I just finished CASES by Joe Gores, which is a surprisingly
depressing book. I checked back in the archives and in July
2002 Karin Montin said about it, "The suspense was good, the
characters interesting, but the tone is quite different from
that of the two DKA novels featuring the Gypsies. Cases is
about a guy getting hard boiled. The DKA crew is a bunch of
tough guys, but the two stories are almost rollicking. In one
of the intros, Gores says that he wanted to make it fun.
Cases is not fun."
It certainly isn't. In the introduction Gores says that the
lead character, Pierce Duncan (known as Dunc) is basically
him. Dunc has just graduated from Notre Dame and sets out to
knock around the country, enjoy life, and get experience
that'll help him be a writer.
By the time he makes it to California he's been on a chain
gang and gotten into a brawl in a Mexican whorehouse. He does
some amateur detective work
(and gets beat up) and is noticed by a private detective, who
hires him as a skip tracer. He handles some cases and marries
the girl he met and fell in love with. That brief description
does sound like what most people probably imagine Gores's
life to be. (Except for the chain gang.)
Gores's DKA novels are fast-paced and fun, and I was
expecting the same kind of thing in this book. It's
fast-paced, and seems DKAish, but man, it doesn't have that
wild fun running underneath it all. The conclusion is
depressing.
Those of you who've read it: do you think it makes more sense
at the end if you imagine Dunc not as Gores or his stand-in
but as Dan Kearny?
Bill
-- William Denton : Toronto, Canada : www.miskatonic.org : www.frbr.org
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