“Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat was my first novel, published in April last year through Another Sky Press in Portland in the U.S. It’s a mixture of noir detective story with dystopian sci-fi, as much influenced by Blade Runner and Philip K. Dick as it is by Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. The thing took half my life to cobble together, and I’m not kidding here.”
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“In the first-person narrative of his first novel, his character struggles to fit the black fedora of Harry Lime, of Graham Greene’s The Third Man. And while the narrator nervously tries to describe himself through the movie’s black-and-white images, he jells into shape through his street-smart voice, describing the skank-life in Melbourne’s far off rotting future.”
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“I first wrote Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat as a 4-page short story when I was in my early 20s, and writing was my single passion. Then I kind of got diverted and spread-out with the asides you just mentioned. In 1992 and again in 2001 I fleshed out the story to manuscript form, and then shelved it on both occasions to collect dust. Somehow I dragged it back out in 2007, wiped it down, and began writing Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat, the novel, with great help from my editor Kristopher Young at Another Sky Press — who decided to publish it.”
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INTERVIEW: JUNE 2012

Atheist’s Point of View (APOV): When did your love of all-things noir start?

Bergen: I grew up on the cinematic version of the genre. My parents and their friends were always watching it, and I think I saw The Third Man for the first time when I was in primary school. Reading-wise, I really started to enjoy books by Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett in my 20s, which was the time I explored a more international take on noir by filmmakers like Akira Kurosawa. I’ve always had this affinity. I think I’ve seen the Humphrey Bogart version of The Maltese Falcon at least a hundred times. Really.

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“Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat is sci-fi-lite, at least according to one of my mates — which surprised me since I believed it safely slotted into the sci-fi genre and I didn’t know there was a style called sci-fi-lite. Probably he was making it up.

“Most people are now telling that TSMG is far more oriented toward noir than science fiction, which I guess is Read more…

“I’m chuffed you like that angle, since it came later on in the development of the story. Floyd, for me, always was a bit of a cynical last-hero-standing, a kind of Charlton Heston type circa Planet of the Apes or The Omega Man. Read more…

“The hard-drinking, hard-boiled and witty hero, Floyd, would usually be the detective in a [Raymond] Chandler story but here in the “new” Melbourne, post-event, he’s placed in a bubble-like world as a “Seeker”, with more authority than a Chander detective, to seek, locate, apprehend, contain and terminate Deviants. Read more…

“This particular yarn is one that’s bubbled away since it surfaced in a short story I wrote in the late 1980s. That short story was about six hand-written A4 pages in length, and was basically the dream-sequence from the existing novel; in that original tale, however, it was anything but dream-like. Read more…

“It could be one hundred percent bona fide reality, or one hundred percent surreal sham. But it is a contemporary homage to old skool detective noir, thrown into a blender with low-brow sci-fi of the near future and current social trends that are pervading the Western world – with the last city in the world being Melbourne, Australia. Read more…

“When I went to Detroit in 2004 to DJ, the people putting on the party took me for a spin through the inner city. That was a riveting eye-opener for me; there’s nothing like that in contemporary Australia or Japan. Although the recent earthquake and tsunami left a similar legacy, that was after I finished the novel. I remember Read more…