For all your Beatnik Needs

Of course, tenants of the Beat Hotel didn't have everything they needed at the Beat Hotel. Madame Rachou did not offer all of the necisities they needed. To get food the Beatniks would need to go out and fend for themselves. God, know I have an image of nature documentaries following Allen Ginsberg around.
"Observe the Beatnik, forced out of America by legal difficulties concerning the obscenity of his work, he finds a safe home for himself in cheep French hotels."

"Hey Peter Orlovsky, my long-time partner, who are those British guys behind us with the cameras?".

"I don't know, Allen Ginsberg. Ignore them and maybe they'll leave us alone."

"I'm going to give them a copy of Jack's new novel On the Road. Hey, camera people!"

"Oh no, the Beatnik has seen us. Run away!"

"Hey, come back. I have free literature! It's really good!"

I am probably going to use this. I'll do something with William S. Burroughs to, but he'll probably just pull a gun on them.

Anywhere, here is a list of establishments not to far from the Beat Hotel where our heroes will attend without having to actually take part in French society to much.

• Ali Baba, a grocery store on the rue de la Huchette, where one could buy food up until 2 AM. Fruit was kept outside and protected by string netting.
  
• Café des Arts, a cheep restaurant frequented by arts students. The menu was a fixed three-course menu and red wine. The tables where bare and wooden and a flagon liter was on them, full of the aforementioned wine.
• Chez Jean, located in a passageway of the Blvd St. Germain, it was basically a Parisian dive-bar where the Parisian Bohemia and underworld lived in an uneasy alliance. The floors where saw dust. Since this is a mystery series this will probably be a common setting. Jack probably knows some weaselly-looking guy who knows everything that goes on in the crime world and is called "The Rat" or something like that. Sometimes a cellist or guitarist played there.
• Chez Raton, a small café that had to wind down the baskets of bread, which where hung from the room by rope to save room.
• Libraire Anglaise, also called the English Bookshop. Located at 42 rue de Seine, intersecting with the rue de l’Echaude. It owned by Gait Froge, a "beautiful, petite Frenchwoman."(Miles 21) She was a big fan of American and English writers and spoke with a cultured British accent. She specialized in Olypmia Press titles. The shop was almost triangular in an old building dating back to the 1500s. It was filled with self-published poetry and rare books, all piled up in the room. Parties for the launch of Olympia Press’ more literary books where held in her basement, which looked like a medieval dungeon lighted by wine bottles in candles.
• The Mistral, the only other really decent English bookstore, it was run by George Whitman. He came over to help with resettling war orphans and eventually settled into book selling. He bought the Mistral in 1951, which used to be an Arab grocery. It was larger then the English Bookstore, and had rooms for poets to stay at. Gait Froge believed that George Whitman worked for the CIA, and both had an intense rivalry. He didn't sell Olympia Press books.
  
• Olympia Press, Not actually a place, but it was a publishing house that would later print the first edition of Naked Lunch. It was most famous for printing banded books that the Americans and English thought where obscene, such as Nabakov’s Lolita, Jean Genet’s The Thieves Journal and pretty much anything by the Marquis de Sade. When they weren’t publishing books that where considered pornography, they where publishing pornography. I’m thinking that this may be an operation of the Pact of Lilith.
• Palette, an artist café "where one could meet a gallery owner to plan a show, hire a model, or buy drugs."(Miles 9)

That's all the real locations I could find in the book I got. I will probably be making up a few other places, such as the local Pact of Lilith safe-house, which should have a name like Our Lady of the Flowers, or something that sounds like a Catholic Church. Also, there will probably be some hidden away occult store somewhere.

Miles, Barry. The Beat Hotel: Ginsberg, Burroughs and Corso in Paris, 1957-1963. New York, Grove Press, 2000

Welcome to the Beat Hotel

The Beat Hotel was located at 9 rue Git-le-Coeur, which is in the famed Latin Quarter, not to far from the River Seine. It closed in 1963 because it was basically a death trap. The toilet was a hole in the floor that had to be shared with everyone on the floor. Some rooms had little light. It was infested with rats. Cleaning was irregular and it smelt terrible. One description said it was like something out of Naked Lunch.
The owner at the time to Beats moved in was Madame Rachou. Her husband, who owned the hotel with her, died before Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orvlovsky and Gregory Corso, the first really famous beats moved in. She ran a bistro on the first floor where she stood on an upturned casket because she was so short. The Beat Hotel was her kingdom, and she took great care in protecting them from the police. The only police that could get by where the immigration police, who would come once every three months, take whichever foreigner they wanted and make him or her pay a tax. This could be avoided by leaving the country every three months for Belgium or the Netherlands.
Despite the fact that the Beat Hotel was just about as dilapidated as you can get without it actually collapsing in around you, it had one advantage. Madame Rachou asked no questions about your personal life. In the book I have on the Beat Hotel, it said that one could bring anybody home "man, woman or group". They'd have to sign there name in the guest book if they where staying over, but nobody bothered much. Also, various eccentricities where excepted. One artist lined his walls with straw. One artist who was called Jesus Christ, painted on the walls and wore sandals even in winter. The Beat Hotel was also the early home of Chester Himes, an African-American most known for his series of Harlem detective fiction, in a time where other hotels greeted him with open racism and hostility for having a (younger) white girlfriend.
In the context of the series, the Beat Hotel is a sort of crossroads in time and space where artistic and magical activity is at it's highest. This is concentrated in the Beat Hotel, and it's inhabitants go on a creative voyage. This more or less happened with the Beats. Ginsberg wrote most of Kaddish, one of his most famous poems, and William S. Burroughs finished Naked Lunch and Nova Express here. Gregory Corso also wrote his very controversial Bomb. I'm attributing it to the fact the Beat Hotel from 1957-1963 was on an apex of space and time.
I'm not sure when Jack moved into the Beat Hotel. I know it was before most of the other characters. I know that he was stationed here to protect the Beat Hotel and because he was burned out from fighting oppressive secret societies and Lovecraftian monstrosities. He may have lived at the same there at the same time as Chester Himes, and worked on a few cases before. Jack also works on the security of the Organization in Paris in general. He is able to get a few residents of the Hotel to work with him, most notably Max Quincy, and most of his case work would involve his work within the Organization, trying to spread there ideals through various sources and keeping the balance between the Throne and the Tractate, as well as occasional cases taken by patrons to pay the rent.

