Hey, Guys! Thinking about getting a testosterone shot? Why bother? Just read Harry Hunsicker's Still River. It's cheaper, less painful, and more fun.
There are a couple of p.i. novel titles that I really like and that I think would better describe this book, but they're both taken. One is Joe Lansdale and Lewis Shiner's Private-Eye Action as You Like It. The other is Let them Eat Bullets, from an old Gold Medal book by Howard Schoenfeld. Either title would fit Still River. This book never slows down to catch its breath. There are more firefights than on a bad day in Baghdad, not to mention martial arts, explosions, and hair dryers. In fact, if the U.S. gov would just send Lee Henry ("Call me Hank") Oswald to Iraq, he'd probably take out the insurgency in under a month. I believe Hunsicker has already signed on to write at least two more books in this series. By the time they're done, the population of Dallas, which is the setting, might be reduced to the size of Alvin's.
There are some good one-liners in the midst of all the carnage. Plus there are characters named Clairol and Poon. If you put copies of books by James Crumley and Dan Jenkins too close together on a library shelf and they mated to produce an illegitimate offspring, the result might be Still River. I suggest that you buy a copy today.
2 comments:
You're certainly right about Dan Jenkins' recent books. They've lost all the fun of the earlier stuff. Like you, I've enjoyed Shrake, McMurtry, Cartwright, and King. I practically grew up reading Shrake and Cartwright in the Dallas Morning News sports section, and I naturally moved on to their novels. Much later I met both of them at different times. Pete Gent isn't a native Texan, but North Dallas Forty is a fine book anyway. As for Leon Hale, I'm happy to hear you like his stuff. I bought a copy of a novel of his, Bonney's Place, back in the early 1970s. I still have it. He's a columnist for the Houston Chronicle now, in his 80s but still writing. I read his column regularly.
I read the Harry Hunsicker A while ago. I think it's a perfect PI book. The action is done real well, the characters great. Wonderful hardboiled stuff.
A review will be in the new Crimespree, which actually went out in yesterday's mail.
Harry Rocks.
Jon
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