Just published is the Amos Walker short story collection, which I have to get. Good grief Steve, you didn’t mention Loren Estleman who is still writing the Amos Walker, private eye series, over 20 of them.
I have read several other Alaska-set series, by Dana Stabenow, Stan Jones, and Marcia Simpson to name three, yet haven’t read Straley or Sue Henry, to name two others.
I never read them either and don’t know why. Parker, Linda Barnes, Sara Paretsky, Linda Barnes, and many others whose names I’m sure are not coming to me now. There were books by Stephen Greenleaf, Jonathan Valin, Arthur Lyons, James Crumley, Bill Pronzini, William Tapply, Jeremiah Healy, Robert B. One possibility, though, is that there were simply too many PI novels in the early 1990s to keep up with, and in my case, Straley’s books were among those I didn’t manage to. I’ve not read any of the books in this series, I’m embarrassed to say, and I can’t even come up with a good reason why. I might even go back and read the first.ħ Responses to “Reviewed by Barry Gardner: JOHN STRALEY – The Curious Eat Themselves.” There’s a third in the series already, and I like this one enough that I’ll probably read it. A few of the business and government people are a tad one-dimensional, but at least you don’t need a scorecard to tell the villains. He’s a better plotter than Crumley, too.Īside from the exotic locale, the story itself isn’t that different from many other hardboiled private detective stories, but it’s well told, and the various characters are interesting. It’s good prose, though, and he obviously has a real feel for the Alaskan country about which he writes. That’s as far as the comparison goes, because Younger isn’t a macho character, and Straley’s prose hasn’t quite the power of Crumley’s. Straley’s book reminds me a little of James Crumley with the alcoholic lead, and the anti-business/environmental orientation, and the flair for describing the wilderness. He’s immediately warned off the case by a high ranking official, and old friend of his family. Now she’s been fished out of the water with her throat cut. His ex-girlfriend had sent a friend to him, who wanted him to track down evidence of her rape by some employees of a big mining concern. He lives in Ketchikan, Alaska, has an autistic roommate, and his erratic life just took a turn for the worse.
Straley lives in Alaska, is an investigator for the Public Defender and has his own private investigation business a pretty good set of qualifications.Ĭecil Younger is an on-again, off-again drunk, an ex-public defender, and a private investigator. It sold enough copies that I must have been one of the very few who didn’t, and now he’s written another. I didn’t read the first Alaskan mystery by John Straley, The Woman Who Married a Bear it was a conscious avoidance, though I no longer remember why. JOHN STRALEY – The Curious Eat Themselves.
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