Jim Nisbet (1947–2022)

This is a pretty deep noir dive. If you’re a noir fan, you probably will want to make a dive like this sometime just to see what it’s like.

The story’s protagonist, Martin Windrow, is already down and out when the story starts. A defrocked police detective now working as a private detective, reduced to serving divorce papers on unwilling recipients. He’s hired to serve papers on Herbert Trimble. From there, it’s Disneyland for the depraved.

Windrow happens onto the remains of a show more murder next door to Trimble’s apartment. This is after he actually thinks he has served the papers but actually has been misled by Trimble’s wife (actually Herbert Trimble himself in women’s clothing, pretending to be his own wife) into thinking another man, Harry Fern, was actually Herbert. Try to keep up.

This is not Martin’s case, and he’s not a cop anymore anyway. But he is hired by some local scene figures, who do not want the story to reflect badly on the local scene. That local scene turns out to include everything from gender-swapping into less innocent depths of sadomasochism. And eventually torture, mutilation, and murder.

Through it all Windrow is running parallel with the actual police investigation led by his nemesis on the force, Max Bdeniowitz.

It goes down from there. Way down.

This is the noirest of noir. I don’t mean that in a bad way. Nisbet is a gifted, skilled writer. This is not cheap sensationalism — it’s psychological thrill-ride stuff. The dialog is pure, premium grade noir -- worthy of the overused “gritty” adjective with a healthy portion of despair and depravity as seasoning.

I’m giving the book 4 stars, but it really deserves 5 for the writing itself. I’m just taking off one because I suspect that for many readers, the reading experience will be more than a little unsettling.

It may be a place to visit, kind of so you know what’s behind that door. But I doubt you would want to move in and live there. show less

Jim Nesbit's "Lethal Injection" is an amazing tour de force of a crime thriller. His writing is rich and layered. The story moves along at breackneck speed.

It is a book that is probably unlike anything else you have ever read, beginning with an in-depth scene taking the reader step by step through the final hours of Mencken as his sentence is finally carried out. They are a frenzied, wild last few hours filled with irony, violence, and characters.
But the focus is not really on Mencken. It's show more Royce, Dr Royce, Dr. Death, who is the star of this show as the doctor wonders if Mencken really did it and delves into his life in an attempt to figure out the truth. This is the doctor's stunning descent into a world he could barely have imagined, a glimpse perhaps into the gates of hell.

Whose life though is crazier Mencken's or Royce's? Royce is stuck in a bitter, hateful marriage where they have to go shopping for new dishes every few months. His career is wasting away and he took on a contract no one else wanted. Is he a righteous man searching for justice or, in the end, is he just another crazed addict trapped in a world of lust and greed?

Life is a game of poker and you gotta deal with the hand you're dealt. show less

Dark, murky, and effective story of a much-battered private eye trying to find a murderer among the S&M/B&D set in San Francisco. Lurid but literate, although Nisbet definitely goes overboard a time or two or three or four or.... Reminiscent of Chandler in many ways, particularly The Big Sleep, even though it is set sometime near its published date of 1981. The biggest similarity is that Nisbet's private eye Martin Windrow, is driven by his own internal code to find the solution to the show more mystery, regardless of anyone else's notion of justice. show less

“Snitch World” is a great find. It is a kind of a Bukowski’s “Barfly” meets the tech world kind of story and is told in a somewhat slow pace that just reels the reader in bit by bit. It is a small story, not a grandiose world story, about a small-time guy in San Francisco’s North Beach, who stopped caring so long ago that he doesn’t even remember when. Klinger sometimes scrapes together enough dough to buy some drinks, often hot water with Jameson, but whatever he can afford show more from the well. It is better for Klinger not to have too much dough at once because it will just pour out of his pockets into the nearest barkeep’s register. He is a petty criminal, prone to sleight-of-hand, robbery, playing messenger, anything that will keep him liquefied. Its dark and dreary and rainy throughout the story. He is not too proud to ask for help or to walk away from trouble, praying that his accomplice’s won’t snitch him out.

But, San Francisco is a small city filled with many cultures and criss- crossing the same blocks as Klinger and his ilk are an army of yuppies running from one dot-com to the next and one IPO to the next. The story tells the tale of how Klinger’s path crosses with that of these yuppies. It is not exactly worlds colliding, but there is a different mood, a different pace to their lives and you begin to wonder who is more desperate, more trapped.

This is a book that is simply beautifully written, perfectly paced, and gently takes the reader into a tale of modern noir. This is worth reading. It certainly is. show less