On the tour Sunday various people asked me at various times as we hiked along whether or not Pinkerton’s was still around — couldn’t say for sure, but something easy to Google up and resolve. Not that any of us bothered at the time.
But it reminded me that it seems that I haven’t noticed a Pinkerton’s armored car in a year, two years, which at the end got a few of us talking about armored cars.
Which led to me doing a plug for the movie Palookaville, one of my favorites — it’s got an armored car caper in it. Plus there’s the classic Armored Car Robbery (sampled in Palookaville), and the more recent Armored — a whole little sub-genre.
And of course I mentioned the Tom Kakonis novel Criss Cross, a novel no fan of armored car capers should miss. As I said in a tour brochure back in 1992, Criss Cross is more or less the Kakonis version of The Maltese Falcon, a modern hardboiled masterpiece.
That micro-essay on Kakonis and the ultra-hardboiled just got reprinted on July 18 on the Brash Books website, part of the promo effort to bring the Kakonis backlist into print. Hey, anything I can do to help out.
I’m digging into an advance copy of the new Kakonis novel now — release date September 2 — and unless he screws the pooch with the ending, he’s still got it.
As always, he’s especially good with the scenes of lowlife thugs. Very, very funny.
