Bindlestiff

Bill Pronzini

Jan 2011 · Nameless Detective" mysteries Kitabu cha 10 · Speaking Volumes

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His P.I. license reinstated, his old friend Eberhardt back on his feet, and things with his girlfriend Kerry patched up, Nameless is ready to roll again. On his first day back at work, he lands an assignment he would have thought went out with the Great Depression: tracking down a hobo.

It's hard to imagine the prim Miss Arlene Bradford wanting to find a father thought to be living the life of a bindlestiff-riding the rails, sleeping in boxcars, eating mulligan stew. Nameless is even more surprised, though, when her pouty, Marilyn Monroe-like sister, Hannah, implores him to leave her father alone. Still, he's getting paid to find Charles Bradford, and Nameless follows his trail through the labyrinth of the Western Pacific hobo jungle straight to a tiny railway museum on the far side of town... a museum run by a man named Dallmeyer whose true identity is more sinister than it seems.

"Pronzini is a pro."-The New York Times

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Bill Pronzini is simply one of the masters. He seems to have taken a crack at just about every genre: mysteries, noirish thrillers, historicals, locked-room mysteries, adventure novels, spy capers, men's action, westerns, and, of course, his masterful, long-running Nameless private detective series, now entering its fourth decade, with no signs of creative flagging. He's also ghosted several Brett Halliday short stories as Michael Shayne for Mike Shayne's Mystery Magazine, and has managed to collaborate with such fellow writers as John Lutz, Barry Wahlberg, Collin Wilcox and Marcia Muller. Still, if he never ventured into fiction writing, his non-fiction work, as both writer and editor, would still earn him a place in the P.I. genre's Hall of Fame. Besides his two tributes to some of the very worst in crime fiction (what he calls "alternative classics"), Gun in Cheek and Son of Gun in Cheek, and one on western fiction (entitled Six Gun in Cheek, naturally), he's the co-author (with Marcia Muller) of 1001 Midnights. The Mystery Writers of America have nominated him for Edgar Awards several times and his work has been translated into numerous languages and he's published in almost thirty countries. He was the very first president of the Private Eye Writers of America, and he's received three Shamus Awards from them, as well as its Lifetime Achievement Award in 1987.