The Wheelman (Duane Swierczynski)


Dear Mr Swierczynski:
I hate you for being such a good author. By hate, I mean envy, and by author I mean sheer awesome dude. So, to recap, I envy you for being a sheer awesome dude.
I read The Wheelman over a couple day span on the local transit system. It was less polished than your later novels such as Severance Package or The Blonde. It is weird to describe pulpy books as polished, but I am sure you are picking up what I am putting down.
I know it is your book and as such, you already know the plot, but bear with me while I summarize what I read. In a nutshell, The Wheelman is a back and forth tale about a mute getaway driver in a botched getaway. Robbing a Wachovia bank was easy, the plan was solid and the route out of inner Philly was mapped and ready to go.? Unfortunately, someone spilled the beans on the plan and the getaway turned more into? 
From there, things just get bloody.. very very bloody. I don’t think a single character makes it through the plot with out landing some horrible flesh wound. Were you eating a lot of spicy foods when you wrote this? Recovering from surgery and on a multitude of steroids? Were you mugged and left for dead in Mexico, lying in the cold desert night considering how you would pay back those who wronged you?
Regardless, The novel was awesome, and I would love to drink a beer and chat about the wrongness of being in a corrugated pipe, 60 ft down with a corpse on top limiting movement as one bleeds out.. Call me. We’ll go to the Horse Brass pub.
Dear everyone else who is not Mr. Swierczynski,
This book was goddamned good.

Comments

  1. russell1200January 6, 2012 at 7:44 AM

    I read this a while ago.

    I thought it was O.K. It has a very fast pace.

    But the main character and his close accomplice are not particularly likeable people even in the way that criminal types can be likeable. It struck me that it used its fast pacing try and get around the very implausibility of much of the action.

    ReplyDelete
  2. erisianJanuary 9, 2012 at 1:10 AM

    I can see that. It is looser than many of his other books, and seems to rush through the plot in an effort to showcase the plot...

    The good thing is that with in the first ten pages, this is easily recognized as being a book where every douche-bag involved will be losing some blood.

    I agree with you, i was surprised that i was not tied to any one character, caring for their survival. I guess this is a good thing based on the outcome :)

    all in all, i still really enjoyed the novel, just in a different manner than other books of Duane's.

    Thanks for stopping in Russel!

    ReplyDelete

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