Philadelphia Weekly

There could be a sniper's rifle trained on stocky Duane Swierczynski's head right now. The woman at the next table in the Starbucks on 16th and Walnut (giving us nervous glances as we talk about sticking fingers in bullet wounds and slicing fingers open like over-ripe bananas) could be a trained gymnast assassin working for the lunatic-staffed and Patriot Act-sanctioned rogue intelligence agency based on the 36th floor of the office tower at 1919 Market.

It's entirely possible that she'll paralyze us both with kung fu jabs, sling Swierczynski over her shoulder, get in an elevator then kick him through a window with a belt tied round his leg and attached to a desk, just to exploit his recently confessed fear of "being on the edge of a tall building, having two seconds of madness, jumping, and then changing my mind."

Or we could be suddenly pancaked by a mute Irish bank robber driven Subaru that comes crashing through the front window after being T-boned by a mysterious speeding white van that may or may not be on a mission from the Russian mafia.

Welcome to Duane's World.

Duane Swierczynski is the 36-year-old crime novelist who, in three short, super-readable and increasingly daft and brutal books, has turned Philly into the capital of psycho noir.

Swierczynski's first big seller, The Wheelman, starts with a Wachovia bank robbery gone wrong. It set the critics gibbering. ("Wheelmen don't eat quiche," badum-tished one reviewer.)

His next novel, The Blonde, was about an explosive nanobot-spreading bottle-blond Typhoid Mary and the men she infects. It has sold shitloads and--fingers firmly crossed--is making its way to film.

But it's his latest, Severance Package, that's really put the cat among the Philly pigeons. Last October, after four years as editor of PW's rival alt-weekly City Paper, Swierczynski quit. The big question: Did he jump--or was he pushed?

He says jumped, but hints he saw a push coming. Not that he gives a fuck anyway. On top of his royalties and film rights, he's also got a contract with Marvel comics to bring The Punisher to Philly in 2009. 

Severance Package is about a spy agency operating out a Broad Street skyscraper (a thinly disguised Philadelphia Magazine) where the boss decides to downsize his staff with sarin gas, bullets and poisoned mimosas. About five plot twists later, it turns into a "spy thriller crossed with a slasher movie" as a lunatic "Jason with tits" offs the boss and then imaginatively tortures and psycho-slaughters her colleagues to win the approval of CCTV-watching superiors.

But Swierczynski says that Severance Package has nothing to do with his leaving City Paper. And that none of the deeply flawed spooks who get hideously mutilated and slaughtered in its pages resemble any of his former colleagues or employees in any way. Of course we believe him.

Born and raised in Frankford (the house he grew up in, 4738 Darrah Street, was the site of a major heroin bust in 2005) and now living in Northeast Philly with his wife and two kids, Swierczynski's fave characters are out-of towners who come to our fair city and get battered by it.

"The obstacle course is kind of my world view." he says, his back to the wall so he can see the door. "Life will always find a way to fuck you up."
That much is obvious. A hero finally gets his shit together? You can bet Philly's about to sucker-punch him in the nuts. Find a character you can identify with? That's a sure sign dude's about to die horribly. Remember that scene in the "intelligent shark" movie Deep Blue Sea where Samuel L. Jackson makes a brilliant, stirring, let's-all-pull-together speech then immediately gets his torso bitten off by an intelligent shark? That sort of thing happens all the time in Duane's World.

Swierczynski's plots are borderline ridiculous. Scratch that. His plots cross that border and runs around naked, screaming like lunatics. Swierczynski jumps the intelligent shark repeatedly. But he gets away with it every time.
In Duane's World a slightly mental Polish-American hitman with a long suppressed fear of the McDonalds character Mayor McCheese kills time between jobs by poking holes in the heads of Philly's pizza-gobbling Italian mafia types with a high-powered rifle. And it's where--just when you think you've got away with killing the bastard who injected you with nanobots that'll make your head explode if you stray more than 10 feet from other humans--you find yourself facing a team of mentally ill teenage assassins, one of whom is a deluded sadist who thinks she's got superpowers (she doesn't).

I tell Swierczynski his crap assassins remind me of the rubbish German nihilists that Jeff Bridges and John Gorman bitchslap in the parking lot in The Big Lebowski. Swierczynski jumps like I've just hit his aircraft carrier in a game of Battleship.

"The Big Lebowski is one of the best Chandler adaptations ever," says Swierczynski in superb piece of reverse-engineered, cross-genre logic chopping. Of course The Big Lebowski isn't a Chandler adaptation but if you squint a little you can see its story (a hairy slacker forced to run an obstacle course composed of deranged, flawed and incompetent idiots) as Chandler-esque, and then it makes perfect sense. Or perfect nonsense. Which is what Duane's World is all about. Chandler through the looking glass.

It's all about paranoia, says Swierczynski. He says 9/11 turned him into a kill-'em-all right wing attack hawk for a while. He swung back to sanity when George W. started acting like a dumbed down Ghengis Khan.

In Duane's World anything can happen in the next 15 seconds--and it might well involve someone getting their hands chopped off or being stuffed naked down a construction pipe or having their head explode mid-shit. Or, as happens in The Blonde, getting thrown off the roof of the Frankford El and through the window of a derelict toy store that's stuffed with the exact toys needed to smash your tough-guy fa�ade and reduce you to a gibbering wreck.

This is the same train Swierczynski took to work for four years.