Customer Reviews

CHINAMAN'S CHANCE.

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Lifelong pals since they hooked up in a San Francisco orphanage, Artie Woo and Quincy Durant are two of the best characters you'll come across in any thriller. Nobody plumbs the depths of corruption and works a great con like this dynamic duo of the Pacific Rim. Throw in the likes of grifter Otherguy Overby, CIA master Whittaker Lowell James, and a former folk trio named Ivory, Lace, and Silk, and you've got the makings for one helluva adventure.

"Chinaman's Chance" is a delight to read. The juicy, twisted tale of opportunists on the make was tailor-made for Ross Thomas' fast-paced, witty style. He had a remarkable ability of making cynical characters likable and complex plots believable. His novels are "page-turners," but they're also insightful and poignant sketches of the human condition. He was truly an uncommon talent.

If you like the combination of humor and action in the tradition of Leslie Charteris, Raymond Chandler, Robert B Parker, and John D. MacDonald, you will like Ross Thomas. Great character development. Good plot. Lots of great dialog.GET THESE BOOKS BACK IN PRINT!

The wily Artie Wu and the often explosive Quincy Durant appear for the first time in this novel.

Throw in a missing actress, a luckless vietnam vet, a fixer connected into the highest circles in Washington, a couple of very bad guys and a fat, Tab-drinking italian killer with his two hoodlums.

Mix it with a couple million bucks under the ground in the ex American embassy in Saigon and a seedy place in Southern California that is so ripe that it has to be perceived as outright rotten.

Then let the master of the double and triple cross weave a plot that's thrilling, entertaining, unpredictable and sometimes outright shocking up to the very end.

Spice it up with some dialogues that are so dry that they can't be outmatched by a swig of Gin, straight from the bottle.

All those components make up one of Thomas' best reads ever.

I consider it to be a shame that so many of his books went out of print.

The best book by the best mystery author. How can these be out of print when so much is in print and unreadable

As usual, Ross Thomas does a great job in developing the characters early in the book, but then, as usual, gets tangled up in plots and subplots that take you way too far in before revealing why what's been going on has been going on. He provides a rich narrative, and character development is certainly one of his strengths, but the tendency to keep so much hidden takes away from the novel. "The Fools in Town are all on Our Side" was similar-great character development early, then a complex, incredible, complex, late to be revealed plot.

Of the Ross Thomas books containing the Wu & Durant characters, this one is arguably the best. A great story with twists and turns that keep the pages turning with very little effort.
The characters are so well developed only a photograph would offer any more insight. If a picture is worth a thousand words, Thomas has the ability to modify that statement to paint a picture using very little wordage. If your a Thomas fan this book shoud definitley be high on your list of "next" reads.

I happened upon Ross Thomas by chance and not design. As my local library had only Out on the Rim and The Fourth Durango on its shelves, I read them first. I was hooked. Through the library's inter- library loan program I have now read from Cold War Swap through Chinaman's Chance. I'm only 50 and admittedly have a lot of reading ahead of me but I can not remember enjoying reading someone's work as much as I do reading Ross Thomas. I cannot imagine that he will ever be out of my top 10 favorites.

A Congressman is killed, the apparent victim of a jealous wife who immediately commits suicide. The Congressman's girl friend is Silk Armitage, a famous singer. Silk goes into hiding in Pelican Bay, disguised as a gypsy fortune-teller. Artie Wu and his partner Quincy Durant are hired to find her. This book introduces Artie Wu, Pretender to the throne of China. Wu claims to be the illigitimate son of the illegitimate daughter of the Boy-Emperor, who is also remembered as P'u Yi. Wu and Durant are always entertaining.

This was the first of Thomas' Wu and Durant novels, and in my opinion, the best. Two things make this novel memorable. First, there is the remarkable array of supporting characters, many of them sleazebags, most of them bizarre, all of them memorable. Second, at some level, Los Angeles is the main character, especially the South Bay. Thomas' descriptions of the cities, the neighborhoods, buildings, the marginal businesses, are absolute gems. I have spent a great deal of time trying to match the places, especially the coastal cities, to actual locations in Los Angeles, without much success, but who cares. I don't know if the Los Angeles he described ever really existed, but it should have.

Wickedly funny and a great page turner. I've been reading a lot of crime fiction lately: Connelly, Rankin, Mankell, Francis, Child. All good in their own way. But I've found Thomas, and this book specifically, to be the most "delicious" and memorable.