Review: "Front Sight: Three Swagger Novellas" by Stephen Hunter

 

Front Sight Three Swagger Novellas by Stephen Hunter Atria Books, 2024     I read Stephen Hunter’s first Bob Lee Swagger thriller, Point of Impact (1993), sometime during the Spring of 1994. And holy wow, it knocked me off my feet with its disturbingly realistic violence—the realism due as much to the emotional impact on the characters as the action itself—and the dizzying large screen conspiracy plot with a former Vietnam sniper, turned Arkansas drunk, nicknamed Bob the Nailer, at its core. I read the next two—Black Light (1996) and Time to Hunt (1998)—as they were released with the same satisfying awe as I’d had while reading the first. Frankly, all three are among the best thrillers published in the 1990s. After that, Hunter switched to telling the story of Bob Lee’s father, Earl. A rugged former Marine and legendary Arkansas lawman gunned down in 1954 by the nasty Lamar Pye—you should read the fantastic Dirty White Boys (1994) for Lamar’s tale. Hot Springs, which was the first of three books featuring Earl—the other two are Pale Horse Coming (2001) and Havana (2003)—hit bookstores in 2000. And then in 2007 Hunter returned to Bob Lee with the disappointing The 47th Samurai and again in 2008 with the so-so Night of Thunder. Which is when I lost interest in Hunter’s new releases and the Swaggers both. I mention all this because I recently read Hunter’s Front Sight (2024), a collection of three Swagger novellas—one each for Earl and Bob Lee, and another featuring Bob Lee’s grandad, Charles Swagger—and found myself wondering if I’d been too hasty in writing-off Hunter and the Swaggers. The first, “City of Meat,” featuring Charles Swagger, is a hard-as-nails story about an elusive drug syndicate working Chicago’s predominately Black 7th District in 1934. Charles is a former Arkansas sheriff and renowned gunfighter turned G-Man on an FBI team looking for the notorious bank robber, Baby Face Nelson. While investigating a possible sighting of Nelson at the Chicago Stockyards, Charles is confronted by a knife-wielding man soaring high on an unknown narcotic. Charles teams-up with the real-life depression-era Black lawman, Slyvester Washington, nicknamed Two-Gun Pete—rumored to be the source material for “Dirty Harry” Callahan in the Dirty Harry movies—and follows the trail of the narcotics gang into unexpected places. “City of Meat” is action-packed and violent, but its real-world setting, the plight of Blacks on Chicago’s Southside—nobody really cared what happened there so long as it stayed there—give it a panache and a depth unusual for anything published in the thriller category. As Hunter says in his intro, “City of Meat” is his attempt at writing the equivalent of “the message picture,” where the story is accompanied by a portrayal of a societal ill. And it worked well. “Johnny Tuesday,” which began life as an unproduced screenplay, is a hardboiled film noir in novella format. It is hardboiled in a Carroll John Daly way: fast-paced but at times frustratingly indecipherable with a black and white morality and, especially in the case of Earl, cartoonish characters. It’s 1945 and Earl Swagger is fresh from the South Pacific and now fighting a personal war in the small fictional city of Chesterfield, Maryland. He hits town using the name Johnny Tuesday to investigate a lethal bank robbery and finds pretty much everyone in town is a scoundrel. The style of this one is cool—it feels like one of those “complete novel” tales published in the pulps of the 1930s. A category I like, but the writing (as good as it is) felt a little too self-aware and the plot a little too busy. And even worse, Earl seemed like an altogether different man than he is in his novels. “Johnny Tuesday” would have worked better if the hero hadn’t been Earl Swagger, or if I hadn’t read any of Hunter’s excellent Earl Swagger novels before reading it. “Five Dolls for the Gut Hook,” which is my favorite of the stories, is a serial killer tale set in Hot Springs, Arkansas. It’s 1979 and Bob Lee is drowning his dark Vietnam memories—“whiskey dreams were the best, and this one was fine”—in his tiny Polk County, Arkansas trailer. But his slow suicide gets shunted aside when his old friend Sam Vincent comes asking for a favor. A killer is targeting young transient women working Hot Springs’ sex trade and the local force is out of ideas of how to catch the monster. They won’t go to the staties or the FBI because it would bring unwanted publicity as Hot Springs is trying to transition from a rough and tumble crime town into a family destination resort. And everyone is sure Bob Lee can bring something new to the investigation since he comes from lawman stock. And, of course, they’re right. In Hunter’s intro to “Five Dolls for the Gut Hook,” he says it is his attempt at writing a “notorious genre of bloody Italian mystery-horror films of the seventies,” called “Giallo.” A film style I’m unfamiliar with, but if any of the films are as good as this tale, I need to make amends and get acquainted with it quick-like. Besides the great title, “Five Dolls of the Gut Hook,” has that grand dusty feeling of the 1970s: pickup trucks, sweat, cowboy shirts, brutality, dark deeds, and corrupt cops all wrapped into a honky-tonk town darkened by its many secrets. And there’s Bob Lee, being Bob Lee, too. This one alone is worth the price of admission.

