It's sounding more and more like this is a book I will enjoy so I plan to buy it soon.
It's sounding more and more like this is a book I will enjoy so I plan to buy it soon.
I like Stephen hunter's books enough that I have all the swagger books in hardback and paperback. I reread them. Some I don't reread. Like the NASCAR one. I figure writers are like actors. I don't like every movie they make or book they write.
Last edited by Rich@CCC; 05-19-2017 at 09:30 AM.
TANSTAAFL
Managing Partner, Custom Carry Concepts, LLC
The last one with his kid was horrible.
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Dirty White Boys might be his best novel.
It's a lot like Star Wars, where George Lucas made an amazing movie because he was struggling with his limits, but then later when he had all the money and creative freedom in the world you saw awful self indulgent shit like the threatened backstreet boys cameos as jedis and Jar Jar Binks.
Finished it today, it was pretty good.
I am about halfway through and think it is Hunter's best novel yet.
As I think I posted, it deals with Bob Lee Swagger's grandfather, Charles Swagger, who was a skilled and experienced lawman in Arkansas in the 1930s. The gun handling and pistol info is dead on. Charles Swagger served in WWI in both the Canadian then the US armies and won a battlefield promotion and ended the war as a major. He has killed a number of criminals in gunfights and is recruited to go assist the Bureau of Investigation in the year before it became the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He is sent to Chicago where they are heavy on law school grads and short on people skilled with firearms. He winds up working with Melvin Purvis to take down the likes of Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd.
His favorite gun is the Colt 1911, and it goes into details about the little things he does to his gun to give it a better trigger pull and make it more reliable.
Didn't Hot Springs deal with the ghosts of Earl's father, who liked to beat on Earl's bother and utilize "working" boys while on "church retreats"? I seem to recall Earl faked Charles's death scene, in order to preserve the Swagger name.
I haven't read the new book, but it seems tough to square Charles the closeted pedophile who owes silence to Hot Springs mob types with Charles the gang-buster of the Purvis years.
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