Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
True-Life Texas? No...But It's Great Fiction, 5 Feb 2002
Read this book while living in London this past fall, when I was pining for any reminder of home (which happens to be Austin, Tex., the locale of the opening scene). It turned out not only to be a little bit of home, but a very good, literate thriller. I can't quite pin down the right author to whom to compare this book; partly, I think, the writing style evokes James Lee Burke, which is high praise indeed. But in the way that the hero is in many respects unlikeable, I'm reminded of George V. Higgins. In the end, it's unique and very worthwhile. Of course, Texas isn't REALLY like that...we all ride horses to work and carry Colt six-shooters on our hip, as you well know.
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1.0 out of 5 stars
A bad guitar solo, 16 Sep 2009
Robbers is the story of Eddie and Ray Bob, out on the lam, rousting through Texas, killing store clerks, offing a nosy cop and fitting in a little casual rape on the way. They pick up failed Beautician Della Street (whose name, identical to 50s TV series Perry Mason's secretary, may be the only intentional joke in the book) and then separate; Eddie goes off with Della, psycho Ray Bob's on his own, for a while at least.
The tale is told in dreary, dead-pan tones, with omniscient ellipses reminiscent of a B-movie screenplay. Sometimes the writer riffs like a bad guitar solo, trying hard to be Chandleresque, but his ear is pure tin, his verbiage stewed, crawling down the page like one of his blood-soaked victims. It is Natural Born Killers without the off-beat charm of Juliet Lewis, Badlands without the brooding intensity of Martin Sheen. Its roots are in the cinema of the tragic, white underclass of America: racist, violent, hillbilly no-brains, fleeing from the law. Sadly, however, the characters are so relentlessly stupid, self-obsessed and motiveless that empathy deserts the reader from the first blood-bath (on page 6) to the murder of one of the dim-wit duo by the other (on page 354). A terrible waste of a tree.
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~ The Felice Brothers
