Joseph Nicholas Gores (1931-2011) was a critically acclaimed screenwriter and author. He received the 2008 Eye Lifetime Achievement Award, the 1970 Edgar for Best First Novel, the 1970 Edgar for Best Short Story, and the 1976 Edgar for Best Television Episode. His success was hard-won, collecting hundreds of rejection slips while holding down any number of physically demanding jobs, including working for a private investigation agency that repossessed cars. He was a huge fan of Dashiell Hammett, creator of the hard-boiled detective story. He wrote a mystery with Hammett as the detective and the prequel to Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon. His New York Times obituary is here: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/14/arts/14gores.html. The Guardian’s article is here: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/feb/10/joe-gores-obituary.
Dead Skip (Random House, 1972) is the first book of seven that Gores wrote about the adventures of Daniel Kearny Associates, a vehicle repo agency in San Francisco. He used his experience at David Kikkert & Associates, where he worked in real life, to inform his stories about the antics of people faced with the loss of their wheels. Gores dedicated the book to “Dave Kikkert, who lives it every day.”
In DKA’s debut Barton Heslip is working the night shift with Larry Ballard; each has more than a dozen active repo cases. They are tasked with finding the vehicles that have been hidden by their drivers who have defaulted on their car payments and using whatever wiles necessary to drive them back to the DKA garage. Heslip is found the next day in a totaled Jaguar, drenched with booze and severely injured. Everyone at DKA knows Heslip wouldn’t drink on the job and go joyriding. Kearny assumed he’d run into someone with more than a delinquent loan to hide and Ballard is tasked with looking at each of Heslip’s cases to identify who set him up and to do it within 72 hours.
That Gores modeled his spare stripped-down style after Hammett’s is no secret. I loved Hammett’s Continental Op stories and Gore’s DKA books are similar. Clear, functional writing without embellishment describing the hands-on drudgery of a hard-working gumshoe. Dead Skip has an Easter egg by way of a scene with Donald Westlake’s professional thief Parker. Westlake worked the same encounter into Plunder Squad (Random House, 1972), Parker’s 15th outing. For fans of 1930s pulp stories and readers of private investigator crime fiction.