Wed 23 Jun 2021
An Archived Review by Barry Gardner: WILLIAM L. DeANDREA – Written in Fire.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[2] Comments
WILLIAM L. DeANDREA – Written in Fire. Quinn Booker & Lobo Blacke #1. Walker & Co., hardcover, 1995. No paperback edition.
I don’t know if Bill DeAndrea is “hot” or not, but he sure isn’t having any trouble getting books published. This is the third in the last year or so, and that’s not counting Encyclopedia Mysteriosa. I like his writing more than a lot of fans seem to, both in his books and in TAD. He doesn’t write Books for the Ages (or try to), but most of his stories are entertaining and go down smoothly.
Quinn Booker is a journalist from New York in the late 1800s who has written a very profitable biography of a famous Western lawman, Lobo Blacke. Blacke is crippled now, and runs a newspaper in Wyoming. His mission in what remains of his life is to find the man who shot and crippled him, and he asks Booker to come West and help him. Booker does, but their quest for vengeance is postponed somewhat (or is it?) when a visiting famous photographer is killed. The West is still wild.
DeAndrea is just a damned good storyteller-and that’s the primary quality I look for in genre fiction. He can adapt his narrative voice to whatever kind of story he is telling, and make it sound right. His characters are likable and believable. And uncommonly for this day and time, he does not use more words than his story requires.
I enjoyed this a lot. I think Booker and Blacke are two of DeAndrea’s better creations, and I very much look forward to seeing more of them.
Bibliographic Update: There was to be only one additional book in the series, The Fatal Elixir (1997), published the year after DeAndrea’s death. He was only 44.
June 24th, 2021 at 8:07 pm
I disagreed a lot with Bill in his TAD column, but I always read it and his fiction with pleasure. At his best he was an engaging and entertaining writer with one of the smoother and easier to enjoy styles to come along in many a year.
June 24th, 2021 at 10:17 pm
He certainly wrote in a lot of different styles and several different series. For those who may not know a lot about Bill, here’s some information about him copied from Wikipedia:
“He won three Edgar Awards from the Mystery Writers of America, the first for his first novel, Killed in the Ratings. The majority of his novels made up several series. The Matt Cobb mysteries drew on DeAndrea’s experience working for a major American television network. The Niccolo Benedetti mysteries paid homage to great detectives such as Nero Wolfe. (DeAndrea was an active member of The Wolfe Pack when he lived in New York.) The Clifford Driscoll series ventured into the realm of the spy thriller, while the Lobo Blacke/Quinn Booker series of historical mysteries were set in the old West. DeAndrea was also the author of the J’Accuse! column in the Armchair Detective, a fanzine published by Mysterious Press. He won his third Edgar in 1994 for his reference work, Encyclopedia Mysteriosa.”