Harry Fannin
Created by David Markson

HARRY FANNIN is a walking scar. He has some shrapnel in his left shoulder, an old knife wound in his right shoulder, his nose has been broken twice that he can remember, not to mention an assortment of .32 and .38 caliber bullet holes in other parts of his anatomy. He plies his rough and tumble trade in Greenwich Village, New York and he wouldn't have it any other way.

UNDER OATH

• "There's a good, hard-boiled feel to this series, some great use of New York City, and it's well-written to boot. 1959's Epitath for a Tramp kicks off the series in fine style with Harry's nymphomaniac wife showing up at the door sporting a knife wound in her chest."
  (Kevin Burton Smith)
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• "I just finished the second Harry Fannin book by David Markson, Epitaph for a Dead Beat, and liked it just as much as the first. I can see why people were reminded of Ross Macdonald by these books (Markson even gives a shout out to RM by mentioning in passing that a bartender was reading a book called The Way Some People Die).
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  Like Macdonald, the writing is very literate (both books have numerous literary allusions), with a sense of gloom hanging over it all. And childhood and family trauma figure heavily in the first. However, Markson leavens it all with Chandleresque wisecracks.
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  The second book features a somewhat demented sense of humor. It is set amidst the Greenwich Village beat scene, circa 1960. Fannin is a clear outsider, but Markson knows his stuff. He throws out hilarious overheard dialog snippets, references to beat writers, even small excerpts of writings. Fannin internalizes all of it to such a degree that he begins to ramble in a like stream-of-consciousness flow for almost a third of the book, while sleep deprived and suffering from a concussion, which, being a hardboiled PI, he treats with booze. The whodunnit of the two books, and the way Fannin discovers it, are very similar, but Markson manages to put an interesting new spin on the same trick in the second."
  (Mark Sullivan)

NOVELS

• Epitaph for a Tramp (1959; AKA "Fannin")
• Epitaph for a Deadbeat (1961)
• Miss Doll, Go Home (1965)

Report respectfully submitted by Dale Stoyer.