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Watershed by Percival Everett. Saint Paul. 1996. Graywolf Press. 1555972373. 204 pages. hardcover. Cover design by Adrian Morgan at Red Letter Design. Cover image courtesy of Photodisc.  

DESCRIPTION - On a windswept landscape somewhere north of Denver, Robert Hawks, a feisty and dangerously curious hydrologist, finds himself enmeshed in a fight over Native American treaty rights. What begins for Robert as a peaceful fishing interlude, ends in murder and the disclosure of government secrets. Why was the impossibly short Louise Yellow Calf hitching a ride on a snowy, deserted road following the discovery of two FBI agents murdered on the reservation? And what is the female FBI agent doing in Robert's shower? As our reluctant hero fits together the pieces in the all too rapidly unfolding drama, connections emerge to his own family's long-standing civil rights battles - battles that he has thus far managed to avoid. In WATERSHED, Percival Everett has created an original mystery that crackles with tension and sly wit. Robert Hawks is revealed as someone who has been indelibly defined by the history of our country's racial relationships, and the one man uniquely qualified to take us with him through this complex and contested territory.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Percival Everett (born December 22, 1956) is an American writer[2] and Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. He is best known for his novels Erasure (2001), I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009), and The Trees (2021), which was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize. Erasure was adapted as the film American Fiction (2023), written and directed by Cord Jefferson, starring Jeffrey Wright, Sterling K. Brown, and Leslie Uggams.

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The One That Got Away by Percival Everett. Boston. 1992. Clarion/Houghton Mifflin. 0395564379. Illustrated by Dirk Zimmer. 32 pages. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION - In this zany book with a Wild West setting, three cowpokes chase and corral "ones." "This offbeat but endearing little book exhibits a congenial marriage between text and illustration, at once whimsical and humorous." -- School Library Journal.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Percival Everett (born December 22, 1956) is an American writer[2] and Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. He is best known for his novels Erasure (2001), I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009), and The Trees (2021), which was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize. Erasure was adapted as the film American Fiction (2023), written and directed by Cord Jefferson, starring Jeffrey Wright, Sterling K. Brown, and Leslie Uggams.

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Erasure by Percival Everett. Hanover. 2001. University Press of New England. 1584650907. 265 pages. hardcover. Cover photo by Elliott Erwitt.

  
DESCRIPTION - Avant-garde novelist, college professor, woodworker, and fly fisherman - Thelonious (Monk) Ellison has never allowed race to define his identity. But as both a writer and an African American, he is offended and angered by the success of WE'S LIVES IN DA GHETTO, the exploitative debut novel of a young, middle-class black woman who once visited some relatives in Harlem for a couple of days. Hailed as an authentic representation of the African American experience, the book is a national bestseller and its author feted on the Kenya Dunston television show. The book's success rankles all the more as Monk's own most recent novel has just notched its seventh rejection. Even as his career as a writer appears to have stalled, Monk finds himself coping with changes in his personal life. Forced to assume responsibility for a mother rapidly succumbing to Alzheimer's, Monk leaves his home in Los Angeles to return to the Washington D. C. house in which he grew up. There he must come to terms with his ailing mother, his siblings, his own childhood and youth, and the legacy of his physician father, a suicide some seven years before. In need of distraction from old memories, new responsibilities, and his professional stagnation, Monk composes, in a heat of inspiration and energy, a fierce parody of the sort of exploitative, ghetto wanna-be lit represented by WE'S LIVES IN DA GHETTO. But when his agent sends this literary indictment (included here in its entirety) out to publishers, it is greeted as an authentic new voice of black America. Monk - or his pseudonymous alter ego, Stagg R. Leigh - is offered money, fame, success beyond anything he has known. And as demand begins to build for meetings with and appearances by Leigh, Monk is faced with a whole new set of problems. Percival Everett's most recent novel, the academic satire GLYPH, was hailed b the New York Times as ‘both a treatise and a romp. This new novel combines a touching story of a man coming to terms with his family heritage and a satiric indictment of race and publishing in America.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Percival Everett (born December 22, 1956) is an American writer[2] and Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. He is best known for his novels Erasure (2001), I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009), and The Trees (2021), which was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize. Erasure was adapted as the film American Fiction (2023), written and directed by Cord Jefferson, starring Jeffrey Wright, Sterling K. Brown, and Leslie Uggams.

