A MESSAGE FROM BIG DADDY THUG

We can’t launch the new ish without first pulling our hats down low and tipping our glasses to the great Robert B. Parker, whom we lost last month.  Like all great Writers on the Storm, the man went down at his desk, banging away words that have entertained you and me for the last few decades.  His best known creation – Spenser – will always be one of the great mystery series characters of all time.  Dennis Lehane put it best when he referred to detective fiction in eras he called B.P and A.P. (Before Parker and After Parker).  The man made an indelible mark on the fiction we love, and he will be missed. 

Hell, he already is.

In this issue of THUGLIT:

• This egg isn’t going over easy.
• Some ideas just sound better when you’re drunk.
• It’s all fun and games until someone gets a life.
• Got it made, got it made, got it maaaaade…
• Old-school versus Bartending School.
• The clock’s ticking…
• Who’s marking who?  And for what?
• Some people are hard to take…and harder to kill

THUGLIT – ISSUE 35

DEGENERATES BOOK CLUB

	Calumet City by Charlie Newton Chicago cop Patti Black isn’t tough as nails.  Nails would run screaming down the street.  When a mayoral assassination attempt, a botched drug bust and a body entombed in a wall all point back to Patti (and her tortured past), she needs to open up her old wounds to find the answers.
	Dirty White Boys by Stephen Hunter State Trooper Bud Pewtie has already crossed paths with Lamar Pye, and barely survived.  But now Lamar has escaped from prison with his ‘slow’ giant of a cousin Odell, and Richard, a sad-sack convict whose life balances on pictures he draws for Lamar.  Bud is going to get a second shot at Lamar, and it isn’t going to be pretty.
	The Last Good Kiss by James Crumley In our classic pick this issue, we go to what many consider one of the great works of crime fiction produced in the last fifty years.  The Last Good Kiss introduces C.W. Sughrue, a Montana investigator who works at a topless bar between gigs.  Hired to find an alcoholic author (and his alcoholic bulldog) on a drunken binge, he winds up reheating the cold trail of a girl missing from San Francisco a decade earlier.

As always, the Thug Picks will be featured in Manhattan's coolest indie bookshop, McNally Jackson Booksellers. Visit them.  Buy something.