Bird Dog

Harold Dodge, pushing 50, is a good man. But in a less-than-perfect world--that is, Los Angeles--good men sometimes have to do bad things. Just about everyone in the City of Angels has a hard-luck story, but when it comes to bad breaks, Harold is rewriting the book... Harold lives for women and cars--he just never figured dying for them. Now he has to add up a pack of lies and hope a scrap of truth comes out in the equation. But Harold lives in a city where everyone's working a hustle, where the only question is who's hustling you. The Santa Ana winds are blowing, and Harold Dodge is feeling the heat.

Low Rider

Mixing business with pleasure is always a risky affair, and in this case Harold's in so deep he's getting the bends. From cowboy cops to jealous lovers, just about everybody wants a piece of him. Worst of all, the bad guys have sunk to a new low: they've stolen his Impala and stripped it for parts. Harold's going to find his Chevy and put it back together...even if it means going to hell and back in Vikki's four-cylinder rice-burner.

Abe Books

Powell's

Doom Fox
with an introduction by Ice-T

Propelled by the story of Joe "Kong" Allen and his gorgeous, treacherous wife, Doom Fox is the last in Iceberg Slim's legendary series of underground novels. Written in 1978 and unpublished until now, Doom Fox is a tale of the Los Angeles ghetto that begins just after World War II and spans the next thirty years. In the no-holds-barred tradition of Chester Himes, Doom Fox captures a violent, vivid world of low-riding chippie-catchers, prizefighters, prostitutes, and smooth-talking preachers. Iceberg Slim detailed life among the hustlers in the inner city and reinvented the concept of cool. His books became underground classics, advertised and circulated by word of mouth. Stylish and uncensored, Doom Fox brings his unforgettable voice to the players of today.

The Getaway

The basis for the film by Sam Peckinpah, The Getaway is a "Dantesque tour of the American underworld, a place where no motive is pure, no stranger is innocent, and no tie is too sacred to be betrayed in a nightmarish split second."

The Grifters

Roy Dillon seems too handsome and well-mannered to be a professional con man. Lilly Dillon looks too young--and loves Roy a little too intensely--to be taken for his mother. Moira Langtry is getting too old to keep on living off the kindness of male strangers. And Carol Roberg seems too innocent to be acquainted with suffering.

Abe Books

Powell's

Like a Hole in the Head
by Jen Banbury

"Jill, a part-time bookseller and a full-time wiseass, gets a sweet deal when she buys a rare book from a slippery-looking dwarf...until a polite giant shows up with the dwarf, sets his hair on fire, and demands the book back. But it's been sold, and now Jill must retrieve it--or the giant will not be so polite. For the sexy, sardonic clerk, a harrowing escapade ensues, as thugs, sycophants, and central casting rejects crop up to claim the hot volume. Before she can find the book and discover its great secret, Jill be be cheated, kidnapped, drugged, tortured, and even forced to act as a movie extra. And then there's the giant with the lighter."

This sounded great, but the protagonist goes from being clever and hip to being hapless and annoying somewhere in the middle of this book, and it was a bit of a trial to finish it up.

Alex Hamilton is young, intelligent, savvy, and independent--but also subject to violent fits of rage. Raised within the confines of a system that has done nothing but provide him with pain, his frustration and anger are completely natural--and inherently dangerous. As Alex is pulled between well-meaning but exhausted social workers and viciously cruel authority figures, his emotions and actions are forever careening off of these two disparate influences. One constant remains: his no-good, criminally-minded peers, who are all too ready to plant illegal ideas in a young intelligent mind that's already well on its way to social deviancy.

They Shoot Horses, Don't They?
by Horace McCoy

"In his best known novel, McCoy introduces a woman protagonist entering a depression-era dance marathon on a crumbling Santa Monica pier. Trapped in an absurd contest in a rotting pier at the edge of the American continent, she is "saved" by her partner who, at her insistence, becomes her executioner."

Check out the movie based on the book, featuring Jane Fonda, finally available on widescreen DVD.

Rainbow Drive
by Roderick Thorp

Mike Gallagher is acting head of Homicide, Hollywood Division, when five people are murdered on Rainbow Drive in Laurel Canyon... and the police heliocopter arrives on the scene before anyone coupld possibly have summoned it. Mike never would have known about the crime except that at the time he's in bed with a brunette who happens to live across the street. When the police delay calling an ambulance, even though there's a survivor who may be dying, Mike knows it's something bigger and dirtier than anything he's ever come up against. Mike gets the message to butt out. But when violence erupts again in a string of new and nasty murders and he realizes someone in his own squad might be involved, Mike won't quit. In a riveting climax, Gallagher stalks the murderers while being hunted by every cop in L.A.

The Onion Field
by Joseph Wambaugh

This is the fictionalized account of the frighteningly true story of two young cops and two young robbers whose separate destinies fatally cross one march night in a bizarre execution in a deserted Mariposa onion field. Wambaugh's first (and best) chronicles one of the worst episodes in LAPD history. For locals, this account is particularly vivid due to the continued existence of the crime scenes.

L.A. Times
by Stuart Woods

A real page turner - where everyone in LA, and I mean everyone, is a bad guy. Not a single sympathetic character in the book. Slightly reminiscent of "Get Shorty" - featuring a young up and coming mobster who comes to LA and rises to the top of the Hollywood heap.