Joe Gores, who has won the Mystery Writers of America's Edgar Award three times in his long career, says about his latest book, "In Cases I have tried to mix fact and fiction so thoroughly that nobody--not even myself--can now untangle them." No wonder this wide-ranging saga of a young man's entry into the life of a San Francisco private detective has a fragmented, often familiar feel to it. Bits of real life and enhanced memory seem to have become mixed up with the many films noir that Pierce Duncan enjoys on his journey from Notre Dame to Baghdad by the Bay.

There's the Georgia chain-gang movie, where convicts murder a cruel guard; the Las Vegas crime-and-boxing movie, where an honest pug dies rather than throwing a fight; the Los Angeles religious cult movie, where a young man finds love among the loonies. And finally, there's the movie that Gores has been acting out, and writing down so well, for most of his professional life: the San Francisco private-eye film: part homage to Hammett, but mostly his own richly detailed vision of the world of skip-tracers, hired guns, sexy dames named April and Sherry, and corruptible gumshoes like the memorable Drinker Cope.

Cases may be a less-than-perfect novel, but it's definitely a valuable addition to our knowledge of Gores. It reads best as the source of local color for his greatest hits--from Hammett and Dead Skip to the more recent Menaced Assassin and Contract Null & Void. --Dick Adler


From Publishers Weekly
"In Cases I have tried to mix fact and fiction so thoroughly that nobody?not even myself?can now entangle them," writes three-time Edgar winner Gores in an author's note to this intermittently gripping, semiautobiographical saga of a young man's entry into the life of a San Francisco PI. The entanglement is part of the problem: on his journey from Notre Dame to Baghdad by the Bay, bits of real life and enhanced memory seem to have become mixed up with the many films noir that Pierce Duncan enjoys. There's the Georgia chain gang movie, in which convicts murder a cruel guard; the Las Vegas crime and boxing movie, in which an honest pug dies rather than throw a fight; the Los Angeles religious cult movie, in which a young man finds love in a cloud of cuckoos. And, finally, there's the movie that Gores (who has worked as a PI) has been acting out, and writing down so well, for most of his professional life: the San Francisco PI film?part homage to Hammett, but mostly his own richly detailed vision of the world of skip-tracers, hired guns, sexy dames named April and Sherry and corruptible gumshoes like the memorable Drinker Cope. Gores is a master of noir fiction, an exuberant practitioner of staccato prose deepened by occasional moral reflection. This novel, while rich in atmospheric pleasures and sharp character sketches, is less meaty with plot. It reads best as the source of local color for such Gores classics as Dead Skip. Agents, Henry Morrison and Danny Baror. Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Did you hear about the time Pierce Duncan ("Dunc"), just graduated from Notre Dame?this was in 1953?took to the road through Georgia and Texas and ended up, inevitably, in Dashiell Hammett's San Francisco? Well, sit yourself down and read all about it in Edgar Allan Poe Award winner Gores's latest. With numerous references to Hammett and Hemingway, it's hard to miss Dunc's literary heroes, although the emulation here isn't quite equal to the adulation. Still, this is a fast-paced, raunchy yarn glowing with nostalgia for the days when the guys were armed, edgy, and dangerous and the molls were beautiful, insatiable, greedy, and equally dangerous in their own way. Following Contract Null & Void (LJ 7/96), this should prove popular in most public libraries.?Bob Lunn, Kansas City P.L., MOCopyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, Marilyn Stasio
Writing with a young man's sense of wonder, Gores seizes a moment, savors it and then catches the next ride out of town before the pleasure fades...


