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.