Handsome Harry is JAMES CARLOS BLAKE’s eighth novel and ninth book of fiction. Among his literary honors are the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Southwest Book Award, the Quarterly West Novella Prize, and the Chautauqua South Book Award. He lives in Arizona.
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PRAISE FOR
Handsome Harry
“Handsome Harry is Blake’s most buoyant and polished novel yet…. Sassy, stubborn, funny, and resilient, his women are one of the delights of his novels…. Among other things, this is a great love story.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“Handsome Harry is a humdinger…. Blake brings this character to life so powerfully that we can’t help but find him an entertaining and somewhat sympathetic companion.”
—Otto Penzler, New York Sun
“[An] engrossing novel…filled with hoodlums who are violent but honorable…capturing the attitudes and outlooks of the populace.”
—USA Today
“Blake at his edgy best…seductively violent.”
—Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“A beguiling, hurtling digression into a new voice for Blake.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“The gutsy Blake mimics a true criminal marvelously while telling an alluring story.”
—St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“Blake’s dialogue is fast, funny, and often raw…. A fast-paced novel that will pull readers into a world of violence, vendettas, and revenge…. Blake’s telling is oh, so good.”
—Fort Worth Star-Telegram
“Blake writes with a bare-knuckled intensity that crackles with relevance and truth. Make no mistake about it, Blake is a master at his craft and his Handsome Harry is one of the best crime novels of the year.”
—Tucson Citizen
“Underpinning scenes of bank robberies, jailbreaks and bloody shootouts is a surprisingly intimate story of friendship, honor and desperate love…. A masterful social commentary on Depression-era America.”
—BookPage
“Harry’s voice is the smooth, almost affectless vernacular of a hardened con [in] this ‘ripped from the history books’ adventure as seen through Harry’s lens of tough verisimilitude.”
—Publishers Weekly
“A brilliant portrait of the real-life Pierpont….”
—Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel
“Easily the year’s best crime novel.”
—Clarion-Ledger (Jackson, MS)
“The novel cooks harder than sly narrator Pierpont does when he meets his inevitable appointment with Old Sparky…. Blake brings this gin-soaked era back to life.”
—Booklist
“Irresistibly compulsive reading.”
—Library Journal
“Blake has created one charming gangster [and] tells the story with humor, finesse, and deftly paced action…. Handsome Harry is a kick.”
—Tucson Weekly
“To categorize Handsome Harry merely as a ‘crime novel’ would neglect the solid characters and quality of Blake’s writing…. He keeps readers enthralled with the skill of a master storyteller.”
—Oxford Town
“The exuberantly unrepentant Harry Pierpont relates his story with power and raw vivacity.”
—Book Folks
“Pierpont manages to seem both clever and good-natured even as he revels in the brutal things he’s capable of doing. This is a violent rogue’s memoir.”
—Arizona Republic
“Blake poses the central question of who did the greater harm, the Dillinger gang who robbed from the rich and became folk heroes or the merciless banks that foreclosed on homes and businesses rendered helpless by the Great Depression.”
—Fort Myers News-Press
“Fast-paced, very funny…snappy and hilarious dialogue…. All in all a fine book that sees James Carlos Blake going from strength to strength.”
—The Barcelona Review
“Blake brings alive the gang’s exploits—deadly shootouts, hard drinking, fast women—in this gripping novel…. [He] excels at merging historical fact with fiction.”
—Playboy
“The time, place, and people all come alive through Blake…. This is a gifted writer.”
—Chicago Sun-Times
“Masterful detail with a steady current of electric storytelling.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Mr. Blake remains the master of action-packed narrative. His prose is compulsively readable, and his characters [have] ferocious immediacy.”
—Dallas Morning News
“The novel has an appealing intimacy. Blake captures the outlaw gang perfectly, from psychopathic narcissism to jailhouse bravado to paranoid remorselessness.”
—Denver Post
OTHER WORKS BY JAMES CARLOS BLAKE
Under the Skin
A World of Thieves
Wildwood Boys
Borderlands
Red Grass River
In the Rogue Blood
The Friends of Pancho Villa
The Pistoleer
Copyright
HANDSOME HARRY. Copyright © 2004 by James Carlos Blake. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Adobe Digital Edition August 2009 ISBN 978-0-06-196795-5
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