The Organization

One of the most important aspects of this world, which doesn't directly concern the creation of characters which you guys have a problem with is The Organization that Jack works for.
The Organization is a catch all term for a secret society that I have been working on. The Organization has many other names, but that doesn't matter much considering the fact it is more of several different secret societies, and in some cases supernatural beings, working in tangent with themselves. At anytime there could be hundreds of sub-organizations within the Organization, ranging from political movements, mystical secret societies, creatures of urban legends, paranoid newsletters and artists colonies, among various other things.
The goals of the Organization differ from organization to organization, but they ultimately come down to the same things.

1. be a sort of nationless Intellegence agency, protecting beauty, truth, love and all that stuff that makes life grand.
   
2. Keeping Heaven (The Soverign Throne) and Hell (the Shadow Tractate) in check.
3. Reconciliation between the two forces.
   

Throne has been under control of When I say Heaven and Hell, I don't mean in the traditional sense. The Yazan, who is a blind, obese, eunuch, protected by his three daughters. The Shadow Tractate is ruled by Ilsetan, who despite having sight, being very well-built and still having his genitals intact, is basically Stalin in a weird liquid metal insect suit. Both of them are insane and want to force there own order upon mankind. The difference would be somewhere between eternal torment under a harsh religious dictatorship and eternal torment under a secular dictatorship. It's hell either way.
As I have said, the Organization is separated into several different secret societies. Here is what I have at the moment.

• The Rosicrucians, based on the actual Rosicrucians, they are a highly secret society of Gnostic Alchemists who follow Sophia, who is sort of a goddess but not really, I'll explain her more later. The Rosicrucians are one of the major groups within the Organization.
  
• The Sciriptomancers, The Scriptomancers are wizards who gain there magic abilities primarily through the art of writing. This can be used as creation, or can be used as a form of prophecy, or other uses depending on how experimental said Scriptomancer is. There are also versions of this for painting, called Pictomancers. This is not an actual organization, but alot of famous Scriptomancers, such as William Blake, James Joyce and William S. Burroughs are with the Organization. I don't know yet if all writers are Scriptomancers, or if all are and only a few are actually any good at it.
  
• The Howller Family, The Howller Family is one of the primer groups working within America. The Howller Family appear on the surface as a family of African-American/Native Americans, but in reality are a supernatural race of beings that in there natural state look like giant owl-like birds with human faces. Along with being one of the major factions in America, they more or less have there hands in every aspect of the Organization in North America, they are also the protectors of a sort of Beatnik Narnia. The Howllers, however are bound to this world where they are given more freedom then in our own. If a Howller becomes to caught-up in the affairs of our world they loose there connection with said Beatnik Narnia. This can be accomplished by killing someone from our plain, or falling in love with a woman from this plane. A descendant of a fallen Howller can exhibit supernatural powers and become a true Howller, but this can become harder and harder with each generation.
  
• The Beautiful Ladies, AKA The Scarred Angels, AKA The Furies, AKA The Little Wrathful Ones, They appear as very beautiful women who hang out in cheap hotels, shoot pool near train stations, read Bukowski and Genet, drink large amounts of whisky that any normal human would pass out with the first bought, and look like they could take down men three times they're size. No one knows what there really called, and most of them are called the Beautiful Ladies or the Scarred Angels. They do a lot of direct fighting against the Soverign Throne and the Shadow Tractate, mainly by hunting down and eating "Transgressors." Most members of the Organization try to avoid them, since they purposefully make themselves look like hard-cases. They are all probably all pretty really nice girls at heart.
• The Pact of Lilith, Off-shoot of the various Christian heresies that came up in the Middle Ages, the Pact of Lilith appeared sometime before the Enlightenment. While not strictly a combatant, The Pact of Lilith specializes in putting safe-houses for other members of the Organization, and spreading information for other Organization members. These Safe-Houses tend to look like very well-hidden brothels that look kind of like the set of Jodorowsky's Holy Mountain.

Those are all the sub-groups within the Organization. As mentioned before, they're are probably several other groups, some of which may not even be active today.