Pomona Queen

by Kem Nunn

Lost in a southern California barrio, Earl Dean has a hard time believing there is one living soul in this foul-smelling night who wants to be found by a salesman hawking vacuum cleaners. What awaits Earl in the faint glow of a distant porch light is the world of Dan Brown.

Dan Brown's brother has been killed. Dan has plans to handle the revenge, and Earl has strayed into the crossfire. Dan is the last of the road warriors, a murderous, drug-crazed biker who only thinks of laws as things to break. But more than Buddy Brown lies dead in the moonlight. From a time when the valley was the hub of the nation's citrus industry to the defoliated sorry mess of today, it has come down to one fact. Earl Dean, broken-hearted vacuum cleaner salesman, owns the last single acre of orange groves in Pomona. And like his great-grandfather before him, he must come forward to claim his inheritance.

Genres: Fiction, Noir, Crime, Thriller, Mystery Thriller, Novels

236 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

About the author

Kem Nunn (born 1948) is an American fiction novelist, surfer, magazine and television writer from California. His novels have been described as "surf-noir" for their dark themes, political overtones and surf settings. He is the author of five novels, including his seminal surf novel Tapping the Source. He received an MFA in Creative Writing from UC Irvine.

He has collaborated with producer David Milch on the HBO Western drama series Deadwood. Milch and Nunn co-created the HBO series John from Cincinnati, a surfing series set in Imperial Beach, California which premiered on June 10, 2007. He has also written for season 5 of Sons of Anarchy.

Reviews

[Ruthiella · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’ve had this book for decades. I’m glad I hung on to it, however. It was ultimately worth reading. It is a modern noir story set in the Pomona Valley in the late 1980s. A seemingly hapless vacuum cleaner salesman makes a sales call in the wrong part of town which turns out to be life changing. Earl Dean, the salesman, hasn’t seen the sociopath Danny Brown since maybe shortly after high school in the late ’60s, between one of Danny’s many stints in prison. Now he is Danny’s living room where there is a corpse in the dining room, demonstrating the Cyclone Air Purifier vacuum and trying not to piss his pants in fear. Normally I don’t really like this kind of story, sort of a noir crime novel combined with screwball comedy. But I found that the present-day events interspersed with Earl’s childhood and the history of the valley helped break up the tension of the darkness and violence.

F.P. Brackett, from whose History of Pomona Valley an excerpt is quoted above each chapter, was a real person and that book is part of the permanent collection of the Pomona Public Library. I grew up in the valley and was able to spot most of the landmarks and streets, even if a few are no longer in existence now, thirty years later. Nunn definitely got the history cum myth of Pomona down right, the self-importance of the rise and fall of white Americans who “settled” the valley while ignoring or suppressing stories of the Spanish, Mexican, indigenous, and anyone else who didn’t fit in their narrative of manifest destiny; the myth of a glorious past, much tarnished upon closer inspection.

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

A vacuum salesman makes the wrong stop and gets drawn into an encounter that puts him face to face with a psychopath and in direct grappling with his past, both his own and the squandered history of the Pomona Valley. Terrifying and sad at once this is a look at American decline, a character study, and suspenseful adventure occurring on one very long night. This never goes where you expect so enjoy the ride don’t try to guess what's next.

[WJEP · Rating 3 out of 5]

The gimmick is that the dick-weed vacuum-cleaner salesman, Earl Dean, is also a lay-historian of Pomona. So the main story is interspersed with nostalgic vignettes about the settlement of Pomona Valley. The main story is about Dean getting mixed up with a dusted psycho biker who is trying to avenge his brother's murder. Dean is in wrong spot at the wrong time

"You try to run away again, you’re dead meat."

I wanted more biker mayhem. Instead, I got stoner musings on "karmic closure" "angelic cryptography" "the curvature of time" and "the theology of hope."

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Dean had, by this stage of the game, seen a number of stiffs. Most, however , had appeared in shining coffins, surrounded by freshly cut flowers and bore little resemblance to what the bikie had in his house. This body was naked and white, stretched out upon a bed of ice in a large red freezer with the words Coca-Cola, and beneath that the phrase "Things go better with Coke," in white script across the side."

