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Blowback, by Bill Pronzini
Aug. 25th, 2008 03:57 pmYesterday I finished Blowback, by Bill Pronzini, the fourth Nameless Detective novel (and with a publication date of 1977, probably the first one written in my lifetime).
One of the things I like about detective novels is that they're often quite short. Thus, I can almost always read a single novel within a weekend. I think I picked this up on Saturday night and finished it up Sunday night. Given the intricate relationships and mysteries implicit in the genre, it's nice to have it all together, thus giving you an opportunity to figure things out.
And that's definitely one of the things that I like about the Nameless Detective. Though detective novels always seem to have more stuff come out of left field than I'd like, Pronzini seems to play more fair than most. In this case, even though I hadn't identified the killer (and indeed, think that the protagonist didn't have enough info to identify the killer) I did successfully realize most of the other stuff that was going on.
There's one other aspect that's interesting about the Nameless Detective: he's not a larger-than-life pulp hero. In fact, the author makes a constant point about this, since the protagonist collects pulp stories and thus can compare himself to those heroes. Unlike them, he tends to work with the police (a true rarity in detective novels) and generally stay on the right side of things. It's a nice change of pace and leaves me interested in what's going to happen when the Nameless Detective and Sharon McCone team up, since she likes to play it more fast and loose.
Anyways, that's the 4th ND book under my belt.
One of the things I like about detective novels is that they're often quite short. Thus, I can almost always read a single novel within a weekend. I think I picked this up on Saturday night and finished it up Sunday night. Given the intricate relationships and mysteries implicit in the genre, it's nice to have it all together, thus giving you an opportunity to figure things out.
And that's definitely one of the things that I like about the Nameless Detective. Though detective novels always seem to have more stuff come out of left field than I'd like, Pronzini seems to play more fair than most. In this case, even though I hadn't identified the killer (and indeed, think that the protagonist didn't have enough info to identify the killer) I did successfully realize most of the other stuff that was going on.
There's one other aspect that's interesting about the Nameless Detective: he's not a larger-than-life pulp hero. In fact, the author makes a constant point about this, since the protagonist collects pulp stories and thus can compare himself to those heroes. Unlike them, he tends to work with the police (a true rarity in detective novels) and generally stay on the right side of things. It's a nice change of pace and leaves me interested in what's going to happen when the Nameless Detective and Sharon McCone team up, since she likes to play it more fast and loose.
Anyways, that's the 4th ND book under my belt.