Check out Front Sight on Amazon—click here for the Kindle edition and here for the paperback.

Review: "The Blue Horse" by Bruce Borgos

The Blue Horse by Bruce Borgos Minotaur Books, 2025   Bruce Borgos’s third Sheriff Porter Beck procedural, The Blue Horse, opens with a pop and a wow—a BLM (Bureau of Land Management) wild horse gather, also known as a roundup, is interrupted when a helicopter crashes while pushing a herd through a narrow canyon in Beck’s Lincoln County, Nevada—but ends with a shrug and a sigh. Beck, who was watching the gather from the back of his own horse, locks down the crash site almost immediately. And in no time at all Beck and his deputy, Tuffy Scruggs, determine it was no accident. The pilot was shot by a sniper and they even find a spent shell casing atop a blue plastic toy horse. The primary suspect is Etta Clay, the leader of a wild horse advocacy group called CANTER. The local Nevada ranchers, and the BLM’s leadership, think CANTER is fanatical since it has compared the removal of wild horses from Nevada’s rangeland to genocide. But Beck isn’t so sure of Etta’s involvement in the killing or that CANTER is wrong about the way the horses are managed on public lands. Then Lincoln County is shocked by another brutal murder and while the two killings are different in style, Beck figures they must be related. The Blue Horse has a complex plot with angles and nuance—the Montreal mafia plays into it, as do ranchers, modern mining, Beck, who suffers from night blindness due to a congenital disease called retinitis pigmentosa, and, since the action takes place in September 2020, so dies Covid. Not to mention, Beck’s sister goes missing in a national park. While the complexity adds drama, it lessens the impact of the action and makes the climactic clash a little ho-hum. The villains are nasty, but (especially in the last third of the narrative) are cartoonish and have all the subtlety and competence of clowns. With that in mind, Beck is solidly drawn and likable, the setting is vivid, and the didactic discussion about wild horses is interesting as heck. If you like Craig Johnson’s Longmire, you’ll enjoy The Blue Horse, but all the while wish it had that same richness as Borgos’s previous novels.

Check out The Blue Horse on Amazon—click here for the Kindle edition and here for the hardcover.

 

Review: "Night on Fire" by Douglas Corleone

 

Night on Fire by Douglas Corleone Minotaur Books, 2011     Douglas Corleone’s second Kevin Corvelli mystery, Night on Fire, is a snappy and sharp legal thriller with personality—in the form of the almost debauched and always fun Corvelli. While chatting-up a cougar in his favorite outdoor beach bar, in Ko Olina on Oahu, Corvelli is among the many witnesses of a nasty and drunken fight between newlyweds. Corvelli’s only thoughts about the dust-up are: 1) too bad he doesn’t do divorces; and 2) just how sexy the bride is. With that, Kevin follows his libido into the cougar’s room in the Liholiho Tower of the Kupulupulu Beach Resort where the fight would have been forgotten, except later that night the Liholiho catches fire, killing eleven—including the sparring groom—and very nearly gets Kevin, his cougar, and a four-year-old boy named Josh Leffler that Corvelli befriended at the hallway vending machine. It takes investigators only a few hours to rule the fire as arson and a few more to finger the angry bride, Erin Simms, as their prime suspect. Of course, Corvelli takes Erin’s case, pisses off his law partner, Jake Harper, and makes one or two ethically dubious choices while facing down a prosecutor that seems to have a personal grudge against him. Night on Fire is a great summertime read—from its vivid Hawaii setting to Kevin Corvelli’s questionable personal behavior; which Corleone obviously had fun writing. Corvelli is a borderline alcoholic, a confirmed skirt chaser, but a damn good lawyer and something of an okay guy once you scrape the gunk away. There is a bit of fish-out-of-water subplot here, too, as Corvelli takes a big brother-like interest in the young Josh Leffler. The mystery is nicely developed with a handful of well-placed clues and the courtroom scenes are excellent. The climactic twist ending is on the far side of wild, but it didn’t bother me a whit since the journey there was so damn fun. Night on Fire is a must read for anyone with a hankering for entertainment and a desire to get away this summer without leaving home.