From Kirkus Reviews
It's 1953, and Pierce Duncan, fresh out of Notre Dame, has decided to see this great country of ours and fill some of the notebooks he'll be using in his career as a writer. He gets arrested for passing through a Georgia town with a black friend, does a stint on a chain gang that ends with shocking suddenness, gets abandoned in the desert by a lovey-dovey couple who earlier pick him up, tags along to Jua'rez with a brawler who drives off with his notebooks, hitches to Vegas and a job tending a hea vyweight contender who's in over his head, tangles with the schemers who are using the San Fernando Mission of the Priests of Melchizedek to smuggle wetbacks, finds that the girl of his prophetic dreams is a real person named Penny Linden who's engaged to a quarrelsome lout, and ends up on Gores's home turf of San Francisco, a town that still has all the seedy glamor of the dying pulps. It's here in San Francisco that Dunc, seasoned by dozens of acquaintances and scores of anecdotes, settles down to learn the business of skip-tracinga business Gores (Contract Null and Void, 1996, etc.) knows better than any other writer alivefrom seen-it-all shamus Drinker Cope, and here that all the pieces of this beautifully textured picaresque, from a killer Dunc shoul d have remembered to an impossible penance that's been waiting for him ever since Georgia, finally fall together. Though this autobiographical pipe dream has been gestating so long that parts of it were published in the long-dead Manhunt, Rogue, and Mike Shayne's Mystery Magazine, it all seems as inevitable in retrospect as a Judas kiss. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Book Description
From Joe Gores, the highly acclaimed author of CONTRACT NULL & VOID and three-time Edgar Allen Poe Award-winner, comes a thrilling novel reminiscent of Jack Kerouac's ON THE ROAD - with a taste of murder. Pierce Duncan, a young man just out of Notre Dame, sets off for the roads and rails of postwar America, driven by Hemingway's belief that "going where you have to go, doing what you have to do, seeing what you have to see" is what makes one a writer. For Pierce, it also leads to strange, fateful meetings: with a redneck guard on a Georgian chain-gang; with a killer on a lonely Texas road; and with a corrupt Los Angeles cult leader. The most influential encounter is with a hard-nosed private eye who changes Pierce's life forever, leading him to San Francisco, where he must decide his ultimate path in the City by the Bay.


From the Publisher
"In CASES I have tried to mix fact and fiction so thoroughly that nobody - not even myself - can now entangle them," writes three-time Edgar winner Gores in an author's note to this intermittently gripping, semiautobiographic saga of a young man's entry into the life of a San Francisco PI. The entanglement is part of the problem: on his journey from Notre Dame to Baghdad by the Bay, bits of real life and enhanced memory seem to have become mixed up with the many films noir that Pierce Duncan enjoys. There's the Georgia chain gang movie, in which convicts murder a cruel guard; the Las Vegas crime and boxing movie, in which an honest pug dies rather than throw a fight; the Los Angeles religious cult movie, in which a young man finds love in a cloud of cuckoos. And, finally, there's the movie that Gores (who has worker as a PI) has been acting out, and writing down so well, for most of his professional life; the San Francisco PI film - part homage to Hammett, but mostly his own richly detailed vision of the world of skip-tracers, hired guns, sexy dames named April and Sherry and corruptible gumshoes like the memorable Drinker Cope. Gores is a master of noir fiction, an exuberant practitioner of staccato prose deepened by occasional moral reflection. This novel, while rich in atmosphere pleasures and sharp character sketches, is less meaty with plot. It reads best as the source of local color for such Gores classics as DEAD SKIPS.


About the Author
Joe Gores has received the Edgar Allen Poe Awards in three separate categories: Best Fiction Novel, Best Short Story, and Best TV Series Segment. In addition, 32 CADILLACS and COME MORNING were nominated for Edgars for Best Mystery Novel, and Gores' 1975 semibiographical novel HAMMETT became the 1983 cult film produced by Francis Ford Coppola and directed by Wim Wenders.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In 1953 Pierce Duncan leaves college as an innocent and sets off to see America. His road trip will take him from the savagery of a Georgia chain gang to a wild ride through Texas to the darkest side of the Las Vegas fight game - and, finally, to San Francisco, the far end of the world. Along the backstreets and freight lines Dunc will meet beautiful women, dangerous men, and murder. And in California, home of the lost and the outcast, he will join up with the dynamic head of a private investigation agency. Here he will learn everything about being a man - and about brutal betrayal.

