Ben Henry
Created by Mike Weiss

BEN HENRY started out as a San Francisco ex-reporter reborn as a cab driver in his 1987 debut, No Go On Jackson Street, who went on to appear in two more generally well-received novels.

Author Mike Weiss does a good job of writing about homosexual characters in San Francisco without reducing them to clichés. Even the flamboyant drug dealer Yollo who asks Ben for his help in No Go on Jackson Street takes on a life of his own. At least until Ben witnesses his murder, and his old reporter instincts kick in. By the time he heads to Big Sur to help an old friend in A Dry And Thirsty Ground, he is a licensed PI. That comes in handy as he starts to investigate the axe murder his good friend is accused of, and he is soon up to his neck in suspects marijuana farmers, a medicine man, a tribe of xenophobes and even a euthanasia enthusiast (who happens to be a nurse). They all take backstage to the forest fire that burns throughout the story. A decent series, with sometimes predictable plots that revolve around social consciousness in some form.

Mike Weiss is perhaps better known for Double Play, his Edgar winning non-fictional account of the assassination of the Mayor and the (openly gay) city supervisor of San Francisco by a former city supervisor, and the "White Night Riots" that followed in the late 1970's.

EVIDENCE

• "More like Cincinnati than it could ever admit to itself, a vain little popinjay of a town that called itself everybody's favorite."
  (Ben Henry on San Francisco, from No Go On Jackson Street)

UNDER OATH

• "Ben Henry is nicely hard-boiled without being trite."
  (Publishers Weekly)

NOVELS

• No Go On Jackson Street (1987). Buy this book
• All Points Bulletin (1989). Buy this book
• A Dry And Thirsty Ground (1992). Buy this book

RELATED LINKS

• Death Flags a Cab: Taxi-Driving Eyes

Report respectfully submitted by Dale Stoyer.