The Pistol Poets (Mass Market Paperback)

by Victor Gischler (Author)
Key Phrases: Red Zach, Sherman Ellis, Annie Walsh (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
The Edgar-nominated author of Gun Monkeys is back with a thrill-a-minute suspense novel that mixes crime and academia—with hilarious results. Here Victor Gischler draws us into a wild and wicked world, where tenured professors are busy burying bodies, cash-up-front P.I.’s hunt for missing coeds and one desperate street-tough has to decide which he’d rather be: a live poet or a dead criminal.

An unlucky grad student just got himself killed in a robbery gone bad. And as lowly drug lieutenant Harold Jenks races with the killer out of the alley, a light goes off in his head: He’ll steal the dead kid’s identity. Now Jenks, who once lorded it over seven square blocks in East St. Louis, is headed due west. With a .32 in his pocket, a 9mm Glock taped across his back, and a rap sheet nearly as long as Finnegans Wake, he’s cruising the halls of academia as Eastern Oklahoma U’s newest grad student, looking for action and hoping he can stay one couplet ahead of his violent past.

While this new bad boy on campus makes mincemeat of his metaphors, across campus visiting professor Jay Morgan has a more pressing problem: What to do about the dead coed in his bed. The professor’s no killer, but try telling that to private eye Deke Stubbs. With the professor on the lam and Stubbs hot on his trail, more trouble blows into town. Now, as St. Louis drug boss Red Zach and his minions converge on Fumbee, Oklahoma, looking for a consignment of missing cocaine, the bullets start flying faster than the zingers at a faculty hate fest. For Morgan and Jenks, now desperate fugitives from poetic justice, survival means learning new skills—and learning fast. Because if they find out they’re bottom-of-the-class, that means they’re already dead.

Featuring the sleaziest, sorriest, and most captivating group of criminal lowlifes, sexed-up academics, poets, and rappers ever to collide in one crime novel, The Pistol Poets speeds deliriously to its electrifying payoff.


From the Hardcover edition.

About the Author
Victor Gischler teaches creative writing at Rogers State University in Claremore, Oklahoma, where the wind comes sweeping through his pants. His wife, Jackie, thinks he is a silly, silly individual. He drinks black, black coffee all day long and sleeps about seven minutes a night. Victor’s first novel, Gun Monkeys, was nominated for the Edgar Award.


From the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 368 pages
• Publisher: Dell (January 25, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0440241693
• ISBN-13: 978-0440241690
• Product Dimensions: 6.8 x 4.2 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #344,707 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Devilishly brilliant black-comedy crime novel., October 26, 2008

By	Software Guy (South Florida, Center of the Universe) - See all my reviews

I don't know what's up lately but I am finding a lot of really great books by writers I hadn't heard of before, like there is a noir/thriller underground cabal of writers out there that I am just learning about. Considering the the amount of reheated, non-starter novels I read, finding a new crop of edgy writers is a real treat. Gischler added his name to my favorites list with a bullet with The Pistol Poets.

Pistol Poets is rich with great characters and an insane storyline. The writing is sometimes wry, sly and subtle, with intricate character development and other times it comes at you with barrels blazing, with in-your-face violence and comedic scenes that will double you over, fluids flying.

Hard to categorize this one. Definitely more dark comedy than not, but it is done masterfully so even the most ludicrous situations are not only plausible but are compelling. I had a big satisfied smile on my face from cover to cover. Victor Gischler has amazing skills for an author with so few works. If he's just getting warmed up, he is definitely going to be in The Bigs for a long time to come.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars hectic crazy, April 25, 2008

By	Rochele R. Lacosse (Phoenix, AZ) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Loved the Gun Monkeys, this one was harder to stay interested in, it was crazy hectic

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Death in a Tweed Jacket, April 2, 2006

By	Gary Griffiths (Los Altos Hills, CA United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Mixing poetry with drugs, sex, and murder would not be the first thing to come to mind if you were thinking about writing crime fiction. And unless you're Victor Gischler, the results of such an abominable coupling would likely be a bad as it sounds. But if Gischler isn't the most talented new crime writer to hit the pages in the last few years, he is certainly the most bizarre. Of his three novels - five stars everyone - "The Pistol Poets" is the most blackly humorous - think a more evil Carl Hiaasen - certainly the most imaginative, and probably the best of the bunch.

Harold Jenks is a low-level drug dealer in the East St. Louis slums, a dead-ender with a long prison sentence the best outcome of his miserable life. When he and his partner kill a graduate student in a mugging gone bad, Jenks decides to swap identities, moving to a backwater east-Oklahoma University playing the role of budding poet Sherman Ellis. It is there he crosses paths with the pathetic Jay Morgan, a visiting professor of poetry at the fictitious East Oklahoma University, the cold and rainy redneck paradise providing an unusually whacky setting for Gischler's very own brand of graphic violence and raw sex told with tongue firmly implanted-in-cheek. Morgan is a slacker of summa cum laude caliber, a gypsy professor of poetry with perpetual writer's block, a connoisseur of undergraduate sex and hard alcohol. But a cranky department head and a cantankerous would-be poet are the least of Morgan's worries when a co-ed he was bedding turns up dead in his apartment. Convoluted for sure, but merely the underpinnings of a non-stop rush of manic academia as gory as it is zany. This may have the Fireside Poets doing synchronized rolls in their graves, but it sure is bloody good fun. Get educated - get Gischler.