Night on Fire appears to be out-of-print (for some sick reason), but you can check out the original hardcover here at Amazon.

Review: "Them Bones" by David Housewright

 

Them Bones by David Housewright Minotaur Books, 2025   David Housewright’s Them Bones—which is the twenty-second Rushmore McKenzie mystery—is a tale of… well, two tales of the same story. Okay, not really two tales, but rather a single story told in two different styles. The McKenzie books are written in first person from the perspective of McKenzie—an unlicensed private eye in Minnesota’s Twin Cities, that spends his time doing favors for friends. But Them Bones is distinct from its predecessors because the crime is detailed in third person from the perspective of the client, Angela Bjork. We last saw Angela as a girl saving McKenzie’s life in The Taking of Libbie, SD (2010), but now she is all grown up and working on her Ph.D. in paleontology at the University of Minnesota. Angela discovered a nearly intact fossil of an Ankylosaurus while working a dinosaur dig in Montana. It was a profound find because it is the most complete of its kind, but before the bones can be transported to the Twin Cities, the skull was stolen. Angela tells McKenzie, and the reader, about the discovery (in May) and the heist (in August) and everything that happened in-between. In this unofficial prologue, Angela introduces the suspects—professors, students, and other miscellany—that were present at the dig site when the heist occurred. The paleontology stuff was interesting, including how the dig was done, the problems they encountered and personalities involved; however, it took so long, about a quarter of the narrative, that I had begun thinking McKenzie had the week off. But once McKenzie agrees to help Angela recover the Ankylosaurus, and he takes charge of the narrative things really pick up. In fact, Them Bones, suddenly becomes a McKenzie novel. With his subtle and not-so-subtle wit, his penchant for finding trouble and breaking the rules, and his always gallant search for justice, McKenzie does an admirable job of flushing out the villains. The action moves from college campuses (there are two), to a museum, to high class neighborhoods, and from Minnesota to Montana to Canada and back again. And it is a good bit of fun. But that opening prologue made the entire enterprise a little wobbly. Its length almost made me give up before the good stuff started, which I’ve never encountered with David Housewright’s writing. It felt like Housewright was setting-up a traditional whodunit, which is cool, but (for me at least) it never quite worked that way. What I did like about Them Bones is far more than what I disliked. As usual, the setting—the Twin Cities, Montana, and even rural Canada—was vivid and melded perfectly with the story. The actual mystery, who was the Inside Man that helped the thieves steal the skull, is compelling and McKenzie’s self-deprecating style and often flippant attitude is fun. There is a good deal of subterfuge and the final reveal is both surprising and perfectly right. But a few hours spent with McKenzie, even in a flawed tale like Them Bones, is always a chore to look forward to.

Find Them Bones on Amazon—click here for the Kindle edition and here for the paperback.

Review: "Playback" by Raymond Chandler

 

