Harper Collins
$7.99
Import £6.99
Patrick Culhane is actually a pen name for Archive fave, Max Allan Collins, author of Road to Perdition and co-author of the last Mickey Spillane novel, The Goliath Bone.
Black Hats, although marketed as Suspense would be just as comfortable with the Western tag. It is a western really, only one set in the 1920's and featuring a young Al Capone and an aged Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson. Yep, this unique premise sees Earp operating as a private detective in the Jazz age and such is the authenticity of the author's voice that one gets sucked into the fiction and almost believes the clever deceit as fact.
The first chapter is self contained and would work separated from the rest of the book as a short story. In this opening we find Wyatt trailing a young woman who is due to marry his close friend, the western actor William Hart. The actor wants out of the marriage without too much scandal and so when Wyatt discovers that the young starlet is actually a gold digger and having a sexual affair with her agent, he confronts them. Wyatt ends up pistol whipping the agent and proves that even at 70 years of age he is as tough as he ever was. It's a great opening to the book and mixes in many facts with the fiction so that by the end of that chapter the world within the novel is very real to the reader.
The novel begins proper when Wyatt is visited by Big Nosed Kate, Doc Holliday's widow. She reveals that she had a son with Doc and that he is in trouble. Grieving the loss of his own wife and child, which is something Earp can identify with, the young man is running a speakeasy in New York and seems to have crossed an upcoming gangster named Alphonse Capone. Wyatt agrees to go to the Big Apple where he will
meet up with Bat Masterson, now a successful sports writer, and together they will try and save their late friend's son from himself as well as the bloodthirsty mobsters he has crossed.Black Hats is a great read that will please fans of both the mystery and western genres - the author clearly knows Wyatt Earp's life well enough to set this novel in a period where it could have actually happened. And boy does it all pack a punch - it moves with the speed of a bullet from one of Earp's old six shooters.
Excellent stuff. I, for one, would like to see more of this kind of mesh up of historical fact and fiction.
