Joe Gores's Books | Crime Books

Biography

Joseph Gores (1931-2011) was one of the United States’ most critically acclaimed crime writers. At the time, he was one of only a handful of writers to win three Edgar Awards (others include Donald E. Westlake and William L. DeAndrea). The Japanese Maltese Falcon Society presented him with their Falcon Award — Japan’s highest prize for crime fiction. The Private Eye Writers of America presented him with their lifetime achievement award. Finally, for good measure, the Mystery Writers of America elected him as their President.

The Hard Way to Get a Degree

His path to writing was not so glamorous. He earned a BA in English Literature from the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. Whilst there, one of his tutors encouraged him, telling him to “Find a small room with a bed, a table and a chair. Put your typewriter on the table, your backside on the chair, and start typing. When you stand up ten years later, you’ll be a writer.”

He went on to study for a Master’s at Stanford University. Here he tried his hand at a couple of subjects:

“In 1954, Stanford University refused me a Master’s Degree in Creative Writing because the stories I had submitted for my thesis ‘read as if they had been written to be sold.'”

“In 1955, Stanford University refused me a Master’s Degree in English Literature because my proposed thesis was on the novels of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Ross Macdonald. ‘Since these novels are not literature,’ they said, ‘obviously graduate theses cannot be written about them.'” (Mystery Bookstore)

At that point, his education stalled, and Gores boarded a freight ship to Tahiti. Here he wrote frantically, selling his first story to a pulp crime magazine. The government drafted him into the US army during the Vietnam war. He spent most of his time at the Pentagon as an information officer, writing biographies of generals.

Stamford finally awarded him a Master’s degree on his return to California.

“In 1961, Stanford University granted me a Master’s Degree in English Lit. because it had to. My thesis was on the Literature of the South Seas; my advisor had read only Conrad, Maugham, and Melville of my 50 authors, so he could not say it was wrong to write about the other 47.” (Mystery Bookstore)

The literature of the South Seas invariably casts men as cannibals and women as shapely, exotic beauties. It is pulp fiction of the highest order.

Repo Man

Enthralled by tales of private detectives, Gores decided to get some real-world experience. He started by tagging along with a friend who was a skip tracer.

“He used to come in hungover as hell telling these wonderful tales of his adventures thugging cars, and I thought, ‘Oh, God, that sounds really great,'” (Stanford Magazine)

Gores asked his friend’s boss for a job, offering to work for two weeks for free. The boss — Dave Kikkert — gave him the file of a man who had skipped the repayments on his car. After talking to 167 people at 57 different addresses, Gores confronted Kikkert.

“Dave, I found the bastard. He’s down in Colma, in a grave—he’s been dead for two years!” (Stanford Magazine)

Gores spent the next 12 years on and off working for David Kikkert and Associates as a repo man and skip tracer. Work was an education. Few other people have tried to repossess a car only to have its erstwhile owner destroy it with a sledgehammer.

Twelve Years to Become an Overnight Success

Throughout this time, Gores struggled to become an author. One year he received so many rejection letters he used three hundred of them to paper his bathroom. Finally, perseverance paid off. After publishing several short stories, he wrote A Time of Predators in 1969, winning his first Edgar award.

“I had learned the elements of successful fiction as a detective by writing thousands of field reports that make clients willing to pay our fees–or readers willing to pay for stories.” (Mystery Bookstore)

Much of his fiction is a thinly veiled retelling of personal experiences. His series, The DKA files, features “Dan Kearney and Associates”, a private investigation firm specialising in repossessing cars. In the story, 32 Cadillacs, they are tasked with recovering a fleet of Cadillacs stolen for a funeral. It doesn’t take much deduction to find the inspiration for the series.

No-Nonsense Style

Joe Gores’s books are sparse and tight, without superfluous words. He cites the first line of a Ross MacDonald short story as one of his inspirations.

“The opening line of ‘Gone Girl’ was ‘I was tooling home from the Mexican border in a light blue convertible and a dark blue mood,’ and I thought, ‘My God, that is the way I want to write! That kind of tightness, that kind of directness, no-nonsense, no navel-gazing. You are in there to create vivid characters who are doing extremely interesting things and that’s it.” (Stanford Magazine)

Dashiell Hammett

Another source of inspiration was Dashiell Hammett, author of the Sam Spade novels. Half a century earlier, Hammett, like Gores, had worked as a Private Detective.

“Hammett is so good at what he did because he had been a private detective. He had been in that field. He had been shot at. He’d been kicked around. He’d fallen off roofs. And so, his stuff was so real.” (Mark Coggins)

Hammett so took Gores that he wrote a fictional story about him, Hammett. Hammett solves the murder of a colleague at the Pinkerton Detective Agency. Thirty years later, Gores persuaded the Hammett estate to let him write a Sam Spade novel. His final book, Spade and Archer, is a prequel to one of Hammett’s best-known novels – The Maltese Falcon. I imagine that pleased his Japanese fan club.

Gores died in Marin County, California. Fifty years to the day after Dashiell Hammett.