I am not a big fan of noir or hard-boiled mysteries, although I will pick one up from time to time on someone’s recommendation.
I found James Crumley that way. Someone told me that reading his books was like reading Steinbeck. I tried them and I was smitten.
So, the best possible recommendation you can make for books that tend to be a bit on the dark side is to promise me that it will read like Crumley.
A recent review for Craig Macdonald’s Head Games did just that.
Here’s the backstory:
In 1916 Woodrow Wilson dispatched Black Jack Pershing and an army of 10,000 into Mexico to find and bring back Pancho Villa — dead or alive.
Villa evaded capture, living in comfort and peace until his assassination in 1923. A short time later, someone dug up his body and stole his head.
Although an American soldier-of-fortune was arrested for the crime, it was commonly held that he was put up to it by Prescott Bush, grandfather of President George W. Bush. The skull was purportedly placed in the Skull and Bones Society’s infamous trophy cabinet at Yale.
According to the publisher’s website: “The legends linking the missing heads of Geronimo and Pancho Villa became a touchy issue during George H.W. Bush’s presidential race against Michael Dukakis. Currently, there is a growing movement in Mexico to push for George W. Bush to press Yale and his old fraternity to return Pancho Villa’s skull to the Mexican government.”
Truth is definitely at least as strange as fiction, if not stranger.
The book, which opens in 1957, is narrated by one Hector Lassiter, a larger-than-life crime writer who knew Hammett and Chandler, and the cast of characters includes Orson Welles, Marlene Dietrich, Jack Webb and a young Yale frat boy and gone-missing Texas National Guardsman named “George W.”
BookPage says that this book has it all: “humor, a delightfully dark tone, a world-weary and larger-than-life protagonist and a wildly inventive storyline.”
You be the decider.
