BIG WHEAT-A FINE CRIME NOVEL EVOCATIVE OF THE HIGH PLAINS IN A BYGONE ERA.

By Richard A. Thompson

Poisoned Pen Press 2011

ISBN: 978-1-59058-820-8

World War I is done and Charlie Krueger’s older brother is never coming home.  Charlie, his sister and their mother must cope with an increasingly abusive drunken father and husband.  The summer of 1919 wanes and vast acreages of the Middle West prairies are thick with ripening grain.  Up the long reaches from the banks of the Platte and the Missouri come the contract threshing machines. Most are followed by raffish rootless men called bindlestiffs, who supplement a farmer’s friends and relatives on the threshing crews.  The crews are often peopled by men of questionable backgrounds and are occasionally eyed with suspicion by local sheriffs who rarely chase criminals beyond their county boundaries.

When Charlie Krueger has a final confrontation with his father, he leaves behind a sorrowful mother and sister and the local girl he thought he’d love forever.  He becomes a bindlestiff, traveling from farm to farm, learning the threshing business and nurturing his love for machines.

The machines are new, complicated and prone to breakdowns.  Charlie hooks up with a marvelously conceived traveling machine repair crew that becomes his new family.  But lurking in the background is a killer, a killer who believes Charlie saw his latest brutal deed.  He seeks to find and murder Charlie.  Meanwhile, the sheriff of Charlie’s home county has developed leads which point him toward Charlie as a murderer.

This then is the roiling plot which moves the story forward.  Carefully constructed and set against the vast reaches of the plains states, the novel evokes a time and place and the attitudes of the people and the land in a powerful and moving way.  Readers will smell the dust, drip sweat and shrivel under the burning sun right along with the threshing crews.  They’ll feel a clutch in the night as the sheriff and the murderer draw closer and they’ll empathize with the casual corruption and the surmounting goodness of the characters the author has created.

A fine, exciting and unusual well-written novel I am pleased to recommend to all readers of crime fiction. Winner of the 2011 prestigious Minnesota Book Award for Genre Fiction.

RIDING THE RAP

ISBN-0440-21441-6
A Dell/Bantam paperback
by Elmore Leonard
1996
Yes, of course it's old and probably not available except as used. Can't help it. This demonstrates the hazards of collecting books. I keep 'em around and sometimes re-read. What a waste of energy, but this is another too-good-not-to-remind you.

Some call it crime thriller, others mystery. I’d call RIDING THE RAP a crime caper novel. Who cares? This is wonderful tragic-comedy. The writing is excellent and the plot works all the time, all the way through the book.

Then we have the characters. With a single exception, Leonard has made us like and even care about all the characters, good and evil. From the psychic Reverend Dawn to the pitiful spoiled Chip Ganz, to Joyce the ex-dancer, Leonard looks at each as a fully-developed individual. Even the Puerto Rican gardener-cum-mob enforcer Bobby changes shape as we move around him.

It’s a bad idea, this terroristic kidnapping, conceived by a Miami Gold Coast druggie and carried out by two mismatched low-lifes. Whom do they snatch, but a retired bookie, figuring he’s got millions stashed somewhere. It turns out the money’s there, but terrorism in Lebanon doesn’t travel well to south Florida.

Enter Raylan Givens, gun-toting Stetson-wearing U.S. Marshall. Straight-arrow Raylan (well almost straight-arrow) polite to a fault, goes looking for the snatched bookie, Harry Arno. It’s not an assignment, you understand. He starts investigating because his lady friend, an ex-topless dancer, asks him to look. So, in between regular assignments in court and transporting convicted felons here and there, Raylan looks for Harry.

As his non-case continues, Raylan has to deal with an astonishing array of characters, nearly all of whom have a hand out one way or the other. The steely-eyed, upstanding marshal wades through these cross-currents until he resolves the case...well almost. The ending is another one of Leonard’s masterful sleights-of-hand. And you love it. And you’ll read the next one. And I think you’ll have a good laugh more than once while you’re RIDING THE RAP.