SUNBURN. [Import] [Paperback]

Laurence. Shames (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: HYPERION. NY 1995; New Ed edition (1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0330343564
• ISBN-13: 978-0330343565
• Product Dimensions: 7 x 4.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,356,602 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Laurence Shames has been a New York City taxi driver, lounge singer, furniture mover, lifeguard, dishwasher, gym teacher, and shoe salesman. Having failed to distinguish himself in any of those professions, he turned to writing full-time in 1976 and has not done an honest day's work since.

His basic laziness notwithstanding, Shames has published twenty books and hundreds of magazine articles and essays. Best known for his critically acclaimed series of eight Key West novels, he has also authored non-fiction and enjoyed considerable though largely secret success as a collaborator and ghostwriter. Shames has penned four New York Times bestsellers. These have appeared on four different lists, under four different names, none of them his own. This might be a record.

Born in Newark, New Jersey in 1951, to chain-smoking parents of modest means but flamboyant emotions, Shames did not know Philip Roth, Paul Simon, Queen Latifa, Shaquille O'Neal, or any of the other really cool people who have come from his hometown. He graduated summa cum laude from NYU in 1972 and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa. As a side note, both his alma mater and honorary society have been extraordinarily adept at tracking his many address changes through the decades, in spite of the fact that he's never sent them one red cent, and never will.

It was on an Italian beach in the summer of 1970 that Shames first heard the sacred call of the writer's vocation. Lonely and poor, hungry and thirsty, he'd wandered into a seaside trattoria, where he noticed a couple tucking into a big platter of fritto misto. The man was nothing much to look at but the woman was really beautiful. She was perfectly tan and had a very fine-gauge gold chain looped around her bare tummy. The couple was sharing a liter of white wine; condensation beaded the carafe. Eye contact was made; the couple turned out to be Americans. The man wiped olive oil from his rather sensual lips and introduced himself as a writer. Shames knew in that moment that he would be one too.

He began writing stories and longer things he thought of as novels. He couldn't sell them.

By 1979 he'd somehow become a journalist and was soon publishing in top-shelf magazines like Playboy, Outside, Saturday Review, and Vanity Fair. (This transition entailed some lucky breaks, but is not as vivid a tale as the fritto misto bit, so we'll just sort of gloss over it.) In 1982, Shames was named Ethics columnist of Esquire, and also made a contributing editor to that magazine.

By 1986 he was writing non-fiction books. The critical, if not the commercial, success of these first established Shames' credentials as a collaborator/ghostwriter. His 1991 national bestseller, Boss of Bosses, written with two FBI agents, got him thinking about the Mafia. It also bought him a ticket out of New York and a sweet little house in Key West, where he finally got back to Plan A: writing novels. Given his then-current preoccupations, the novels naturally featured palm trees, high humidity, dogs in sunglasses, and New York mobsters blundering through a town where people were too laid back to be afraid of them. But this part of the story is best told with reference to the books themselves, so please stick around and explore them.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars sort of a man's equivalent to a Stephanie Plum book..., July 20, 2003

By 

lazza (Fort Lauderdale, Florida) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Sunburn (Paperback)

Janet Evanovich writes an extraordinary successful series of funny crime stories starring Stephanie Plum, the bounty hunter who happens to be a babe. While they should have universal appeal it seems that the publishers target them to women (..guys don't like buying pink covered books). However I can now say I found the male equivalent to Evanovich's novels: Laurence Shames novels. They are also funny, well-written stories with quirky yet likeable characters.

So what does Shames give us with 'Sunburn'? Beyond the formulaic breezy comedic crime novel with a Key West setting he delivers .. shock!.. some rather dramatic and moving stuff (, without taking it all too seriously). We have an aging crime figure who wants to dictate his life story to a sympathetic journalist. Unfortunately both the FBI and others within the Mafia have an unhealthy interest in what is being written, and an especially stupid son makes matters much, much worse. Without divulging spoilers, I simply want to say the author has structured and paced the novel beautifully. The last fifty pages are especially good, exciting.

Bottom line: much better than his introductory 'Florida Straits', 'Sunburn' has made me a fan of Laurence Shames.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Worth the reprint, January 29, 2006

By 

Charles J. Marr (Cambridge Springs, Pa USA) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Sunburn (Paperback)

The copy I read is a reprint of the original, unavailable for a number of years. My experience with Lawrence Shames has been the much more comic novels; although, Bert the Shirt - the retired mafioso who died is an important part of the action here. His trip to New Yaak after more than ten years of tropical warmth will strike maky Floridians as the equivalen of a descent into hell. One whom I know has no shoes with toes so people cannot make her visit during winter. Perhaps Bert is as close as Shames comes to the humor of his later books. This is a more serious but not heavy handed analysis of the biographer's art.
Arty, a newspaperman and friend of the "Godfather's" illegitimate son is tempted into assisting with an autobiography. In it the old man will tell all. But the rub is that he tells the philosophy of his life: discrimination, self protection, racisim, authority, omerta, the need for something of one's own. Arty is getting nowhere, but becomes everyone's target. Meanwhile he becomes closer to the family and "the family."Everyone else, Vincente's other son, the mafia, the FBI all think the book is a naming of names and the chaos that results reaches the point of murder. Still there is a resolution of sorts: not a happy ending but at least ajust ending. It is a very different book from Welcome to Paradise , for example, but still an enjoyable discovery. Shames would probably do better if he left out his attempts to spell out New York accents. But aside from that, a good Key West read.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Gilligan's Island with an Edge, September 4, 2001

By 

"booshkindoggin" (Santa Clara, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Sunburn (Paperback)

RE: RECORDED BOOKS AUDIO VERSION. Among the quirky Key West characters are a reluctant & reflective Mafia Don, his pal "retired" heavy Bert the Shirt, a ditzy gun-moll with a heart of gold, a neurotic Jewish newspaper editor and the Shirt's aging chihuahua, Don Giovanni. They're all artfully blended in a stew of humor and suspense where its hard to tell the white hats from the black. Well worth a read.
One question: why am I the first friggin' guy to, whaddayacallit, review, this book, Knowwhaddamean?