BOOKS


The Black Issue 2022 Q&A: Ray Shell


You published Iced in 1993. What prompted you to write this story? I was in the US, on tour with “The Music of Andrew Lloyd Webber”, starring Michael Crawford, and I stopped to see a neighbour. This man was the smartest guy in the hood. He’d been accepted into Columbia Universit at 16; he had everything going for him. I was surprised he was still in my East Brooklyn hood; I thought he’d be in Washington DC as part of President Clinton’s administra- tion—that’s how brilliant and charismatic he was—so I went up to his apartment to find out why he hadn’t moved on. When he came to the door, instead of my handsome, big- brother-friend, a satr or some kind of beast appeared.


When he invited me in, there was no furni-


Actor and author Ray Shell on returning to the world of iconic Iced, after 30 years


Ray Shell’s début novel was first published in 1993 by HarperCollins imprint Flamingo. The book is the diary of a crack addict, Cornelius Washington, and follows his trajectory downwards. Shell was an actor—the original Rusty in “Starlight Express”—but despite his initial success, he fell off publishing’s radar. Thirty years on, here’s how he is getting a second chance with Iced...


Philip Jones @philipdsjones 14 20th May 2022


ture in the flat but you could see the shadow spots where the furniture and pictures had once been. I didn’t want to embarrass him so I jokingly asked: “What happened to your stuff?” He said: “They took them...” I asked him who these people were and he said: “I never see who they are, I only see what they’ve done to me...” I didn’t understand, so I joked again, “You mean like ghosts?”, and he said, “Yes. Ghost people.” I was freaked... in fact, a lot of what became the language of Iced came from that conversation. I leſt there feeling that someone had died and I decided that day to find out what had happened to my friend, what this “crack” was, because it hadn’t yet appeared in the UK. When the tour got to Ohio, I went into a


library to do some research. There was tons of stuff about the sociological effects that drug- dealers had on American neighbourhoods but nothing about the addicts, so I started inter- viewing the addicts. We were in a different cit each week; the addicts were everywhere and what they told me provided the menu of behaviour that became the story of Cornelius Washington Jr, the anti-hero of Iced.


What happened after publication? Overnight, I was this star author. I was used to being a star actor on stage but Iced received the kind of reviews that I could never have dreamed of... beter reviews than I ever received as an actor. Lee Daniels bought the film rights and Iced was translated into several foreign languages. I atended international book fairs on the strength of my début novel. It was unbelievable.


Then two things happened: Jonathan


Warner, my publisher at Flamingo, died a few days aſter Iced was published, and my US book tour was sabotaged by O J Simpson. When I got off a plane at LAX the entire news cycle was focused on the alleged murder, so all


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