Playback by Raymond Chandler Houghton Mifflin, 1958 Reviewed by Mike Baker Playback is the last book Raymond Chandler published in his lifetime and, while I haven’t read everything he wrote, I can say categorically this is the weakest entry to date. The novel opens and closes with Clyde Umney, a lawyer representing some nebulous East Coast concern, stogeying Marlowe into taking a job tailing a young woman for reasons he refuses to explain—but he pays well enough, and that’s apparently enough for Marlowe. So our detective heads down to Central Station in L.A., where the woman is supposed to arrive, and brings along a grip full of clothes, cash, and a gun. There, we meet the story’s villain, Larry Mitchell. He’s well-connected but broke, seedy, and clinging to charm like it might still work. Mitchell meets with the young woman—who wants nothing to do with him—and then vanishes. Marlowe follows her to some small southern California town, and the job should be simple: observe, report, collect. But it isn’t. Mitchell complicates things. Marlowe can’t stand a bully, and Mitchell fits the part too well. The woman complicates things more. Marlowe still carries the instincts of a knight, even if the armor’s corroded and the lance is blunt. He delays calling Umney, digging instead into what Mitchell might have had on her. Then Mitchell turns up dead—or doesn’t. There’s no body. In true Chandler fashion, the mystery becomes metaphysical as much as procedural. Maybe there was a murder. Maybe there wasn’t. But Marlowe, ever the stubborn moralist, is now in it, tangled up with a woman he barely knows and a story that doesn’t want to be told. And here’s where Playback loses itself. What begins with promise descends into a slow unraveling: a string of aimless NPCs saying things, doing little, contributing less. A fog of narrative confusion settles in. There are murky shenanigans, unresolved threads, and long stretches of pontificating—much of it Chandler, or Marlowe, or some hybrid of the two, meditating on life and death and what it all means. It took me until page 119 to feel even a flicker of investment. Chandler can still craft a surgical sentence—his style is as crisp as ever—but he no longer seems interested in building anything with them. Reading Playback is like calling a friend while cleaning the kitchen: they’re rambling about a trip to the library, and you’re only half-listening, more focused on the stubborn stain you’ve been scrubbing for fifteen minutes. There are, as always, moments of delight—those sharp quips that cut air and page alike—but they’re fewer and farther between. In between, we’re left with a kind of exhausted melancholy. Chandler, who once lit noir on fire with his wit and moral clarity, now seems lost in the haze. There’s no irony in his musings, just the raw blurting of worn-down truisms. Mortality isn’t just a theme here—it’s the undercurrent pulling everything under. What’s striking is the fear behind it. Chandler, the ultimate stylist, seems overwhelmed by the vision he’s spent his life perfecting. The white knight has become a disenchanted ghost, mumbling at the hollow praise still echoing around him. He’s no longer getting it right, and he knows it. Playback isn’t just a detective story. It’s a last letter, written to no one in particular. A man staring into the final dark, trying to summon meaning from the habits of a lifetime. In the end, there’s no great twist, no satisfying conclusion. Just a tired hero and the man who created him, both running out the clock. And maybe that’s the most honest ending Chandler could have written. Not with a bang, not even with a whisper—but with the slow, sinking realization that the world doesn’t need saving, and the knight doesn’t need to ride again*. *               *               * *  There’s a single chapter near the end where Marlowe is searching for a waiter and tracks him to the tiny shack he calls home—only to find him hanging in the outhouse. The story is so messy by this point that I wasn’t sure whether it was suicide or murder. Either way, Marlowe is gob-smacked by the horror of it, and maybe even shaken by the thought that he played some part in the man’s death. It’s a moment that feels like Chandler reckoning with something personal. Maybe even entertaining the idea of doing himself in. But history would prove he didn’t have the heart to go out that way. Instead, he chose the long, slow exit: alcohol and maudlin self-indulgence. Still, the chapter is striking—arguably the best in the book. The thing is, I love to read well-written books, but even the writers I admire most stumble sometimes. This might be one of those moments. But if you love Chandler, it’s like blues harp—you play all the notes between where you are and where you’re headed. And Playback, for all its flaws, is one of those notes. If you want to understand Chandler, really understand him, this is part of the journey.

Check out Playback at Amazon—click here for the paperback.

Review: "Make with the Brains, Pierre" by Dana Wilson

 

Make with the Brains, Pierre by Dana Wilson Black Gat, 2025   The only bad thing about this 1946 psychological thriller from Dana Wilson—it is her only mystery novel—is the clunker of a title: Make with the Brains, Pierre. A title more apt for a Hollywood farce than a bleak ride into tinsel town’s darker side. In fact, Bill Pronzini, in 1001 Midnights, compared Make with the Brains, Pierre with the work of Cornell Woolrich and the New York Times wrote, “[it] presents a convincing picture of a troubled mind struggling with problems beyond its power.” Pierre Bernet is a French film editor, or what they call a cutter, lured to Hollywood in the years before France was defeated by Nazi Germany. But now he is 34, unemployed, living in a tiny apartment, and in love with a woman far too young for him: Eleanor Marr. Eleanor works as an onscreen extra and while she is fond of Pierre, she loves the very married owner of a film company, Joe Sherman. As a kindness to Pierre, Eleanor convinces Joe to hire Pierre. The job is less than a week’s work, but it pays eight times what M-G-M, when Pierre last had gainful employment, paid. While working, Pierre meets Joe’s dreadful wife, who refuses to grant a divorce to her husband, and the guy bankrolling the job. A shifty and well-connected lawyer named Frank Marshall. Of course, the film cutting job is for an audio splice that is used in a fraud and no matter how Pierre tries to play things, it always ends up with him hanging from the branch. Make with the Brains, Pierre, is a solid thriller—it opens with Pierre self-destructing in his tiny apartment, water dripping on something awful in his bathtub, while he awaits to be killed by the two men outside his building. Then the narrative goes into flashback to answer, How did Pierre get here? and What the hell is in the bathtub? It is told with sly humor and a sharp commentary of both Hollywood and post-WW2 America. The suspense is ratcheted slowly from chapter to chapter until, in the last pages, there is no doubt where it is going and the full horror of Pierre’s situation is starkly written into nightmare. Make with the Brains, Pierre—bad title and all—is a damn good book. *             *             * This new Black Gat edition includes an excellent introduction by Randal S. Brandt, “The Original Bond Girl,” detailing Dana Wilson’s life. She was an actress whose second husband was Albert R. Broccoli, the producer of the James Bond film franchise, and so much more.