[Neven · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kem Nunn's stories are supremely strange, combining the simplest and lowest cliches of Americana with bizarrely violent situations. It's all a bit hard to categorize or recommend. Above it all, however, rises Nunn's own style, gripping enough to make any story work. Here, a tale of a vacuum-cleaner salesman sharing with trailer-trash bikers a night of drunken revenge becomes a modern-day adaptation of the history of Pomona, CA. A book that's hard to like but easy to love.

[Carlos · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ken Nunn is a very good writer and zeroes in on the dysfunctional, sometimes brutal, always shortsighted elements of society. This is a very good book but it is hard to take if the reader is particularly empathetic.

[Gregory Frost · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was my introduction to the fiction of Kem Nunn. The book unfurls like a dusty, nasty indie film. Well worth your time if you like dusty California noirs.

[Peter · Rating 2 out of 5]

Reading Pomona Queen in 2019, it feels very much a product of the 90s. Pynchon‘s Lot 49 mixed with Coen Brothers absurdly dark violence and Bret Easton Ellis nihilism. In maybe another postmodern touch (or just sloppiness), it’s hard to pin down what decade this takes place in. I’m guessing late 80s, but there are door-to-door vacuum salesmen, greasers, nostalgia for orange groves of the prewar era, all mixed in with punk clubs and speed metal.

For a book with trappings of an epic imagining of the context of the Pomona Valley, it has a surprisingly limited perspective. Each chapter starts with an epigraph from a history of the city, chosen to ironically call out the historian’s racist attitudes toward the “degenerate” natives and the worthless Mexicans and Chinese. Yet Pomona Queen does not engage at all with the these populations outside of casual mentions of roadside orange sellers, prostitutes, or the “bad” black side of town. Every character in the book is white, and they travel in white spaces, bemoaning the failure of the orchard owners and city planner to avert the white flight that turned the city into an apocalyptic ghetto. Maybe that’s the joke, but it doesn’t hit home the way it should. And that may be giving the author too much credit.

[Brad · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not a very good book. I mean, I enjoyed it, but compared to Nunn's other work this one pales. The protagonist's obsession with "the one who got away", hell, with everything that he has lost in life, gets really tiresome. The history of Pomona, the orchards and all, is really interesting but I assume most of it is fiction, if not all of it, so in the end I don't think I was educated on anything. The main plot line isn't much of thriller. It almost feels like an outline for what could be a really compelling movie, but reads really poorly.

All in all I'd say you could safely skip this one unless you are a Kem Nunn diehard for some reason. Read Tapping the Source and Dogs of Winter instead.

[Umberto Rossi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lansdale in California? Forget Texas, we are in Pomona Valley. It begins like black comedy and there's some comedic episodes scattered throughout the book, with the demented hoodlum Dan Brown (not the author of the Da Vinci Code...) towering at the centre of the plot, but then it's the history of Pomona and its valley, the history of California, the story of a family, and a remarkable set of characters sketched with enough poison in the ink (well, it may be one of those pre-word-processor novels).
Ah, and it is also a quite good crime novel, with some surprises here and there. And vacuum cleaners galore!

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

For me the story is not so important when I read Kem Nunn. It's the descriptions that get me. The tortured characters, the history of place and of less-than-perfect-but-not-defeated people caught in bizarre-but-somehow-expected circumstances in landscapes no one really sees. This one had no surf, but who cares,

"It occurred to him as well that he had, after all, been working in the realm of the incomprehensible most of his life."

[Scott Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great Dark History of Pomona

This is a very good book wherever you grew up but if you grew up in Pomona during the time this book describes, it’s going to resonate. The main character is like the city then, hopeful but dilapidated and sad. He and I would be about the same age, I think so I could see, feel and smell the Pomona where I delivered the Progress Bulletin newspaper and worked in a liquor store.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent secondhand find, though the prose is comma crazy and full of exposition. Captures a time and place and its deep history without losing focus too much for too long. Dan Brown is someone we've all known and been bullied by, only to see him get his in the same ironic ending familiar to all gunfighters

[Kenwyn Whitford · Rating 5 out of 5]

ANYTHING from Kem Nunn. I believe I'm caught up reading all his novels and I have not been disappointed even once!

