Good Girl Bad Girl

Christopher Finch produced the first of what will be a series, Good Girl, Bad Girl, featuring the slightly hapless private eye Alex Novalis (Finch describes him not as a hard-boiled PI, but rather “scrambled on bagel”), a former art fraud detective, on the hunt for a missing “bad girl” amidst the garbage, grunge, sexual and political radicalism of the era. It’s a great read and a light way of taking a dose of art and urban history – in the brief moment before the art world exploded, Manhattan cleaned up, and Soho became accessible only to stockbrokers. Christopher Finch talks about the novel, what propelled him to write it, his own teen experience living among young criminals, and how in a future book Alex Novalis just might come out to LA and hang out with the “artists floundering in Venice.”