Excellent. I found myself wondering which of the episodes in Dunc's life were real and found myself suspecting that many of the darker episodes were based on his life. Very compelling and true to life. I found it difficult to put down. ( )

After graduating from Notre Dame in 1953, Pierce Duncan tours the US, looking for material for a career as a novelist. He gets involved with a wide variety of undesirable characters; he spends a month on a Georgia chain gang, visits mexico with a fellow Yankee, sees Las Vegas as a fighter's hanger-on, and ends up assisting a private detective in San Francisco. At each stop he uses his ingenuity to figure out a weird situation or solve a small mystery; larger connections continue to grow and affect his life. Gores, who worked as a private eye before turning to writing, acknowledges that much of the story is autobiogtraphical. He gives us a lot of hard-boiled violence, attitude, and style, and Dunc grows up a bit at each stop. If you like Chandler and other writers of hard-boiled detective fiction, you might enjoy this. ( )