HUSTON'S HANK THOMPSON TRILOGY

Admittedly, I was late to the party on Charlie Huston. I had heard good things, heard people mention him alonside others of the new school like Jason Starr and Ken Bruen, but had never given him a chance. His first novel Caught Stealing was given to me Christmas of '06. Since pretty much all I ever want for Christmas is books, it took me a while to get around to it. Then about a year ago I picked it up...and pretty much couldn't put it down until I was finished. I caught up with Huston real quick after that.

Caught Stealing is book one of a trilogy of novels known as the Hank Thompson Trilogy. The trilogy includes Six Bad Things, and A Dangerous Man. Basically, the books are about a hard-luck bartender and all the shit he has to go through over a few million dollars in gangster money. It starts out with some classic Hitchcock "wrong man" shennanigans and then escalates over the books to the point that he is a reluctant hitman with an addiction to painkillers and a surgically modified face.

Through all the craziness and ultra-violence (and I mean "ultra" - his graphic violence is second only to McCarthy's Blood Meridian), the beautifully terse sentences and no bullshit plotting, we have Hank Thompson, possibly the best noir hero ever written (up there with Pete Bondurant of James Ellroy's so to be completed American Underworld Trilogy).

The transformation we see Hank goes through is the key to these books. Though throughout this regular guy ends up killing an endless amount of people (in the best action scenes ever written), he still is consistently someone we root for, sympathize with. In the first book he just wants to stay alive. In the second book, he just wants to keep his parents alive. In the final installment, he is looking for some small amount of redemption, some peace.

Huston thus far has seven books widely available:

the hank thompson trilogy: CAUGHT STEALING, SIX BAD THINGS, A DANGEROUS MAN
the joe pitt casefiles: ALREADY DEAD, NO DOMINION, HALF THE BLOOD OF BROOKLYN
a standalone: THE SHOTGUN RULE

I will talk about about the Joe Pitt books later but those and SHOTGUN RULE are just as exciting as the Hank books. In case you hadn't inferred as much from my discussion of the extreme violence of these books, Charlie Huston is not for Murder She Wrote fans. Honestly, it doesn't get any more hard-boiled, more violent, more disturbing than Charlie Huston.