Check out Make with the Brains, Pierre at Amazon—click here for the Kindle edition and here for the paperback. Or at the Stark House website here.

Review: "Ceylon Sapphires" by Mailan Doquang

 

Ceylon Sapphires by Mailan Doquang Mysterious Press, 2025   Mailan Doquang’s second novel, Ceylon Sapphires—which, conveniently, is also the second in her Rune Sarasin thriller series—is sharp-witted, scorchingly paced, and down-right thrilling. Rune is a likable rogue with a bottomless debt to the nasty and ruthless Charles Lemaire. While Rune was working Bangkok as a jewel thief, she had the misfortune of stealing from Lemaire and now, at the threat of the only two people she loves, Rune is Lemaire’s peon. Whatever Lemaire wants stolen, Rune steals. While Napoleon Boneparte’s great-great-grand niece, Margot Steiner, is taking a private showing of the great man’s portrait in the Louvre, Rune (at the behest of Lemaire) executes a magician-like caper to steal the valuable Ceylon sapphire necklace—commissioned by the little emperor himself—from around Steiner’s neck. Rune’s dazzling misdirection and sleight-of-hand earns her the necklace. But when Rune is ordered to steal the well-guarded matching earrings, she knows Lemaire will never let her go. So Rune does the only thing she can. She makes plans to steal the earrings while at the same time plotting to get free of Lemaire. Ceylon Sapphires is a globe-trotting thriller—the action moves from Paris to Mallorca, Marseille, Amsterdam, and Berlin—with a solid plot held together by Rune’s vulnerability and flawed likability. A handful of surprises, a few gritty and realistic jewelry capers, and a couple monstrous villains keep things interesting. Lemaire’s role is mostly off-page, but his villainy is omnipresent and pushes Rune into deadlier and deadlier situations. The story flies with a sizzling pace and an easy-to-read narrative style. And, this is no easy feat in any thriller, the European settings are nicely rendered and believable. Ceylon Sapphaires is how a thriller should read, from the first page to the last, and when it was done, I was tempted to start again from the beginning. *                 *                 * Ceylon Sapphires picks up where the first Rune Sarasin novel, Blood Rubies (2024), ended, but it isn’t necessary to have read the previous book to enjoy it. But why not read Blood Rubies anyway?

Check out Ceylon Sapphires—which is scheduled for release June 3, 2025—on Amazon: click here for the Kindle edition and here for the hardcover.

Review: "Chain of Evidence" by Garry Disher

 

Chain of Evidence by Garry Disher Soho Crime, 2007   Chain of Evidence—which won the Crime Writers Association of Australia’s Ned Kelly Award for Best Novel in 2007—is Aussie crime writer Garry Disher’s fourth novel featuring Inspector Hal Challis and Sergeant Ellen Destry. A police procedural set in the rural, but booming Mornington Peninsula area south of Melbourne in Victoria, Australia. A place where poverty and wealth live side-by-side and crime is as deadly and ugly as it is in any large city. While visiting his dying father in his childhood home in the dusty, hardscrabble South Australia town of Mawson’s Bluff, Challis unofficially investigates the mysterious disappearance of his sister’s husband, Gavin Hurst, from eight years earlier. Hurst is a man not readily missed by many of Mawson’s Bluff’s residents and his disappearance is truly a mystery. His truck abandoned at the desert’s edge, his body never found. Back home at the Waterloo Station, Ellen Destry is filling in for Challis during his absence, a girl is kidnapped on her way home from school. She is found imprisoned in an uninhabited house. Abused by what Destry believes is a pedophile ring operating in the Peninsula. Her investigation hits roadblocks from within the police service and the only person she can trust is Hal Challis, more than 1,000 kilometers away. Chain of Evidence is a powerful and disturbing procedural. The two major mysteries are intriguing and executed with the sure hand of an absolute professional. It is Ellen Destry’s coming out as an equal partner with Challis. The setting, both the Peninsula and Mawson’s Bluff, is rendered with a muted artistry and adds immeasurably to the novel’s power. There is nothing gory or exploitative about either storyline and Disher has a way of mixing character stereotypes to develop tension between the characters, the plot, and the reader. It may be the best book in the series. If you are new to Garry Disher, Chain of Evidence is a very good place to get acquainted. *              *              * This review was originally published in August 2017 at my Gravetapping blog. With a distance of years from this reading to   now, I’m more certain Chain of Evidence is Disher’s best Challis / Destry book, and it very well may be his best book overall.

