If you’ve ever seen the Keanu Reeves movie "Point Break," you may recall the scene where Reeves’s character buys his first surfboard.
The salesman is a preternaturally wise adolescent. As Reeves walks out of the shop, the young clerk offers him some vaguely mystical parting advice.
This idea — that surfing is "the source," and that it has the power to change your life, was likely pulled from the book on which "Point Break" is loosely based — "Tapping the Source," by Kem Nunn.
Nunn’s book is a seminal text in a literary subgenre known as "surf noir" — hard-boiled stories of criminal desperation that unfold by the sea. When David M. Olsen first read Kem Nunn, it inspired him to do two things: read as much surf noir as he could possibly get his hands on and start surfing several days a week.
These days, Olsen is a writer and editor, and he’s just released his third curated anthology of surf noir stories, "The Amber Waves of Autumn." The collection features authors ranging from literary legends like Joyce Carol Oates to local favorites like Jeffrey Kronenfeld.
Olsen will be speaking at Changing Hands Bookstore in Tempe on Thursday. He told The Show that editing surf noir is the culmination of a lifelong fascination.
