Private Eye Action As You Like It

Rating:
Summary: A blast from their pasts
Review: Here's a quiz for trivia fans. Identify the following:

Ray Slater. Dan Sloane. John Talbot.

Give up? Ardent Lansdale fans may recognize the Slater moniker, but I'd bet most of you are hard pressed to come up with anything on the other two. Here's the answer: each is a fictional private detective, created by Joe R. Lansdale, Lewis Shiner, or both. All starred in early attempts by the authors to write hard boiled mysteries, and all first appeared in Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine in the late seventies and early eighties.

Private Eye Action As You Like It (the title is based on an in-joke between Lansdale and Shiner) presents eight stories featuring these characters-three Slater tales by Lansdale, three Sloane adventures from Shiner, and two collaborative efforts starring Talbot. Typical of the men's action-adventure genre, they bear titles like "Long Gone, Forever," "One Blonde, Well Dead," "Deep Without Pity," "The Killing Season," and "Black as the Night". None of the stories are particularly stellar, but all are well written and entertaining, notable for the insight they provide into each writer's professional development and evolution of their particular voices. All the stories contain flashes of the author they become-Lansdale, in naming a character Eclipse, "on account of he's so big he blocks out the sun," and Shiner in his already polished prose.

From the tenor of their editorial remarks, I sensed both authors look back on these stories with a measure of disdain and affection. This is to be expected, but the disdain is probably not justified. Sometimes clumsy, sometimes amateurish, the stories represent the best work they could do at that stage in their careers, and as such are nothing to be ashamed about. So, in the final analysis, I'd have to say the collection is interesting primarily for its historical perspective, secondarily for the entertaining author's notes filled with insight and good natured ribbing between the two friends (Shiner's piece, "Can You Run With It?" is particularly funny). As such, the book is primarily for Lansdale and Shiner completists, not for casual readers. Even so, those unfamiliar with either author will find things to like.