A Smile on the Face of the Tiger (The Amos Walker Series #15) - Hardcover

Estleman, Loren D.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0892967064 ISBN 13: 9780892967063

Publisher: Mysterious Pr, 2000

Synopsis

Detroit private detective Amos Walker is hired by scheming book editor Louise Starr to find the missing Eugene Booth, an aging pulp fiction writer from the 1950s, to uncover why he has turned down his first book contract in forty years, but the case is soon complicated by Booth's apparent suicide, a death that could be linked to the murder of his wife, forty years earlier. 20,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author

" LOREN D. ESTLEMAN delighted readers and critics by bringing back his classic private eye, Amos Walker, in the 1997 novel Never Street, followed by two more new Walker novels, The Witchfinder (1998) and The Hours of the Virgin (1999). Estleman, born and raised in southeastern Michigan, is also the author of a heralded Detroit series of novels that includes Whiskey River, Edsel, Stress, and Thunder City."

Reviews

HThe three Shamus Awards Estleman has won for his Amos Walker mysteries (The Hours of the Virgin, etc.) testify to his reputation as the torchbearer of the classic PI yarn. In his 14th novel about the tough-minded Detroit gumshoe, Estleman pays explicit tribute to his artistic ancestors, dedicating the book to "Hamilton, Prather, McCoy, and Spillane" and others, and centering its complicated, absorbing plot around the fates of a classic paperback writer and the bombshell blonde who posed for his books' lurid covers. Walker is hired by sleek Louise Starr, owner of a nascent New York publishing house, to find Eugene Booth, author of such titles as Tough Town and Bullets Are My Business. Booth has called it quits on a contract to reprint his best-known novel, Paradise Valley, set within the horrific Detroit race riot of June 1943; Starr wants to know why. Walker locates Booth, a broken old drunk tapping at a manual typewriter, at a fishing lodge north of Motor City. They drink and they talkDabout the murder of Booth's wife way back when and about what really went down at the riot; hours later, Walker finds Booth hanged in his cabin. Suicide? Then how to explain the "heeled" guy in an adjacent cabin, who Walker soon learns is hit man-turned-bestselling author Glad Eddie Cypress? Fleta Skirrett, former paperback jacket honey, now waiting to die in an old folks' home, offers some clues, and so does the son of the painter of Booth's covers, who lives surrounded by plastic-wrapped paperbacks. A good, involving mystery featuring strong characters and prose as smooth as the brim of a fedora, this novel makes smart points about writing, publishing and the cult of mysteries. Anyone who appreciates the difference between a gat and a gun, a gam and a leg, is going to wolf it down. (Aug.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Detroit shamus Amos Walker, who fills Marlowe's shoes and adds a few hardboiled scuffmarks of his own, is asked by sultry publisher Louise Starr to track down Eugene Booth, a '50s pulp writer she'd love to reprint--if only he hadn't returned her book advance and disappeared. Immersing himself in pulpy old prose, prurient dust-jacket art, and the gossip of collectibles dealers, Walker chats up Fleta Skirrett (who's slid from posing for old book covers into near-dementia at the Edencrest Retirement Home); meets the reclusive son of cover artist Lowell Birdsall; crosses paths with Mafia hitman-turned-bestselling confessional author Glad Eddie Cypress; and finally corrals Booth himself and a case of liquor in a fisherman's motel up north. Next morning, Booth is swinging by his belt from the cabin rafters, and Walker has stepped into a noir nightmare that began 50 years back with the murder of Booth's wife Allison and a police report Booth's brother Duane never filed. Before murders old and new are solved, Walker will get a helluva black eye, some commitment-free loving, and a chance to mouth à la vintage Spillane.Like Walker's earlier adventures (Never Street, 1997, etc.), a Waspish valentine to the old Black Mask writers, with cutthroat dialogue, lovingly delivered concussions, and enough punch and plot twists to accompany another full case of booze. -- Copyright © 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Eugene Booth wrote noir novels in the fifties but then disappeared, apparently a victim of the bottle. He resurfaces, lawsuit in hand, when a publisher reprints one of his books without permission. With his name back in the headlines, and a new contract pending from a legit publisher, Booth disappears again. Detroit PI Amos Walker is hired by the publisher, Louise Starr (an old flame of Walker's), to find the elusive writer. Walker, more than a little intrigued by the case--living the noir life himself--tracks Booth down to a fishing resort in northern Michigan. There he strikes up a friendship with the hard-drinking, bitter man and learns that the writer is working on a nonfiction account of a Detroit race riot in the forties. When Booth unexpectedly dies in an obviously staged suicide, Walker realizes that the half-century-old race riot may still hold secrets that powerful people in Detroit do not want revealed. Walker is himself a modernized version of the pulp-era PI, and award-winner Estleman has written a very entertaining thriller that offers a fitting tribute both to the genre and to the tough, passionate men who created it. Wes Lukowsky
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Mysterious Pr
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0892967064
• ISBN 13: 9780892967063
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 295