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

At 21, the nameless narrator of Murder Mile, with a broken marriage and a broken career behind him, faces a burgeoning heroin habit and a new marriage to a fellow junkie. Their downward spiral into squalor and desperation, first in L.A. and then in a dangerous neighborhood in London, is rendered in exquisitely precise prose. Once a musician with a promising career, the narrator now has no qualms about pawning his gear, running scams for money, and spending entire days and nights frantically looking for drugs. Collapsed veins and exhausted funds drive the couple to a methadone clinic, where Susan must put on a “crying, begging routine” to get them into a program, and they must follow a strict set of byzantine rules to stay in it. Having found a tenuous stability, he eventually takes a job with a music magazine, forms a new band, and falls in love. As with other titles in the annals of addiction, such as Naked Lunch (1962) and Permanent Midnight (1995), the hell of addiction is made as visceral as the hell of sobriety. --Joanne Wilkinson

MetroThe continuation of O’Neill’s autobiographical debut, Digging the Vein (2006), even more caustic than its predecessor...whip-smart...Call it a junkie fairy tale: Boy meets girl, gets clean and lives. The whole truth with no reservations: not a pretty story, but a rare telling.

“Down and Out on Murder Mile doesn’t disappoint if you’re looking for a visceral, grisly experience...Fans of Irvine Welsh and Warren Ellis are sure to enjoy this dark, disturbing journey.”

Publishers Weekly

“Fast-paced, compulsively readable portrait of a young would-be rocker junkie…the novel’s consistent tone of urgency and desperation creates a gritty world of its own that compels.”

Scott Heim, author of Mysterious Skin and We Disappear

“Tony O’Neill is one of my favorite new writers, and DOWN AND OUT ON MURDER MILE is his best book yet. In O’Neill’s wizardlike hands, all the drugs and sex, the fierce fights and shouts and blaring rock & roll, amount to a story both horrifying and beautiful.”

Josh Kilmer-Purcell, author of Candy Everybody Wants and I Am Not Myself These Days

“Finishing DOWN AND OUT ON MURDER MILE hurts. O’Neill paints a vividly original picture of addiction and recovery that made my veins thirst and my heart worry.”

