One Foot off the Gutter

by Peter Plate

The time is 1996. Our narrator, Coddy, a policeman, is underpaid, sleep-deprived, and overweight. Coddy’s partner, Bellamy, is homeless, living out of their shared squad car, littering the back seat with his dirty underwear and empty cigarette packs. Free Box and Barbie are squatters who rob Rainbow Health Foods at gunpoint for something to eat. From the junkies openly shooting up on stoops to the homeless men with their fleets of shopping carts piled high with garbage, Peter Plate’s Mission District is "a catechism in destruction," one that doesn’t end until someone is apprehended for an unsolved crime. A story about inner-city, west coast gentrification at the end of the 20th century.

184 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Named a Literary Laureate of San Francisco in 2004, PETER PLATE taught himself to write fiction during eight years spent squatting in abandoned buildings. He is the author of many novels, beginning with Black Wheel of Anger (1990) and continuing through his seven neo-noir "psychic histories" of San Francisco, where he still lives and writes today.

Reviews

[Damien · Rating 1 out of 5]

I read this because I live in the area it's based on. In fact, I have lived in the Mission District of San Francisco off and on since 1989. I read it as if I had some obligation to, like going to see a friend's band play even if you don't like their music, or listening to the story of how a relative or roommate's day went; you really don't want to hear it, but you endure it all the same. Maybe this is one of those books that I should give two stars to because the writing was decent, and it wasn't the worse thing I could've read. Still, I didn't like it so there.

[Kenn Love · Rating 3 out of 5]

I bought this book after seeing that Mr. Plate had a series of 4 novels, beginning with this one, called the Mission Quartet published by Seven Stories Press. I somehow got the idea that the "Mission" in the title referred to a Rescue Mission, inferring homelessness, of which I have a history and am writing short stories about based upon that history. But it turns out it is a novel about the Mission District in San Francisco, and predominantly two police officers assigned to that district. And that proved intriguing to me in and of itself. The novel was okay. There were flashes of really good ideas. But it was jarringly sexually explicit in a few places and two characters talked about throughout the book disappeared from the finale altogether. A bit of a hot mess, but, as I stated, assorted passages showed promise, and kept me in line with taking the book seriously as I read it. I'm not sure I'll finish the Quartet, but I might.

[Francis Hall · Rating 1 out of 5]

Reading this turned out to be a total waste of time. I’m glad I didn’t buy his other novels at the same time.

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read like a slightly off-episode of The Wire that had ben set in San Francisco's Mission District.

Not the worst crime novel you'll ever read but certainly nowhere near the best.

I had read Plate's 2 earlier experimental novels 20 years or so ago - and remember enjoying them very much. His crime fiction very much less so.