From Publishers Weekly
The notoriously wild Truluck (Street Level) out-wilds himself with Joe Ready, a 98-year-old cop turned PI turned vigilante, and Ready's younger partner, Jimmy Cotton. Ready and Cotton met when Ready was already old and supposedly retired, and Cotton was a young man scarred and scared by the 1970 shootings at Kent State. The two formed a relationship around Cotton's desire to soak up Ready's tall tales, liquor and dope. Years later, the tables are turned and Cotton must recount Ready's exploits to entertain the dying old man, even though he's pretty sure Ready was never actually mixed up with Machine Gun Kelly, Meyer Lansky, tough guys in Cuba, kidnappings and Ready's perennial nemesis, Pearlie Friedman. Turns out the tales are true, Ready's not really retired and Cotton's being seduced—or drafted—into Ready's world. Truluck's pulpy prose is spot on, and his vision and voice remain among the most original in a genre too often reduced to formula. (Aug.)
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Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* Don't be fooled into thinking that Truluck's third novel is yet another nostalgic salute to the pulp era: one more simile-strewn re-creation of the tough-talking Black Mask gang's pennies-a-word, rat-a-tat prose. Yes, there are plenty of gats and gunsels in these pages, but Truluck is no imitator. Take the setup: a private eye, Jimmy Cotton, visits his ninetysomething partner and mentor, Joe Ready, on Joe's deathbed. Joe wants to hear all his old stories, the ones he told Jimmy 30 years ago, the ones that drew the young Jimmy, then a disillusioned hippie, into the business of tracking kidnappers and their victims. And so it goes: Jimmy, speaking in Joe's voice, tells Joe the story of his own life: encounters with Ma Barker, the Lindbergh kidnappers, and Meyer Lansky, among others. The content is pure 1930s, but the pulpers' narrative structure of choice didn't employ voices within voices within voices. The dialogue, too, may start out sounding like it's straight from the pages of Black Mask, but then you realize that Truluck has substituted a chord here and flatted a few dozen fifths there, like Thelonius Monk playing "April in Paris." And there's an edge to Joe Ready that you wouldn't find in a pulp hero, a sense that he's fooling himself about half the time. So do we all, of course, but we don't have Jimmy there at the end to tell us our own stories the way we want to hear them. Think about that: bittersweet is not a flavor one associates with the hard-boiled style, but Truluck makes it taste just right. Ott, Bill