From the Back Cover

After exhausting their resources in the slums of Los Angeles, a junkie and his wife settle in London's "murder mile," the city's most violent and criminally corrupt section. Persevering past failed treatments, persistent temptation, urban ennui, and his wife's ruinous death wish, the nameless narrator fights to reclaim his life.In prose that could peel paint from a car, Tony O'Neill re-creates the painfully comic, often tragic days of a recovering heroin addict.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Down and Out on Murder MileA NovelBy Tony O'NeillHarperCollins Publishers, Inc.Copyright © 2008 Tony O'NeillAll right reserved.ISBN: 9780061582868Chapter OneThey Go Together Like a Horse and CarriageThe first time I met Susan she overdosed on a combination of Valium and Ecstasy at a friend's birthday party at a Motel 6 on Hollywood Boulevard. My friends Sal, RP, and I dragged her blue face down to the 5:00 A.M. Hollywood streets below, and the filthy predawn drizzle on her face somehow brought her round. She blinked up at us and said: "I need a beer. And I want to shoot some pool."I married her six months later. I had one broken marriage, one broken musical career, and a burgeoning heroin habit to contend with. I had nowhere I wanted to be, and neither did she. Without a strong pull in any other direction we decided to go down together.I married my second wife the day the dissolution of marriage from the first disaster became final: we did it in the home of a Dominican notary public near Koreatown, having shot the last of our heroin and furiously smoked the last of the crack in the car parked outside. I was twenty-one years old.Before the wedding we stopped at the storefront needle exchange on Cahuenga between Hollywood and Sunset. I wore a suit that had a few bloodstains on it and Susan wore a crumpled white dress. We dressed like that because the whole thing seemed slightly perverse to start off with, so why not go all out? Inside we received a few sideways glances, but nothing more. Needle exchanges are like porno bookstores or public toilets. Nobody wants to talk or even make eye contact unless it is absolutely necessary. The exchange had a front room where you could watch TV or get access to the Internet, as well as a table you could pick up lube and condoms at. I suppose that must have been for the meth freaks. In the back was a desk with a flip-top container for ¬people to dump used needles into, and a storeroom full of syringes of all shapes and sizes. We used the standard Terumo 28 gauge ½ cc insulin needles because we were new at this and our veins were not too screwed up yet. We had not yet begun to inject into our groins, necks, or the backs of our knees. But there was still time.Todd was a dreadlocked ex-junkie who worked the exchange on Wednesdays. He had been in Narcotics Anonymous for almost ten years. He was a good guy, one of the few ¬people I knew in recovery who still gave a shit and tried to help those still strung out in a practical way. He doled out needles and advice every week for four hours on a strictly volunteer basis. He eyed us up and down as we dumped the old needles and requested a new hundred-count box."What's with the outfits?" He half smiled. "You two getting married or something?""Yup. We're on out way there now.""Yeah." Todd sighed, sliding the box across to us, "Well, you know, congratulations."My wife-to-be was a heroin-addicted thirty-two-year-old accountant. We married to keep me in the country as we were having such a good time getting high together. Meeting Susan was the moment that my drug use ceased to be a healthy product of my youth and recklessness and started to become the only thing that mattered to me. That old, drunken Irish fatalism that had been with me throughout my life suddenly resurfaced, and it was no longer enough to be high and having a good time. I needed to be higher. I needed to feel my heart pounding so hard it seemed as if it might burst loose from my ribcage. I needed to feel the palpitations and see my vision blurring, doubling. I needed to know that Death was here, in the room, and that I was too fast, too young, and too smart for him.In the beginning we drove around in her eggshell-blue eighties Mercedes with the top rolled down, blasting punk rock from her tape player and pulling over to get high. We always had enough drugs. Heroin. Crack. Methamphetamine. We woke up and did drugs. We did drugs until we passed out. And the money was always there, the money I made writing music videos and the money she had saved from accounting jobs. The money would never run out, it seemed. And for her dollars, Susan had bought someone as completely into the idea of total destruction as she. It wasn't love, but there was the unspoken agreement that we would eventually die together.The wedding was as brief and perfunctory as one could imagine. The house was a dimly lit, ramshackle little place. We signed the papers, high and twitchy, and since we didn't have any friends the old woman called her daughter, or her granddaughter, downstairs to act as witness. She was around sixteen years old and pissed off about being dragged away from her TV shows. She looked at us, silently chewing gum, and we shot back big stoned smiles at her. The whole thing was over in minutes. This now marked the second time that I had married someone while I was out of my mind on drugs. The first time was a rush job in Vegas to a vengeful blonde while ripped on booze and crystal meth. And now here, two years later, junked out of my brain and spun from smoking crack. I started singing Wagner's "Bridal Chorus" as we staggered out of the place and back into Susan's car.We were renting a place in one of the poorer parts of Hollywood, a shabby building populated with burned-out drinkers and stoic old Armenian women. We moved in and never unpacked, so everything sat in cardboard boxes. The furniture that Susan had kept from her last divorce was stacked up in one corner, giving the apartment the look of someplace completely uninhabited by the living. The shades were drawn all day long. The only furniture we ever used was the couch, the coffee table where we divided the drugs, the television, and the filthy bed that we lay in moaning and cursing whenever the smack ran out.Continues...Excerpted from Down and Out on Murder Mileby Tony O'Neill Copyright © 2008 by Tony O'Neill. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

About the Author

Tony O'Neill is the author of Digging the Vein and Down and Out on Murder Mile, and the coauthor of Neon Angel and the New York Times bestseller Hero of the Underground. He lives in New York with his wife and daughter.

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