Probably not a lot of people these days know who William R.
Cox was, which is too bad. He started out in the pulps and
wrote hundreds of stories for them: sports, mysteries,
westerns. Later he branched out into paperback originals both
under his own name and as Jonas Ward (he took over that
franchise sometime in the early 1970s, I believe). He wrote
hardcover books, too, mostly juveniles and biographies. Last
night I re-read HELL TO PAY, a 1978 Signet original. The
narrator is a professional gambler named Tom Kinkaid, who was
also in several of Cox's pulp stories. The book is very much
"of its time" as people say when they're trying to excuse
dated slang (how long has it been since you read a book where
someone's called "Daddy-O"?) and attitudes, but then most of
us on this list aren't surprised by those kinds of things.
You won't be surprised by the action and violence, either,
but you might by Cox's attention to character and by the good
writing. Cox is one of those guys who was really good, but
hardly anybody knows it.
This is another give-away book, to the first e-mailer.
Bill Crider
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