Check out Chain of Evidence at Amazon—click here for the Kindle edition and here for the paperback.

Review: "Manifesto for the Dead" by Domenic Stansberry

 

Manifesto for the Dead by Domenic Stansberry Permanent Press, 2000     Manifesto for the Dead hit bookstores the same day Y2K had been forecasted to cripple the modern technological society. The whole world was going to crumble into ruin and this Stansberry guy had a hardboiled and noirish crime novel with a velvety, stark prose scheduled for release that same very damn day. A positive attitude from the writer and the publisher of a bleak as hell tale about the grimmest and perhaps the most luckless of the paperback writers, Jim Thompson. It was January 1, 2000, and the world didn’t end on that first day of the last year of the 20th Century. That wouldn’t happen until 25 years later when too many American voters— Well, okay. We won’t go there… Instead, we’ll go to 1971. When a 64-year-old Jim Thompson is living at the bottom of a bottle and sleeping in the penthouse of the Hollywood Ardmore. He hasn’t been able to write a word in months and his wife, Alberta, is to blame—or so Thompson thinks. The couple’s money is almost gone and with no reasonable way of getting more, Alberta finds a dumpy apartment in the Hillcrest Arms where they can fade away. But Thompson’s luck changes—from shitty to shittier but Thompson’s sure it’s the break he’s been waiting for—when he’s approached by a producer with a bad reputation, Billy Mircale, at the “fashionable gutter joint” of Musso & Frank’s. Miracle is working on a deal with one of Hollywood’s heaviest producers and he thinks a book, especially one written by a guy with Thompson’s reputation, could push the movie into production. Thompson agrees to write the book, without much negotiation about pay—and he’s getting ripped-off, like he always gets ripped-off. But as he writes, Thompson’s real-life begins mixing with his fiction: An Okie hired killer with a dead bombshell in his trunk comes off the page, followed by a fading starlet with her own secrets, and of course Miracle is mixed in everywhere, too. Manifesto for the Dead was a brave novel to write. It was released at the height of Jim Thompson’s popular revival—he had died in 1977 without much fanfare, but by the late-1980s his work was in fashion in a big way with literary critics and academics, readers, and writers. Which meant no matter how good Stansberry’s novel was, there would be criticism from those looking to criticize for no other reason than it was a fiction with Jim Thompson at its center. The poor reviews tended towards snide comments about Stansberry’s inability to capture Thompson’s voice, which from my vantage is unfair at best. I mean, check out the opening paragraph: “This was the end. The final trap. The last flimflam. And for Jim Thompson, this ending—this long plunge into the sweet nothing—was set in motion on the day he first met Billy Miracle, at the Musso & Frank Grill, down on Hollywood Boulevard.” How’s that for a doomed Thompson protagonist? A protagonist that, this time is the tough-luck writer himself. The plot is simple: Murder, betrayal, and blackmail, all fueled by an ill-fated fear and Thompson’s underlying self-destructive behavior. This simplicity gives it a kinship to the best of those 1950s hardboiled novellas published every month in the pulps. The 1970s setting is littered with hippies and druggies, conmen, and z-list celebrities. The Hollywood players are cast with a shadowing of the ludicrous and the starlets, even the fading ladies, are painted as tough and ambitious as everyone else in the City of Angeles. And then there’s Thompson. Unlucky, something of a mark for every unethical bastard in Hollywood, and running for his life. Manifesto for the Dead is my kind of book.

Manifesto for the Dead is out-of-print, but you can find used copies in every corner of the internet. Click here for the hard cover at Amazon