Gun Monkeys

Great opening line:
“I turned the Chrysler onto the Florida Turnpike with Rollo Kramer’s headless body in the trunk, and all the time I’m thinking I should’ve put some plastic down.”

Poor Charlie. His boss is being squeezed out by a guy from Miami, all his buddies are dead, and his workplace has been burned to the ground. And he is running around trying to find out what happened and why! And the answers are none too forthcoming!

A quick paced, action-filled read! A good main character, and an even better supporting character in the "New Guy"! And I very much enjoyed the killing scene set to Johnny Cash's "I Walk the Line"! That added quite a bit of corpses to an already high body count in this book! I liked the ending too!
Maybe show more I'll check out the movie next... show less

My first Gischler book.

His lead character Charlie Swift is a National Geographic-loving killer, whose girlfriend is a taxidermist. ..:)

I believe one has always to start at the beginning. He proves, should anyone have any doubts, that exceptional prose can turn the merely ordinary into an extraordinary winner.

Gischler's prose is charged with kinetic energy and it’s darkly funny.

Narrated in the first person, Gischler’s writing is contextually real and simply, deliciously, hilarious. From the opening sentence, which has to rank as one of the best openers ever, “Gun Monkeys” delivers a fresh take on good old-fashioned sleaze, written with great style, enormous energy and even greater wit.
Noir Crime Fiction at show more its best.
PS. Almost everybody he meets gets bumped off and the body count by the end of the book is in war movie territory… show less

Here's the first sentence of the book: ""I turned the Chrysler onto the Florida Turnpike with Rollo Kramer's headless body in the trunk, and all the time I'm thinking I should've put some plastic down." That does get your attention.

Picture, if you will, Carl Hiaasen, Robert Parker, Raymond Chandler, and Jim Thompson all rolled into one and you have a fair approximation of Victor Gishler's Gun Monkeys. Caught in the middle of a war for control of Orlando's lucrative crime trade, Charlie Swift, enforcer for an aging mobster who is being forced out by Beggar Johnson is no longer quite sure of whom to trust. He comes into possession of a set of ledgers that document how money has been laundered through the system and now the FBI is after show more him too.

Violence, sex, total amorality, yet we still root for Charlie. And he's very, very loyal.

I immediately bought and downloaded Gishler's other books to my nook. show less

This is my first Gischler. I'm under the impression that his fans tend to be zealots, the type who own all his books and insist he's the core genius for contemporary crime. Authors like that generally leave a love-em-or-hate-em wake, but I was pleased to find that there's little to object to in Gun Monkeys.

I love dark and cynical. I'm not a huge fan of funny, but I especially hate funny and cynical. But VG's humor struck me as surprisingly sweet and entirely palatable, despite the body count (which includes lots of cops) and flexible moral center.

Extra kudos to VG for writing a more-than-decent hardboiled romantic relationship. Don't know why that should be so damn hard to do, but they're generally so lopsided and uninteresting they'd show more be better off left out...but I love taxidermist Marcie. Actually I was pretty fond of all the characters: VG's good at creating fully-realized people even while sticking to tried-and-true types like the avuncular boss and the dumb muscle and the jaded waitress.

Might just have to read another one. show less

If you are looking for a fast-paced, hardboiled crime novel that is filled with cover to cover action, you are not going to find anything better than this. It's a mix of Goodfellas with pulp noir elements and features the misadventures of a gun monkey, Charlie Swift, caught in the middle of a battle between two warring factions in Orlando.

But what's really incredible about this book is the voice it's told in. It is told in a matter of fact tone that just draws you in.

This book has more gunfire and bodies wrapped in plastic and and all out battles than almost any other book. What happens when the crime boss you're working for and who you sit around playing Monopoly with while the money drops come in disappears, your other gun monkeys are show more taken out one by one, an army of trained killers and FBI agents are on your tail, and you have to figure out who gave you up. show less

Extremely violent noir novel but it never alienates you as even though lead character, Charlie Swift, is muscle for the local mob in Orlando with all that entails he still comes across as a likeable character as he wants to find his boss who's disappeared, get his kid brother to go to university rather than follow home into a life of crime, protect his mother and new girlfriend - all this while avoiding the FBI, corrupt ex-FBI agents and the muscle sent in by the big mob boss in Florida to clean house in Orlando. How he manages to make a girlfriend of a woman who he first meets when he shows up at her door asking her to identify the decapitated body of her ex-husband that he happens to have in the trunk of his car is anyone's guess. show more That is the relatively low key introduction and the body counts rises steeply as the book progresses so avoid if squeamish but otherwise if you're a fan of crime or detective fiction this one is worth picking up. show less

Hard to believe this was Victor Gischler's first novel. The most fun I've had since reading early Elmore Leonard -- not quite caper, not quite noir, somewhere in-between. High body count, and a helluva lot of fun! Taxidermy takes on a new twist.