Authors and Creators
Joe Gores
(1931--)

"I loved detective work, I truly loved it."

Born Joseph Nicholas Gores, he's one of only two authors to receive Edgar Awards in three separate categories: Best First Novel, Best Short Story and Best TV Series Segment. His novels 32 Cadillacs and Come Morning were nominated for Edgars as Best Novel, and his 1973 novel Hammett was adapted for the screen by producer Francis Coppola and director Wim Wenders. As well, he's written episodes of such popular TV crime shows as Mike Hammer, Columbo, Remington Steele, Kojak and Magnum, P.I.

He earned a master's degree from Stanford University in 1961, and along the way worked as a truck driver, a hod carrier, a logger, a clerk, a driver, a carny, an English teacher at a boy's school in Kenya, an assistant motel manager and, for twelve years, a private eye/repo man. He has often relied on his former occupations, particularly his stint as a private eye, to lend an air of authenticy to his work, blasting through the "glamour" of detective work, showing the drudgery and grunt work of detection. Of course it really helps that the guy's a helluva writer.

Joe Gores's first novel, A Time of Predators, set in the suburban Peninsula region south of SF, tells of a Stanford professor who retrains himself in the long-dormant skills he used as a military commando to go after a gang of juvenile thugs who raped his wife. It won a well-deserved Edgar for Best First Novel.

And Gores' Interface is, IMHO, one of the finest PI novels ever written, introduced morally-challenged Neal Fargo, and features possibly the best surprise ending since Sam Spade refused to play the sap for Brigid O'Shaugnessy. The style, a totally objective third-person narrative (what one writing teacher of mine called "camera/tape recorder") is, like the socko surprise finish, reminiscent of The Maltese Falcon.

Gores has written several acclaimed standalones, including Wolf Time (1989), Dead Man (1993) and Cases (1999), but it's his DKA series that he'll be forever linked woith. The novels and short stories featuring skip tracers and repo men and women of Dan Kearney and Associates are simply one of the all-time great series and the closest anyone has ever come to a private eye version of Ed McBain's famed 87th Precinct procedural novels.

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RELATED LINKS

Report respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.

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