|
Vigilante in the Shadows
Bob Truluck’s shady ways beat the heat
By John Hood
You could say neo-noir crime scribe Bob Truluck’s a man after my own
hard heart; hell, you might even say he’s got it. He writes like
a fistfight, brass knuckles beating the brawl right outta the
back alley, and he stories like a legend, or like a scribbler
who insists that all the best tall tales consist of legendary
outlaws.
Best thing is, despite being a fictionist, Truluck doesn’t deal in
ifs, ever. He deals in is, and was, and, on occasion, a will be,
and he does so with a vengeance befitting a vigilante.
And there’s no more vengeful vigilante than Joe Ready, the
ever-antagonizing protagonist in Truluck’s The Art of
Redemption (Dennis MacMillan, $30), the first of what I wish
would be a long series of singular exploits involving gumshoes,
gun molls and goombahs.
Problem is Joe’s now 98, and as artful as the old man is and was,
it doesn’t look as if he’ll be able to dodge the deathbed.
No matter. He’s got his pal Jimmy Cotton on hand to mouth back his
own life story, not simply because he wants to relive what he
lived before he dies, mind you, but so he can hear if the lad’s
learned from what he’s heard.
“Don’t piss away the listening time by thinking too much,” Joe says
at one point. “Keep your eye on the pea, not the cups,” he
repeats on a couple others. And when Jimmy begins to get
wide-eyed over some of Joe’s far-flung doings, he gives him the
squint: “There ain’t no big deals,” he spills to the kid, “just
good runs.”
And Joe should know. Back in the ’20s, Joe fancied himself a
copper, but after a stint spent mostly directing traffic,
writing parking tickets and shaking doorknobs, he ditches the
uniform and takes a high-profile kidnapping case into his own
itchy hands. All doesn’t exactly go according to plan, but it
gets close. And it gets personal. And it gets ugly. Then and
there Joe gets this thing about mugs who snatch kids, and he
spends the rest of his life tracking ’em down and setting ’em up
— or killing ’em.
Think Charles Bronson by way of Sam Spade and you’ll get the bright
idea; imagine noir’s boy Ellroy doing a high pulp rewrite of
some of the 20th century’s basest capers and you’ll get it even
brighter.
Joe comes up against and alongside the likes of Machine Gun Kelly
and Johnny Torrio, Meyer Lansky, Ma Barker and Batista, and
despite the formidability of even his friendliest foes, he
always seems to come up roses. That the cold-blooded cannon does
so with the irreverence of a “purebred American cur” gives it
moxie; that he does so fueled by a continuous gush of back-room
hooch and black market imports gives it tilt.
This, my friends, is how to play right the wrong angles.
Hard to believe Truluck springs from, let alone lives in, O-Town,
or that he works in the construction racket, but there you have
it. It isn’t, however, hard to believe the cat won a Shamus from
the Private Eye Writers of
America — he’s got chops. And he’s got story. With Joe Ready out
and Jimmy Cotton in, it looks like the tales are just beginning.
Write on, killer.
Bob Truluck reads from
The Art of Redemption at
8
p.m. Thursday, Jan. 3, at Books and Books,
265 Aragon Ave.,
Coral Gables. For more information, call 305-442-4408.
Comments? E-mail
letters@miamisunpost.com. |
