Nightcrawlers: A Nameless Detective Novel (Nameless Detective Mystery) [Hardcover]

Bill Pronzini (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 10, 2005 | Series: Nameless Detective Mystery

Bill Pronzini's "Nameless" detective has become one of the longest-lived, and consistently highly praised, private investigators in the annals of American crime fiction and the award-winning author proves, once again, that his skills
are unmatched.

Things were quiet in the San Francisco-based agency Nameless founded and his

partners, Jake and Vanessa were itching to get back to work. A deadbeat father needed to be found, and Vanessa needed to do some field work, so she took the file and headed out to keep an eye on the last known address.

Jake got to work on something much more personal...and dangerous. The Castro had become the stomping ground, literally, of two violent gay-bashers and the most recent victim was Jake's son's lover. Father and son are estranged, but maybe helping now would help them reconcile. That was Jake's thought when he started. For Nameless it was all a matter of letting everyone know that if they needed his help, he was there.

Jake was handling his situation but for Vanessa, things got out of hand. Her perp never showed up, but when she saw a man carrying a young girl into the house across the street, she knew something was wrong....and about to get worse, because she was going to investigate what was going on.

When she doesn't show up a few days later, Nameless feels a sinking in his gut: a few years ago he'd been kidnapped, shackled, and left to die in a cabin in the woods and something about Vanessa's disappearance echoed too loudly. When he discovers the house she'd investigated on her own and sees the words TAKING US TO A HOUSE IN THE WOODS scrawled on a closet wall, the echo became thunderous.

Now it was a race against time, and the clock had begun ticking before "Nameless" and Jake heard the starter's gun.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Conceived as a lone-wolf sleuth, prowling the fog-embraced hills and criminal redoubts of modern San Francisco, Bill Pronzini's Nameless Detective has evolved over the course of 29 novels into a semi-retired family man and mentor to two younger operatives, neither of whom seems any more capable of staying out of trouble than Nameless was in his prime. Fortunately, Nightcrawlers (the sequel to Spook) packs enough grim drama and emotional traumas to go around.

A couple of short-fused homophobes are putting the hurt on gay men in the city's Castro district, and among their victims is Kenneth Hitchcock, the elder lover of investigator Jake Runyon's estranged 22-year-old son, Joshua. So, for professional as well as personal reasons, the widowed Runyon takes an interest in these attacks, connecting the bashers to an underage hustler and an "old-fashioned meat market" called the Dark Spot. Meanwhile, Nameless is summoned to the death bed of Russell Dancer, a manifestly repulsive former pulp-magazine contributor (first introduced in 1973's Undercurrent), now fallen on hard times, who has an unpublished manuscript he wants delivered to Nameless's mother-in-law, Cybil Wade, after whom he's lusted--unrequitedly--for half a century. It will be a test of Nameless's diplomatic acumen to fulfill Dancer's request, without drawing rancor from both Cybil and his wife, Kerry. A still greater test, however, awaits Nameless's black junior partner, Tamara Corbin, whose assignment to stake out a deadbeat dad turns into something more perilous, after she spots her subject's neighbor sneaking an unidentified, squirming bundle into his house one dark eve.

It's evidence of just how much American detective fiction has changed over the last 30 years, that Nightcrawlers can come off as fresh. Even with its high-stakes, triple plot lines, this novel is more retro than revolutionary. Yet the Shamus-winning Pronzini, who has outlasted most of his original contemporaries to become a sage of the genre, continues to entice by emphasizing character development over simplistic violence or gruesome gimmickry, and by allowing Nameless to do something rarely attempted: explore the creaky twilight of his hero-hood (he's now in his early 60s). Seems that age really can bring wisdom. --J. Kingston Pierce

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. The fast-paced latest in the longest-running PI series currently published shows Pronzini at the top of his form. Nameless's beat is the mean streets of San Francisco—but it's a vastly different city from the one inhabited by Sam Spade and the Continental Op. Gay-bashers seeking a thrill brutally beat a young man ("The crack of bone breaking damn near gave him a hard-on") and stalk gay lovers in the Castro district. Enter three seasoned investigators: Jake Runyon, Tamara and "Bill" (Nameless finally has a first name). When Jake learns that the young man attacked was his son's lover, he takes on the case—on his own time and without pay, vowing to beat the night crawlers on their own turf. Pronzini handles the two main story lines and multiple, shifting points of view with aplomb while unsentimentally exploring violence against gays with understatement, righteous indignation and genuine pathos. The author's legendary pulp-collecting nameless investigator shines in a number of affecting scenes in which he visits a famed pulp writer, Russ Dancer, who's dying of cirrhosis and emphysema in a Redwood City hospital. Pronzini just doesn't get better than this.
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Forge Books; First Edition edition (February 10, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0765309319
• ISBN-13: 978-0765309310
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.9 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,985,456 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A great balance, March 5, 2008

