PIKE: Outstanding noir novel

by Benjamin Whitmer
ISBN: 978-1-60486-089-4 2010
2010 Trade Paper release
from PM Press.

This crime-ridden novel will not be to everyone’s taste. It is gritty, dirty, foul-mouthed and foul-intentioned on the part of the principal characters. It is a wonderfully written novel. If your tastes in crime fiction run to the dark side; if you yearn to explore the minds and the actions of those who inhabit the dangerous underside of urban life, you should read this novel.

Douglas Pike, rising out of a criminous youthful raging life has become an oddity. He’s reigned in some of his worst impulses and tries to live out his days scraping things together with a young friend who has aspirations to be a professional boxer. Pike has done many things in his life, including functioning as an adept private investigator. Now with nothing momentous on his horizon, he sifts through life. And into that life falls his granddaughter, Wendy. Wendy is the result of a twelve-years-ago liaison between Pike’s estranged daughter, Sarah, and some guy. Wendy has intelligence to spare, loads of attitude, and a vocabulary guaranteed to cause multiple double-takes.

Because Pike suddenly feels unfamiliar familial vibrations, however faint, he sets out to find out about his family and in the process create a welcoming environment for his grand-daughter. His odyssey takes him deep into the grimy streets, bordellos, crack-houses and assorted environs of the worst that Cincinnati has to offer.

This is one powerful, novel of soaring descriptive language, poetical vibrant driving action; a novel to shudder at, to wince over and to remember, long after its surprising and satisfying conclusion. It is well-plotted, finely paced and filled with descriptions of wonderful and awful things.

A WASTELAND OF STRANGERS

Author: Bill Pronzini
Publisher: Walker & Company.
ISBN: 0-8027-7560-8
Price: $8.95 (hard cover)
pub. date: 1999
257 pages


www.thrillingdetective.com/trivia/pronzini.html

This is another of Bill Pronzini’s intensive, commanding, explorations of current social ideas and concerns which move a national colloquy in many forums. But this is not a social treatis full of statistics. This is a moving, intense, crime novel, that will captivate and enthrall the reader. Take one large, dangerous looking, individual, John Faith, by name. He’s a traveler, a seeker, a man on the move. Insert this stranger into a small resort community during the off season. This community happens to be in northern California, but such are the author’s skills, it could be anywhere. It could be your hometown.

John Faith is the immediate object of suspicion, because he’s a stranger and he doesn’t look like he belongs. His presence gradually reveals and widens long-standing cracks in the comfortable, biased attitudes and ideas of almost everyone in town. Why has this man come to town? What are his motives? His answers are enigmatic, and even at the end we are left with questions. John Faith’s encounters with the police chief, the bigoted lake-side resort owner, some local Native Americans, and a bartender or two, are like pebbles dropped in a placid pool. The ripples expand and expand until they reach the edge of the pool and die. Except in this case, the ripples grow larger, intersect and become irresistible waves that begin to tear at the base fabric of the town.

This psychological thriller is tightly plotted, and intricately presented. It’s pace is irresistible. “A Wasteland of Strangers” is a thoughtful, satisfying crime novel. Artist Doug Henry has presented a handsome, evocative cover illustration. Highly recommended.