Pubdate: Tue, 8 Aug 2006 Source: San Jose Mercury News (CA) Copyright: 2006 San Jose Mercury News Contact: http://www.mercurynews.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/390 Author: Dan Reed, Mercury News JANITOR PENS 5 THRILLERS Convicts Love His Gritty, Graphic Prose For seven years, Renay "Rainbow" Jackson worked as a janitor at the Oakland Police Department. Wash that. Dump that. Mop that. But always there were questions to detectives: How do you track a weapon used in a crime? What kind of murder is the hardest to unravel? "I was always after them, man," Jackson said recently. He had no criminal intent, just a literary bent. Jackson is the author -- at first, self-published, but now with a Berkeley publishing house -- of the Oaktown Mystery Series. And he's about to release his fifth novel, which details cocaine dealing in Richmond. It won't win him any accolades from that East Bay city's chamber of commerce. It's called "Crack City." It'll probably be another hit with his grateful -- and captive -- audience at the county jail, where the convicts hungrily eat up his prose, a police sergeant said. Jackson has kept his day job, but with a promotion, now serving as a janitorial supervisor making sure others correctly wash that, dump that, mop that. Jackson, 47, grew up in the projects in North Richmond. He knows the ghetto. He knows crime -- his brother is in prison, his sister recently got out. Now, after befriending many cops, he knows the other side of law and order. What he didn't know much about was writing -- or any writers. And most people never thought he'd make money with a pen, instead of a mop. "I'd tell people, 'I'm writing a book,' " Jackson remembered. "And they'd say, 'Yeah, baby,' looking past me. And I'd think, 'that fool don't believe me!' " It is a fairly unbelievable tale. A father of four daughters, it was his second oldest who got him to take up a pen in the fall of 1997. She had an assignment to write about what she did on her summer vacation. He wrote a paragraph about washing his car to show her descriptive writing. She went away, but he kept on writing every day, just for fun. By chapter four, he thought he was on to something, and he was: his first book, "Oaktown Devil," which follows the exploits of law-abiding Oakland resident Rainbow Jordan as he tracks the killer of his drug-dealing brother. Jackson's books aren't for the squeamish. They're about "murder, sex, drugs, violence, vicious killing," he said. "I was self-publishing," so no one could censor him. "I could put what I wanted in them. I went to town. I was coming with it, man." His books are mainly about African-Americans, who have such street names as Black Nasty, Dirty Don and JoMo, an undercover cop. And the dialogue, often profane, is from the streets as well. Here is a scene-setter from "Oaktown Devil." "The corner of 14th and Peralta was at its chaotic best with a gang of fools hanging as usual. Drug transactions took place everywhere along with drinking and getting high." And here's some dialogue from his second book, "Shakey's Loose." "Shake you know dis mah turf an you ain't welcome," Big Ed boomed. "Man dis America jack and the last time ah heard, it was still a free country." "Looka heah . . . ah'm ghin you yo only woanin, you sell on mah turf, you buy from me." The writing is in the tradition of Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines, who wrote ghetto stories a generation ago about their lives as hustlers and pimps. It was Goines' Eldorado Red -- born of the author's experience of ripping off a local numbers house -- that got Jackson to read his first book ever when he was 16. "It wasn't cool to read in my neighborhood," said Jackson, who graduated from high school and years later got an associate arts degree from Laney College in Oakland. And while some criticize Jackson's own violent tales, he said they may get non-reading inner city kids to read. And, then, as happened to him, to start reading a more and diverse library. As a young man and even an adult, Jackson was no fan of the police. "I was anti-police," he said, "because in my neighborhood, you grow up anti-police." He started working as a custodian for Oakland in 1979 -- cleaning up City Hall, the museum, the library, but never the police department. He wanted no part of it. Then, in 1997, he was assigned there. And he discovered, "they're just like regular people," most good, some bad. During his shifts at the Hall of Justice, he soaked it all in, from cops and criminals. "You see all kinda stuff down there," Jackson said. Criminals would blurt out their stories as he stood by, cleaning up. And he had easy access to the cops -- who always knew he was coming with more questions. He would be in the homicide division, the criminal investigations division, the jail. He'd see crime scene pictures. "He would ask me how we would handle things," Sgt. Brian Medeiros, a homicide detective, said recently. "What would you guys do about this?" Medeiros, who's read one of the books, said Jackson used some characteristics of past Oakland detectives for his characters. "Some of it I found interesting," he said of the book. "Some of it I found a little far-fetched." One thing he knows for sure is that the inmates in county jail can't get enough of Jackson's books. One reason is because he uses real locations, and language, from the streets. Inmates at Santa Rita county jail in Dublin "love his reading material," Medeiros said. "They're always trying to get ahold of it." After being rejected by the company that publishes Slim and Goines, Jackson decided to print and distributed his books himself. He sold more than 40,000 copies and got noticed by Berkeley publishers North Atlantic Books, which re-edited and repackaged his first few novels, four of which are available on Amazon.com and at local bookstores. Mark Ouimet, associate publisher of North Atlantic Books, said Friday that Jackson was one of the pioneers of "urban lit" -- gritty, real-life stories about happenings in the inner city. "There is a real growing urban lit scene going on," he said. "And Renay was really early in that scene. Renay has a very unique voice. He writes about the city he knows very well. He has a legion of fans, for sure." So, with a publishing deal and a new book coming out, is he able to quit his day job? "Not that I know of," he said. "Maybe, if I get a movie deal." Maybe the movie should be about a man named Renay Jackson. - --- MAP posted-by: Richard Lake