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Assumption: A Novel by Percival Everett. Minneapolis. 2011. Graywolf Press. 9781555975982.  228 pages. paperback. Cover design: Kapo Ng. 

DESCRIPTION - A baffling triptych of murder mysteries by the author of I Am Not Sidney Poitier. Ogden Walker, deputy sheriff of a small New Mexico town, is on the trail of an old woman's murderer. But at the crime scene, his are the only footprints leading up to and away from her door. Something is amiss, and even his mother knows it. As other cases pile up, Ogden gives chase, pursuing flimsy leads for even flimsier reasons. His hunt leads him from the seamier side of Denver to a hippie commune as he seeks the puzzling solution. In Assumption, his follow-up to the wickedly funny I Am Not Sidney Poitier, Percival Everett is in top form as he once again upends our expectations about characters, plot, race, and meaning. A wild ride to the heart of a baffling mystery, Assumption is a literary thriller like no other.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Percival Everett (born December 22, 1956) is an American writer[2] and Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. He is best known for his novels Erasure (2001), I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009), and The Trees (2021), which was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize. Erasure was adapted as the film American Fiction (2023), written and directed by Cord Jefferson, starring Jeffrey Wright, Sterling K. Brown, and Leslie Uggams.

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Deliver Me From Dallas by Charles Willeford. Tucson. 2001. Dennis McMillan Publications. 0939767384. Originally published as a Fawcett Gold Medal paperback original in 1961 with the name of Franklin W. Sanders as the sole author. 192 pages. hardcover.  

DESCRIPTION - Although an earlier version was first published as Whip Hand by W. Franklin Sanders in 1961, the publisher declares this to be the original Deliver Me from Dallas!, for which the late Charles Willeford (Shark-Infested Custard, the Hoke Moseley series, etc.) deserves full credit. (Confused? All is explained in Jesse Sublett's introduction.) Ex-cop Bill Brown flees L.A. for Dallas, where he runs into all manner of trouble, including some murderous hillbilly kidnappers and a woman who wields a mean bullwhip. This hardboiled yarn is remarkably well constructed and should find an enthusiastic audience among aficionados of Jim Thompson and the like. - PUBLISHERS WEEKLY.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Charles Ray Willeford III (January 2, 1919 - March 27, 1988) was an American writer. An author of fiction, poetry, autobiography, and literary criticism, Willeford is best known for his series of novels featuring hardboiled detective Hoke Moseley. The first Hoke Moseley book, MIAMI BLUES (1984), is considered one of its era's most influential works of crime fiction. Film adaptations have been made of three of Willeford's novels: COCKFIGHTER, MIAMI BLUES, and THE WOMAN CHASER.

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Perdition, U.S.A. by Gary Phillips. Salem. 1996. John Brown Books. 0963905066. The Second Ivan Monk Mystery. 255 pages. paperback. Cover art by Mohammad Smith.  

DESCRIPTION - The mystery series that launched Gary Phillips's career. When three young black men are gunned down within blocks on one another, Ivan Monk investigates for a possible link--and finds himself on the trail of a racial conspiracy centered in a small Northwestern town. Robert “Scatterboy” Williams is a small-time hustler selling bogus Cartier watches in Pacific Shores, a port city south of Los Angeles. One day, he’s gunned down in the street, seemingly at random. Then drug dealer Ronny Aaron is shot and killed leaving a liquor store. Shortly thereafter, college student Jimmy Henderson is rendered comatose after two bullets to his body. The three victims have nothing in common save the neighborhood where they were shot—and the color of their skin. The police categorize Scatterboy’s murder as business as usual. But his girlfriend convinces private eye Ivan Monk to find the killer. What looks like three unrelated shootings of Black men in Southern California will put Monk on a tortuous trail unraveling a larger nefarious plan: the rise of an extremist demagogue.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Gary Phillips (b. 1955) is a critically acclaimed author of mysteries and graphic novels. Raised in South Central Los Angeles, Phillips grew up reading comics, classic pulp and detective fiction, and the likes of Iceberg Slim and took inspiration from all this when he created his first series character, Ivan Monk, in the early 1990s. A private detective adept at navigating the racial tensions of modern L. A. and beyond, Monk has appeared in four novels and one short story collection, Monkology (2011). Phillips introduced his second series character, Martha Chainey, in High Hand (2000), and followed that rollicking tale of a showgirl's mafia troubles with another book and short story. Besides writing several stand alones like The Jook and The Underbelly, and editing anthologies such as Orange County Noir, Phillips has found success in the field of graphic novels, penning illustrated stories such as The Rinse and High Rollers. When not writing, he spends his time smoking the occasional cigar and pondering why his poker abilities haven't improved. Phillips continues to live and work in Los Angeles.

