Slow Dance in Autumn: A Hank Prince Mystery Novel [Hardcover]

Philip Lee Williams (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1988

Meet hank Prince, Atlanta's most engaging private eye. He's bold, he's tough, he's tenderhearted. A former AAA baseball player-turned detective, Prince is a literate jock with an abiding appreciation of food, wine, and women.

Lately Prince has fallen on hard times. His last love ran off with an encyclopedia salesman. He lost his boat, his house, most of its contents, and he sloshes when he jogs, all due in part to his fondness for Evan Williams bourbon.

Prince is ready to bail out of the private eye business ltogether when he gets drawn into the mystery surrounding an old friend's disappearance. Reinvigorated by the search, Prince pursues the truth and trips across a LISTPRICEless artifact that seems to point to a reason for his friend's demise. He also stumbles upon Ginny Calvert, and rediscovers the thrill of a new love.

Hardboiled, appealing, Hank Prince might not be the world's perfect detective, but he knows the difference between right and wrong, and that's the code he lives by. When you've fininshed reading SLOW DANCE IN AUTUMN, you'll be ready for Hank Prince's next case.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Hank Prince is a baseball player turned private eye in Atlanta. Literate, flip and often drunk, Prince wakens from a binge to learn that an old friend, Tony Browning, a small-time drug dealer, is missing. Hired to find Tony by his wife, Prince suspects drug-business trouble but he doesn't move quickly enough; first Tony's wife is shot to death, then Tony, too, is gunned down. One twist develops when Prince discovers a jewel-encrusted medieval cross hidden in the victim's house; another comes when the man's boss hires Prince to clear his organization of the murders. While alternating between states of sobriety and inebriation, Prince figures out who has masterminded the killings and frame-ups, and arranges that the kingpin be brought to justice. Williams ( All the Western Stars ) keeps an encumbered and uncompelling plot alive with his funny, movie-script quoting hero, whose next appearance will be anticipated by readers.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

"Smoothly readable, quick-paced." -- Kirkus Reviews

In 1984 Philip Lee Williams' first novel, The Heart of a Distant Forest, received high praise from critics but little recognition from the public. With this third novel, Williams has made a pitch for a larger reading audience by writing the first in what seems intended to be a series of hard-boiled detective novels, featuring Hank Prince, a tough private eye in the heart of a different forest, the bustling capital of the New South, Atlanta. Slow Dance in Autumn is a welcome addition to the mystery genre self-consciously adopted by a number of talented mainstream "southern writers" striving for a national readership. Prince is a hard-drinking, tough-talking PI with enough cynicism to get by and enough heart to get himself into trouble. He epitomizes the American hero of popular culture as personified in private-eye novels. He is our way of defining who we wish to be: tough but kind and with enough openness to the conflicting swirl of human motivations that we can see not only the selfishness and greed that underlies much of the behavior around us but also the deep ties of need and love that fuel it as well. Slow Dance in Autumn is competently plotted and well written, an easy and engaging read, with plenty of subplots, lots of snappy dialogue, and enough literary references to keep you aware that this is a real writer. The danger of serious literary stylists moving into a genre like detective fiction is that they will appear to be slumming. Williams avoids that pitfall with grace, and one finishes this story looking forward to Hank Prince's next case. If there is a problem with this book, it is a minor one: While we get a strong sense of Prince as a character-one which we hope will be further developed in future stories-we never get much of a sense of Atlanta as a specific place. There is enough name-dropping to appeal to local readers, but the particular texture and feel of the locale is sometimes missing-as if Hank Prince's Atlanta is as bland as the shiny new steel and glass towers make it seem. Williams has published another mainstream novel since Slow Dance was released, and we can only hope that he will continue both his literary careers and return to Hank Prince's Atlanta sometime soon. -- From Independent Publisher

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 255 pages
• Publisher: Peachtree Pub Ltd; First Edition edition (October 1988)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0934601569
• ISBN-13: 978-0934601566
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,193,068 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Philip Lee Williams is the author of 16 published books, including 11 novels, three works of non-fiction, and two volumes of poetry. His books have been published by such presses as St. Martin's, W. W. Norton, Random House, Grove Press, Ballantine, Dell, Viking/Penguin, and Mercer University Press, as well a number of other smaller and university presses.