[James Robert · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was an okay book, although if you are a fan of the author's other work, it does feel a little bit like he is fighting below his weight class. One of Nunn's skills has always been able to weave in a part of California into the tapestry of this story. And while it was done again here, it was not done in the same powerful, vivid manner that I have come to expect after Tapping the Source and Dogs of Winter. In fact, the novel feels like Nunn lite: almost one of his novels but not quite there, a little watered down. The plot doesn't hit solidly like the author's other work, nor does the ending feel as finite. Or put another way, this feels like another author's debut novel, where it hints at the greatness of the writing style but we have to wait for the follow up novel to be satiated.

Is the book still worth the read? Sure, it is pretty decent, in fact it isn't that it is a bad novel, just not a great one. The recipe is just a little office, but Nunn's books, to me, are a lot like pizza, even a bad one does more than just fill the hunger. But if you are getting ready to read one of the author's books for the first time, do yourself a favor and pick up Tapping the Source first.

[Brian Mott · Rating 5 out of 5]

Actually read this long ago but in doing some browsing just say review of it, someone rating it poorly and saying he figured most of the history of pomona in it was fiction. The demise of the orange groves, the high hopes of the Pomona Mall and its decline, the Alibi bar, the canyon life of North Clairmont, and most definitely the locally famed Midway bar (the college hang out of the 60's and the biker dive it ended as. All sadly true. I felt I must have seen Kem some wasted nights I was there.
But most important all the metaphysical questions he takes his major and minor characters into. I have bought, read and given this book away 3 times, Just found an original orange crate picture hard cover edition I plan to keep - at least until someone deserving comes around.

[Dan Downing · Rating 3 out of 5]

The last time I met a literary vacuum cleaner salesman was in maybe 1962 when I found Graham Greene's "Our Man in Havana". That is one of Greene's 'entertainments'. It stands tall today.
Mr. Nunn's salesman brings with him a history, that of F.P. Brackett, wherein F.P. writes of Pomona and its environs. Each chapter is headed by F.P.B.
As for the novel itself, it could be made much shorter---perhaps a short story---if the descriptions of the protagonist's mental discussions were removed. As it stands there is a noir thriller/comedy encased in literary wool-gathering. In short, one could do much worse but also much better. The writing is fine, the tensions real, the villains evil.

[Jennifer]

This book seems tripartite to me; there's the immediate story of the vacuum salesman in the night, and it's very gripping, there's the backstory of the history of Pomona and the family decline and the nostalgia, which I mostly like, and then there's just a ton of metaphysical and poetic stuff which I like much less. It's just too much. I'm also skeeved out by the middle aged dude perving on the 19-year-old.

[Richard Kravitz · Rating 5 out of 5]

My second Kem Nunn book. I liked it as well ask "Tapping the Source". A quick read (3 days) and some cool historical info on the Pomona Area, which I know a bit as my wife's grandmother lived in Claremont.

A pretty cool story, not as graphic sexually as Tapping the Source, and not even as violent. They did share the same type of gnarly people, but the Huntington beach scene was earlier, 70's maybe. This story seemed to be in the 90's.

[S.B. Gilfillan · Rating 5 out of 5]

After reading Tapping the Source I was an instant fan of Kem Nunn, and I've enjoyed this and other titles as well.

[Travis Waddell · Rating 3 out of 5]

first novel endures seasons
second maybe a week or so
pomona queen spans one night
that’s chinatown

[Jack Heath]

Synopsis: lost in a California barrio, Earl Dean is trying to sell vacuums. He meets Dan Brown who wants to revenge his brother's death.

[Leslie · Rating 3 out of 5]

While I can’t gush over the book, I did really enjoy it. It was a fun adventure filled with sketchy characters, depressed surroundings and good old fashioned violence. See my full review here.

[Sylvia Richardson · Rating 5 out of 5]

If the opening chapter of this book does not reel you in, you are immune to the pleasures of noir with a twist of humor. I am not! Loved every minute of this sparkling gem set in the blingy fool’s gold that is Los Angeles.

[Shoshi]

I liked the descriptions of LA, and the history, but just not my type of story.

[Heidi · Rating 4 out of 5]

school's out! time for reading for fun!!!

[Mundy Carroll · Rating 2 out of 5]

meh