FROM THE CRITICS

Marilyn Stasio

...[T]he adventure bounds along with the unquenchable energy of youthits reckless spirit only slightly tempered by a touch of authorial wistfulness. —The New York Times Book Review

Publishers Weekly

"In Cases I have tried to mix fact and fiction so thoroughly that nobody--not even myself--can now entangle them," writes three-time Edgar winner Gores in an author's note to this intermittently gripping, semi-autobiographical saga of a young man's entry into the life of a San Francisco PI.

The entanglement is part of the problem: on his journey from Notre Dame to Baghdad by the Bay, bits of real life and enhanced memory seem to have become mixed up with the many films noir that Pierce Duncan enjoys. There's the Georgia chain gang movie, in which convicts murder a cruel guard; the Las Vegas crime and boxing movie, in which an honest pug dies rather than throw a fight; the Los Angeles religious cult movie, in which a young man finds love in a cloud of cuckoos. And, finally, there's the movie that Gores (who has worked as a PI) has been acting out, and writing down so well, for most of his professional life: the San Francisco PI film--part homage to Hammett, but mostly his own richly detailed vision of the world of skip-tracers, hired guns, sexy dames named April and Sherry and corruptible gumshoes like the memorable Drinker Cope. Gores is a master of noir fiction, an exuberant practitioner of staccato prose deepened by occasional moral reflection. This novel, while rich in atmospheric pleasures and sharp character sketches, is less meaty with plot. It reads best as the source of local color for such Gores classics as Dead Skip.

Library Journal

Did you hear about the time Pierce Duncan ("Dunc"), just graduated from Notre Dame--this was in 1953--took to the road through Georgia and Texas and ended up, inevitably, in Dashiell Hammett's San Francisco? Well, sit yourself down and read all about it in Edgar Allan Poe Award winner Gores' latest. With numerous references to Hammett and Hemingway, it's hard to miss Dunc's literary heroes, although the emulation here isn't quite equal to the adulation. Still, this is a fast-paced, raunchy yarn glowing with nostalgia for the days when the guys were armed, edgy, and dangerous and the molls were beautiful, insatiable, greedy, and equally dangerous in their own way. -- Bob Lunn, Kansas City Public Library, Missouri

Marilyn Stasio

...[T]he adventure bounds along with the unquenchable energy of youth, its reckless spirit only slightly tempered by a touch of authorial wistfulness. -- The New York Times Book Review

Kirkus Reviews

It's 1953, and Pierce Duncan, fresh out of Notre Dame, has decided to see this great country of ours and fill some of the notebooks he'll be using in his career as a writer. He gets arrested for passing through a Georgia town with a black friend, does a stint on a chain gang that ends with shocking suddenness, gets abandoned in the desert by a lovey-dovey couple who earlier pick him up, tags along to Juarez with a brawler who drives off with his notebooks, hitches to Vegas and a job tending a heavyweight contender who's in over his head, tangles with the schemers who are using the San Fernando Mission of the Priests of Melchizedek to smuggle wetbacks, finds that the girl of his prophetic dreams is a real person named Penny Linden who's engaged to a quarrelsome lout, and ends up on Gores' home turf of San Francisco, a town that still has all the seedy glamor of the dying pulps. It's here in San Francisco that Dunc, seasoned by dozens of acquaintances and scores of anecdotes, settles down to learn the business of skip-tracing-a business Gores (Contract Null and Void) knows better than any other writer alive-from seen-it-all shamus Drinker Cope, and here that all the pieces of this beautifully textured picaresque, from a killer Dunc should have remembered to an impossible penance that's been waiting for him ever since Georgia, finally fall together.