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The Art of Redemption by Bob Truluck, cloth
state, $35. The quarter-morocco state is long sold out, but if you call
me, I may be able to steer you to a rare bookseller who might still have
a copy (my original price, as with all of my morocco eds. for the past
few years, was $250., and the print run was 104 copies, slipcased, signed
and lettered by the author).
What can one say about Bob Truluck, other than he's "sui generis,"
and has written three of the coolest books in the PI "genre"
(his first novel, Street Level, won the St. Martin's Press prize
for Best First PI Novel in 1999 and was published under that imprint as
part of the prize, while I published his second novel, Saw Red,
in 2003, in part to save it from the emasculation its traditional hard-boiled-PI-novel
humor would have received at the hands of his [assigned!] extremely "PC-minded"
editor and, of course, it got starred-reviews and raves everywhere, and
sold out quickly). His latest effort in the field, however, The Art
of Redemption, stretches the definition of that genre about as far
as one could go, since, although the protagonist, or, really, one of the
two protagonists, Joe Ready, was once a regular LAPD officer, back in
the late 1920s, he turned private after a horrendous incident that happened
during a kidnaping case he was involved in, that so affected him emotionally
that he turned his complete attention and energies for the rest of his
life to dealing with kidnappers: preventing them from plying their "trade"
if possible, and, if not, then catching them as quickly as possible, acting
as a private agent instead of working for or with any other official police
dept. after resigning from the LAPD. He did this job-of-woik for the next
seventy years, in fact, picking up one Jimmy Cotton as a junior partner
shortly after the infamous "Kent State massacre" in May, 1970,
where National Guardsmen opened fire on an unarmed group of students at
that Ohio university who were protesting the Viet Nam War and Nixon's
invasion of Cambodia that spring (eventually resulting in the rise of
the Pol Pot regime, the most bloodthirsty in the entirety of the 20th
century, putting even old Joe Stalin to shame, percentage-wise, in the
number of his own countrymen that he brutally murdered). But
enough of this light, off-the-subject banter, eh? What we're talking about
here is an incredibly good, nay, excellent book, period.
One like I, personally, have never read the like of before, and believe
me, friends, that's saying something. The Art of Redemption has
a unique structure, wherein Jimmy Cotton, the junior partner that Joe
Ready picked up in Miami in May 1970, shortly after he'd fled from Kent
State, tells Joe his own life story (i.e., Joe's), as he
lies on his deathbed, still or again in Miami, in the year 2005, at the
age of 98.
In his starred Booklist review, publisher Bill Ott comments
that reading Bob Truluck's prose is "like listening to Thelonius
Monk play 'April in Paris'," and that's not a compliment you get
every day from a critic as well read as Bill Ott. In fact, it's worth-while
to reprint the entire starred-review below, as Bill can put things a little
more succinctly than I usually can, not being as personally involved with
each book as I am! So, here it is, from the August 1, 2007 issue of Booklist:
"Don't be fooled into thinking that Truluck's
third novel is yet another nostalgic salute to the Pulp-era: one more
simile-strewn re-creation of the tough-talking Black Mask gang's
pennies-a-word, rat-tat-tat prose. Yes, there are plenty of gats and gunsels
in these pages, but Truluck is no imitator. Take the set-up: a private
eye, Jimmy Cotton, visits his ninetysomething partner and mentor, Joe
Ready, on Joe's death bed. Joe wants to hear all his old stories, the
ones he told Jimmy 30 years ago, the ones that drew the young Jimmy, then
a disillusioned hippie, into the business of tracking kidnappers and their
victims. And so it goes: Jimmy, speaking in Joe's voice, tells Joe the
story of his own life: encounters with Ma Barker, the Lindbergh kidnappers,
and Meyer Lansky, among others. The content is pure 1930s, but the pulpers'
narrative structure of choice didn't employ voices within voices within
voices. The dialogue, too, may start out sounding like it's straight from
the pages of Black Mask, but then you realize that Truluck has
substituted a chord here and flatted a few dozen fifths there, like Thelonius
Monk playing "April in Paris." And there's an edge to Joe Ready
that you wouldn't find in a pulp hero, a sense that he's fooling himself
about half the time. So do we all, of course, but we don't have Jimmy
there at the end to tell us our own stories. Think about that: bittersweet
is not a flavor one associates with the hard-boiled style, but Truluck
makes it taste just right."
Embarrassing photos of Bob and his wife Leslie
are coming very soon!
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