James Carlos Blake is the author of nine novels. Among his literary honors are the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Southwest Book Award, Quarterly West Novella Prize, and Chautauqua South Book Award. He lives in Arizona.
"One of the best, and most original writers in America today." -- Milwaukee Journal Sentinel"Classic Blake, mixing violence with passion, the hardnose with the sensitive...No one out there does this better." -- Denver Post"'Handsome Harry' is not a departure for the seductively violent Blake but a refinement. It still carries his trademark - carnage, sex and dry humor - but it is also a beguiling, hurtling digression into a new voice for Blake. It's not just firstperson point-of-view, but it's crawling inside a character who really lived and rebuilding him from the inside out without disturbing the patina of legend that colors him." -- Denver Post"James Carlos Blake has established himself as one of the greatest chroniclers of the mythical American outlaw life... his fiction is so readable--so folksy, action-packed, and earthy, --it's easy to miss the fact that it is also, frequently, brilliant." -- Entertainment Weekly
Blake's eighth novel, like his recent Under the Skin (2003), stars an antihero narrator in a world of Depression-era crime. As Harry Pierpont, the self-described leader of the bank-robbing Dillinger Gang, awaits electrocution in Ohio for the murder of a sheriff, he recalls his adventures in a narrative that reads like a good as-told-to true crime story. His teenage criminal apprenticeship prepares him for a career as an "independent fundraiser," aka a stick-up man. With his friend Earl Northern, he holds up his first bank at 21; when their second heist goes awry, Harry ends up in the state reformatory, where he first meets John Dillinger. An escape attempt lands him in the Michigan City, Ind., state pen, and there Harry learns the systematized approach to bank robbery his gang will employ years later after Dillinger helps them escape. The heady account of the ensuing four-month crime spree has the gang taking down banks, buying new cars, mooning over women and shooting policemen in the face. Harry's voice is the smooth, almost affectless vernacular of a hardened con it's convincing, but it also keep readers at a certain distance. Add that to Harry's exhibited brutality, pitilessness and fixation on sex (the book has a lot of erections and much is made of the relative size of John and Harry's members), and Blake has created a deeply flawed character, eloquent enough to tell his tale but perhaps not perceptive enough to understand its significance. Fans of true crime and gangster stories will undoubtedly enjoy this "ripped from the history books" adventure as seen through Harry's lens of tough verisimilitude. 6-city author tour. (Feb.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
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