PROBATION OFFICER BY DAY, STREET LIT AUTHOR, ENTREPRENEUR BY NIGHT

Back in the mid-’80s, when Fanita Pendleton was a high school student in Oakland, Calif., her mother knew exactly where the girl had to be if she didn’t come home from school right away.

On the short walk home, Pendleton often made a detour to the Oakland Public Library – not to clock in for an after-school job or to do homework at one of the tables. She’d find the aisle where the seedy books were – often the hardcore street fantasies of Donald Goines and Iceberg Slim or sometimes the tawdry tales of Danielle Steel – and read until closing time.

“If it didn’t have cussin’ and killin’ in it, I wasn’t interested,” says Pendleton, seated at a table in Urban Moon, the bookstore she opened a month ago inside Chesapeake Square Mall.

A probation officer in Virginia Beach by day, Pendleton has realized something she never dreamed of as she escaped into street lit at the Oakland Public Library all those years ago. In the last four years, she has self-published nine of her own wild urban tales, boasting such titles as “Shoot First, Ask Questions Never.”

With Urban Moon, Pendleton also has established a place where fellow street lit authors, most self-published, can meet and share ideas. Here, they can also hustle their quickly written stories of sex, drugs and deceit that line the store walls.

Pendleton opened Urban Moon because she had found doors closed to her. It’s in a prime corner spot next to Foot Locker in Chesapeake Square Mall, which in the last few months has been headed toward foreclosure with the departure of such anchor stores as Macy’s and Sears. Purple and silver balloons from one of the bookstore’s weekly author showcases still float in corners. Two tiny tables and chairs for toddlers, designated as the “Kids’ Corner,” sit under a mural of children frolicking in brilliantly green grass. Paperbacks with flashy titles befitting straight-to-DVD urban action flicks (“Hood Lawz” and “Turf Warz,” for instance) dominate the shelves along the walls. A small “mainstream” section boasts hardback books by commercial authors such as Tom Clancy and Patricia Cornwell. A smaller “African American” section carries a few titles by such canonized authors as James Baldwin and Eldridge Cleaver. One book by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison sits on a low shelf, curiously placed with the “inspirational” and Christian books.

But most who patronize Urban Moon don’t have an appetite for mainstream literature. They’re in search of the kind of gritty, violent tales that extend what Donald Goines and Iceberg Slim wrote back in the ’70s, books that were usually sold behind the counter at five-and-dime stores. These days, such hardcore tales are widely available. Places like Target and Wal-Mart carry urban fiction paperbacks. Many of the 150 titles at Urban Moon, some of which aren’t fit to print in a family newspaper, are the lurid soap operas one has come to expect from the genre. Manipulative wives and cheating husbands, icy drug kings and scheming drama queens, sex and profanity abound – along with the adverbs.

The writing and characters are often inelegant, the plot lines clumsy and almost always predictable. But street lit has been a lucrative market for years. Some of its major names, including popular Portsmouth author Kiki Swinson, demand six-figure advances and sell an average of 100,000 copies per title.

“It’s really important to have a platform like this because there’s a lot of untapped talent and authors that have great stories but aren’t attached to major publishers,” says Swinson, who appeared at Urban Moon for a book signing soon after it opened. “If you’re not signed with a major publishing house, then we’d never see that author’s book in stores like Barnes & Noble, Wal-Mart or Target. So having Urban Moon Books bridges that gap for self-published authors that want to get their books on a retail book shelf.”

In 2012, Pendleton, a voracious reader who finishes three or four books a week, read one that displeased her.

“I was wondering how they were putting this story out, as raggedy as this is,” says Pendleton, 44. “I figured I could write down these stories in my head.”

At that point, Pendleton, a single mother of a teenage son, had been living in Hampton Roads for nearly half her life. (She first moved to the area with her family in the mid-’80s, returned to Oakland to finish high school, and moved back to Norfolk shortly afterward.) She had earned degrees in sociology and public administration and taught criminal justice at ITT Technical Institute in Norfolk. But writing gave her a challenge and fulfillment she didn’t always find while teaching and working as a probation officer.

Her brother, Leihei, encouraged her to pursue writing. He also designed his sister’s store logo – a busty, bespectacled woman holding a book inside the moon. The design also is a nod to Pendleton, whose nickname is “Moon.”

Pendleton self-published her first book, 2012’s “Shoot First, Ask Questions Never,” a title inspired by a game of pool, one of her favorite pastimes. But she could find no stores that would carry it.

“They gave me some song and dance about my book not being returnable, so they wouldn’t put it on the shelves,” says Pendleton, still dressed in her slate-gray uniform from her day job, her hair in a slick ponytail. “Because I’m an independent publisher, I don’t have that kind of policy. If I’m having this problem, other independent authors have to be having the same problem.”

Pendleton soon opened a kiosk in Chesapeake Square Mall – an ideal place, she says, because the mall only has a Christian bookstore. She then went from a kiosk to a booth, selling urban lit paperbacks. And now there’s the corner location next to the spacious Foot Locker. Independent authors whose titles dominate the shelves sign an agreement with Pendleton’s store in which they receive 60 percent of sales. They’re responsible for shipping their books to Urban Moon, where they are also sold on the store’s website.

“There’s usually more traffic on the weekends,” Pendleton says, looking outside the store at an eerily empty mall on a weeknight evening. “We’re gonna get Bibles in, too, so people can pick that up, if that’s what they’re looking for.”

A young woman with purple braids sweeping her back and two piercings in her bottom lip strolls into the store.

“Can I help you find something?” Pendleton says, rising from the table. “What are you in the mood for, girl? I got you.”

The customer smiles, “I read everything.”

Pendleton plucks one of her own books, “Open Marriage,” from the shelf and hands it to her. “I think you’ll like this.”

A young man then enters the store and snakes his arm around the young woman’s waist. She shows him the book and he furrows his brow.

Pendleton reaches for the book and chuckles, “If that’s your man, maybe you shouldn’t be reading this book.”

They all laugh. The couple scans the shelves. Before she leaves, the young woman promises to return to buy a few titles she sees.

“When people come in here, they didn’t know that there was this many books and authors. But we’re here,” Pendleton says, looking around her empty store. “This is my retirement plan. I ain’t going nowhere.”

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