His 1000-page novel, The Divine Comics, was published in November 2011 by Mercer University Press. This book is a modern re-imagining and updating of Dante's fabled Divine Comedy. Another novel, Emerson's Brother, will come out in May 2012.

The University of Georgia Press republished his Michael Shaara Prize-winning novel A Distant Flame on April 1, 2011.

Williams's The Flower Seeker: An Epic Poem of William Bartram, came out on Sept. 1, 2010. It was named Book of the Year by Books & Culture Magazine. His most recent novel is The Campfire Boys, fiction about entertainers during the American Civil War. A collection of poetry called Elegies for the Water (Mercer University Press) came out on March 1, 2009.

In May 2007, he received the Governor's Award in the Humanities from the State of Georgia during ceremonies in Atlanta, and in June of that year he was for the second time named Georgia Author of the Year, this time in the essay category in a program at Kennesaw State University. He has since been named Georgia Author of the Year twice more.

His most recent nonfiction book, nature essays called In the Morning: Reflections Toward First Light, came out in the fall of 2006 from Mercer University Press. He is a featured author in a textbook about Georgia authors for the state's eighth graders that was released in the fall of 2008.

His novel A Distant Flame was published by St. Martin's Press in September 2004. In April 2005, it was named winner of the Michael Shaara Award as the best Civil War novel published in the United States in 2004. Williams received the award in Boston in June 2005. The book was also named, by The Georgia Center for the Book, one of 25 books that "All Georgians Should Read." It came out in a trade paperback edition in November 2005.

His first novel, The Heart of a Distant Forest, was reprinted in September 2005 by the University of Georgia Press.

His books have been translated into Swedish, German, French, and Japanese and have appeared in large-print editions as well. A number of his books have been optioned for film by such people as producer Richard Zanuck, director Ron Howard, and actress Meg Ryan. He was hired by M-G-M to write the screenplay of his own book, All the Western Stars, though the movie has not yet been made.

Two of Williams's unpublished manuscripts have also been optioned by producers in Hollywood.

Williams has also published poetry in more than 40 magazines, including Poetry, Press, Karamu, the Cumberland Poetry Review and many others. He has published essays and short stories, and one story, "An Early Snow," published in 2000, was nominated by The Chattahoochee Review for a Pushcart Prize.

An essay of Williams's appeared in the fall 2010 issue of The Georgia Review.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Worth a look, but don't hold your breath for a sequel, June 10, 2001

By 

Dr. Christopher Coleman (HONG KONG) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Slow Dance in Autumn: A Hank Prince Mystery Novel (Hardcover)

Philip Lee Williams is a fine author who specialises in introspective characters who find themselves somewhat unexpectedly at points of closure in their lives. His novels are flavored with nostalgia and regret, hopes and expectations unattained.

Slow Dance in Autumn is Williams' shot at a detective story--although displayed rather prominently on the cover are the words "A Hank Prince Mystery Novel" as though it were one in a series, it should more accurately say "The Hank Prince Mystery Novel", given that after some 13 years another has not appeared. Prince is a wise-guy almost-was baseball player turned hard-drinking, hard-smoking PI facing hard times; he's intelligent but not overly competent in the dectecting trade. For me, the character was rather too familiar--true, we haven't had many fictional PI's in Atlanta, but that is scarcely unusual. And that in the author's note before the novel begins Williams inadvertently gives an enormous clue to the puzzle Prince faces ruined quite a bit of the suspense.

With these caveats, Slow Dance in Autumn is a perfectly good detective story, but it didn't quite capture my imagination the way Williams' extraordinary other novels have, like All The Western Stars, Crossing Wildcat Ridge, or The Heart of a Distant Forest, all of which I most highly recommend. But Slow Dance in Autumn is not to be written off entirely--Williams has some very good lines, including perhaps the most intriguing line in detective fiction ever written: "The stretch of I-20 between Atlanta and Birmingham is like being stranded somewhere between Murmansk and Vladivostok with a phonetic alphabet book, no rubles and an empty bottle of vodka." Raymond Chandler must be rolling in his grave wishing he'd written that!