By 

Smeddley - See all my reviews

This review is from: Nightcrawlers (Nameless Detective Mystery) (Audio CD)

I noticed it in the last book and I'll say it again - the detective is only pseudo-nameless. They do, in fact, refer to him as `Bill' several times in the novel. That aside, it was a good detective story. It teeters on the edge of hard-boiled, but it's soft enough not to offend anyone's sensibilities. I think this is a great series for those who don't want the true cozies, but also don't want too graphic descriptions or really, really nasty plot lines. It won't give you nightmares, but it will make you think.

I particularly like the very diverse group of characters portrayed, both in the agency and as bit players. The dialogue and interaction ring true, the storyline flows wonderfully, and there's just enough of an `Oh!' factor at the end. You kind of see the ending coming, but not soon enough to spoil the surprise. Honestly, I think it would appeal to both cozy and hard-bitten crime buffs, and I'll almost certainly end up reading more.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Now only another 29 books to catch up on..., August 13, 2006

By 

Kevin Rienecker "Kev" (Portland, OR USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Nightcrawlers: A Nameless Detective Novel (Nameless Detective Mystery) (Hardcover)

First off - covers can be deceiving. The Nightcrawlers title, along with the hazy figure at the end of a dark tunnel, initially gave me the impression that this was a suspense series in the creepy, X-Files sort of vein. I was heading to the beach for the weekend, stopped at the store for snacks, and the cover caught my eye: it looked interesting, and I bought it on impulse, without even reading the blurbs on the back cover.

Well. You can't get much further from X-Files territory. Nightcrawlers is basically a compilation of stories from the Nameless detective agency, blended together. Russ Dancer, a dying hack author, has commissioned Nameless (I'm still not quite sure where the whole 'Nameless' bit came about - his name is Bill) to carry out his last wish - to give a mysterious package to an old flame. Investigator Jake Runyon tries to help his estranged son, after his son's partner is a victim of a brutal gay-bashing. And Nameless's workaholic junior partner, Tamara Corbin, stumbles onto a kidnapping while on a stakeout.

Pronzini has plenty of experience in his genre, and it shows. The themes are dark and gritty, and his writing is tight and focused. The three main characters are well-drawn, if not particularly distinctive, or unfortunately, even memorable (except for maybe Nameless). The book kind of stumbles along until Tamara disappears, and Nameless slides out of the background and comes front and center. Many of the supporting characters are stereotypes, and dialogue intended to establish characterization often doesn't ring true. And coming in to the series so late, I had a little trouble keeping track of who was who and what was going on for the first couple of chapters. Pronzini alternates his main protagonists point of view, abruptly switching between plotlines from chapter to chapter. It's handled as smoothly as possible and I don't really see a better way around it, but the device still slows the narrative. Each time I got interested in one of the stories, I was yanked away and thrust back into the middle of another, until they all verged together about halfway through the book.

There aren't many authors who manage to create a character for one novel, or over the course of a short series; much less successfully sustain the series over the course of three or four decades. Lawrence Block and his Matt Scudder series come to mind... and that's not a bad comparison, in the way Nameless has grown and evolved over the course of 35 years. But even with the disturbing subject matter he's working with here, Pronzini can't quite build up the dark and disturbing atmosphere that's the hallmark of the Scudder books. That's not an interest killer though, because the events that unfold (at least in this installment) are even more realistic as written in such a straightforward manner.

All in all, even with a little nitpicking, I was pretty impressed. Enough to go back to the beginning, and learn more about Nameless and his associates.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars 3.5 stars - Not his best, but better than good., May 31, 2005

By 

L. J. Roberts (Oakland, CA, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Nightcrawlers: A Nameless Detective Novel (Nameless Detective Mystery) (Hardcover)

Interesting characters, and excellent dialogue and sense of place hallmark Pronzini's writing. It is understandable, as "Nameless" gets older, that he can't do as he once did and that Pronzini bring other characters into the agency, but it does dilute the focus. But by taking away the mystique of "Nameless" and telling the various stories of each of the partners, this latest entry doesn't have the same introspection or tension of previous books. That's not to say it's not a good book. It's fast paced and each sub-story is interesting in it's own right. It's not Pronzini at his best, but it's still better than good.