In 2003, the FBI arrested a thirty-one year old man, the suspect in some thirty bank robberies over a ten month spree. At the time of his capture he was spotted, by a sharp eyed agent working with a surveillance photo, scoping out another score. Inside the suspect’s car was found a copy of This Here’s a Stick Up: the Big Bad Book of American Bank Robbery by Duane Swierczynski, a true crime study of the history and the art of robbing banks in America.
That’s what I call a recommendation.
Maybe that incident is not what inspired Swierczynksi to write a heist novel, (2006’s The Wheelman ), about a mute Irish getaway driver desperate to get out of Philadelphia after a major score and a series of double crosses, but it sure makes an intriguing note on the dust jacket.
Swierczynski writes fast paced, blood-slicked, high concept pulps that spin wildly imaginative tales within tight structures. When presented with a standard character or beat of a genre, rather than run from a cliche, he presses into them till they burst. His tough guys are near superhuman, the femme fatales are sexy and deadly beyond anybody else’s and his killers are machines of preternatural skill or thrill seekers of bottomless depravity. They are not books of half-measures.
The Wheelman , The Blonde and Severance Package contain thin layers of overlap that unite them in a heightened alternate universe called Philadelphia, and his latest, Expiration Date , is another anything goes mystery (is it time travel, hallucination or something even stranger?) set in the city he loves.
And though it returns to the truly wild territory of his fiction debut Secret Dead Men , it’s also his most personal work yet. It’s laced with autobiographical detail and anchored by real familial warmth that’ll possibly even warm your shriveled heart until the final reveal of the book’s back third makes yer brain cage pop.
He's edited newspapers, magazines, anthologies and outside of True Crime, written non-fiction books on various topics and a whole mess a comics. He's also become the go to guy for trying new ways to experience books, having written a couple of interactive mysteries as well as the first of a series of digi-novels, Level 26, with CSI creator Anthony Zuiker.
I predict Swierczynski will soon become a household name. One that is unpronounceable.
You can read my interview with Duane Swierczynski here.
Jedidiah Ayres writes fiction and keeps the blog Hardboiled Wonderland.