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Violent Spring: An Ivan Monk Mystery by Gary Phillips. Portland. 1994. West Coast Crime. 1883303133. 277 pages. paperback. Cover art by Mohammad Smith.  

DESCRIPTION - In one of the hottest debut mysteries in years, African-American private investigator Ivan Monk must investigate the murder of a Korean shopkeeper in riot-torn, racially-charged Los Angeles . . . WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING - ‘ . . . Tough, smart, and unabashedly political, Monk is (to paraphrase basketball sart Charles Barkley) a P.I. for the nineties, and Violent Spring is Phillip's perfect intro to him.' - Gar Anthony Haywood . . . ‘Ivan Monk traverses the terrain of the boosters and mercenaries who run Blade Runnerville. He is an unbowed post-modern protagonist who with brains and brawn confronts this Hobbesian universe in his quest for the answers. Violent spring peels away the studded rind of the golden orange, exposing its dete noir core.' - Mike Davis.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Gary Phillips (b. 1955) is a critically acclaimed author of mysteries and graphic novels. Raised in South Central Los Angeles, Phillips grew up reading comics, classic pulp and detective fiction, and the likes of Iceberg Slim and took inspiration from all this when he created his first series character, Ivan Monk, in the early 1990s. A private detective adept at navigating the racial tensions of modern L. A. and beyond, Monk has appeared in four novels and one short story collection, Monkology (2011). Phillips introduced his second series character, Martha Chainey, in High Hand (2000), and followed that rollicking tale of a showgirl's mafia troubles with another book and short story. Besides writing several stand alones like The Jook and The Underbelly, and editing anthologies such as Orange County Noir, Phillips has found success in the field of graphic novels, penning illustrated stories such as The Rinse and High Rollers. When not writing, he spends his time smoking the occasional cigar and pondering why his poker abilities haven't improved. Phillips continues to live and work in Los Angeles.

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His Name Was Death by Fredric Brown. Berkeley. 1987. Black Lizard Books. 0887390447. 139 pages. paperback.

DESCRIPTION - Joyce Dugan had no idea she was about to commit an act that would instigate a chain of murders, but you know what they say: the first killing was hard, after that they were easy.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Fredric Brown (October 29, 1906 - March 11, 1972) was an American science fiction and mystery writer. He was born in Cincinnati. He is perhaps best known for his use of humor and for his mastery of the "short short" form - stories of 1 to 3 pages, often with ingenious plotting devices and surprise endings. Humor and a somewhat postmodern outlook carried over into his novels as well. One of his stories, "Arena," is officially credited for an adaptation as an episode of the landmark television series, Star Trek.

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The Root of His Evil by James M. Cain. Berkeley. 1989. Black Lizard Books. 0887390870. Originally Published In 1951. paperback. Painted front cover by Kirwan.

  
DESCRIPTION - A thriller which tells of the deadly corrupting influence between love and money as one man falls desperately in love with an innocent girl who proves willing but inadequate in satisfying his overwhelming demands.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - James Mallahan Cain (1892 - 1977) was a first-rate writer of American hard-boiled crime fiction. Born in Baltimore, the son of the president of Washington College, Cain began his career as a reporter, serving in the American Expeditionary Force in World War I and writing for THE CROSS OF LORRAINE, the newspaper of the 79th Division. He returned from the war to embark on a literary career that included a professorship at St. John's College in Annapolis and a stint at The New Yorker as managing editor before he went to Hollywood as a script writer. Cain's famous first novel, The POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE, was published in 1934 when he was forty-two, and became an instant sensation. It was tried for obscenity in Boston and was said by Albert Camus to have inspired his own book, THE STRANGER. The infamous novel was staged in 1936, and filmed in 1946 and 1981. The story of a young hobo who has an affair with a married woman and plots with her to murder her husband and collect his insurance, THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE is a benchmark of classic crime fiction and film noir. Two of Cain's other novels, MILDRED PIERCE (1941) and DOUBLE INDEMNITY (1943), were also made into film noir classics. In 1974, James M. Cain was awarded the Grand Master Award by the Mystery Writers of America. Cain published eighteen books in all and was working on his autobiography at the time of his death.

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