Introducing Robert Ferrigno

After Raymond Chandler's death in 1959, the mantle of chief chronicler of crime in Southern California was passed on to Ross MacDonald. When he reached his final deadline, it hovered between a number of hopefuls: Walter Mosley, Michael Connelly, Robert Crais. Now, Robert Ferrigno is the latest to pick it up and perhaps he should hang on to it too. The author of seven superb thrillers set in the infernal paradise of California, including the latest, Scavenger Hunt, Ferrigno is a figure with a past so colourful, he might well have stepped from the pages of one of his books.

According to his website, when he was growing up in Florida, he spent carefree days 'cutting secret passages through the palmetto thickets with a machete and occasionally burning down those palmettos for the simple pleasure of seeing the fire trucks arrive, sirens blaring.' Well, it beats collecting stamps. A professional gambler for five years, he used his stake to start a punk rock mag called The Rocket, which led to a job as features writer on daily paper in Southern California. Jimmy Gage, the protagonist in Scavenger Hunt and Flinch, is a journalist and a line in his CV reveals that he 'played war games in the Mojave with a bunch of gun nuts', which highly amusing activity Ferrigno himself followed for a while. In a recent interview, he memorably described these 'nuts' as people who indulged in 'sharpening their knives on the drive out to the desert, face paint and full-auto weaponry, sleeping on the ground in 40 degree weather with no sleeping bag, no tent, no tarp, running a mock interrogation camp, standing naked in snow, pouring water up each other's noses to get them to reveal supposed military secrets…kind of like Hannibal Lecter goes to boy scout camp'.

His first novel, The Horse Latitudes , was published in 1990 and, like his next three books, is currently out of print. Its hero, Danny, is a guy with a problem in that he's a former dope dealer whose ex-wife has vanished, leaving behind a blood-spattered corpse in her luxury home. Among the cast of grotesques are a pair of steroid-popping body builders who are long on brawn but short on brains and their boss, a pharmacologist and big-game hunter who's also hunting the secret of eternal youth. Gracing the various cops (most of them bad) is Detective Jane Holt, later to take Jimmy into her own special kind of protective custody in Flinch.

In 1993, he followed up his illustrious debut with The Cheshire Moon , a lurid tale about Quinn, a writer who teams up with the beautiful and sultry photographer Jen Takamura to investigate his friend's suspicious suicide. A former investigative reporter who was burned by a source two years ago, Quinn is certain his friend was murdered and sets out to track down the killer somewhere among the decadent streets of Hollywood. In his search, he comes across a pair of lethal sociopaths and a talk show hostess with a corrupt senator for a husband and a psychotic ex-football player for a bodyguard. Only in LA…Quinn returns in Dead Man's Dance where he is probing the death of his stepfather, a judge named Teddy Krammerson, who was apparently killed by a gang of Skinhead Neo-Nazis bent on revenge following a stiff sentence for one of their members. Quinn's suspicions are aroused by the surprising appearance of a figure from his past, Joe 'Steps' Sarducci, a character who was his boyhood idol and Teddy's best friend. As he looks further into Teddy's murder, he opens a can of worms with a sell by date that's thirty years old and discovers that two of these worms are a pair of vicious lunatics, possibly the author's most demented duo to date. The flashback sequences covering Teddy's and Joe's past, a rare excursion from the present in Ferrigno's books, works brilliantly.

In Dead Silent , he takes a break from journalism and picks up on the beat of the LA music scene. Quaintly-named thrash band the Plague Dogs are basking in the success of a gold single when they take the traditional showbiz route of splitting up on tour. Frontman Nick Carbonne spends the next seventeen years hovering around the edges of the music scene, producing acts such as OJ's Knife (a very sharp combo) and marrying Sharon, a lawyer. The reappearance of his old band member, Perry Estridge, triggers off memories and dashed dreams of stardom for Nick. Returning from a party with Perry's foxy girlfriend Alison, Nick discovers his friend and Sharon are both dead. It turns out that Perry and Alison were running a blackmail scam where Alison would phone people up, tape the ensuing telephone sex and then sell the tapes to the highest bidder. Accidentally listening in to someone getting beaten to death seems to have resulted in a permanently broken connection for Perry and Sharon and Nick and Alison could be next on the line. Much mayhem follows and the usual lurid losers, lawbreakers and life-takers proliferate.

Ferrigno's next book, Heartbreaker was something of a breakthrough and, unlike the rest of his work, opens in Florida. After drug dealer Junior kills undercover cop Val Duran's partner, Val leaves the sunshine state and heads for California. Here, he earns his living as a stuntman for low budget movies and falls in love with Kyle Abbott, a beautiful marine biologist from a wealthy, but radically dysfunctional family. Soon he's caught between Kyle's evil half-brother Kilo, murderously keen to get his hands on the family fortune and the ever-bloodthirsty Junior, who now knows he was a cop. Ferrigno turns up the heat till the pace reaches (hard)-boiling point leaving the novel scorched black - and that's black as in 'noir'.

Set, like his five previous novels in a garishly depicted Los Angeles, Flinch introduces us to Jimmy Gage, a Quinn-like character who is a journalist. He's been sent a letter by someone professing to be a killer called 'The Eggman', who's claiming responsibility for six seemingly unrelated murders. The police think the note is a hoax but Detective Jane Holt, last seen eleven years earlier in The Horse Latitudes , feels otherwise. Jimmy is a character with a rather shaky legal history and at the onset of the book, has just returned to California after having fled to Europe to avoid some big trouble, leaving behind his girlfriend Olivia in the process. Back in Los Angeles, he discovers that Olivia has married his brother Jonathan, a successful plastic surgeon and a man who manipulates those around him as skilfully as he performs his sundry nips and tucks on all that imperfect and malleable flesh. Taking sibling rivalry to new heights (or depths), Jimmy and Jonathan grew up playing a game called Flinch, where the object is to remain perfectly still while your brother shoves a large weapon near your face and/or privates, a distraction that, even now, they continue to metaphorically indulge in.

A substantial sub-plot involving a deliciously evil villain called Macklen and his enormous henchman Great White (who were actually the reason Jimmy fled to Europe and who are now in pursuit of two of his closest friends) provides a strikingly effective counterpoint to the book's main theme. This itself takes on a new slant when Holt is taken off the Eggman case and Jimmy develops an increasing suspicion that the killer might be Jonathan. Naturally, his motives for suspecting his brother are highly dubious, based as they are on his still smouldering desire for Olivia and his deep-rooted fraternal resentment. Macklen and Great White are seeking revenge for the act of lunatic violence and retribution perpetrated by an unknown assailant, but actually meted out by Jimmy, and they're getting closer to him all the time. Holt and Jimmy are also developing a growing mutual attraction that could prove to be fateful or perhaps fatal. All Jimmy has to do is find out if Jonathan is the killer, stop Macklen and Great White from finally figuring out that the one they want is him and stay alive long enough to enjoy Detective Holt's delightfully individual take on the good cop/bad cop routine. The book concludes with an explosive climax (in more ways than one), but is sufficiently open-ended to promise a sequel in the near future. Just so long as we behave.

Luckily for us, Ferrigno has kept his promise and the new novel, Scavenger Hunt, sees the return of Jimmy Gage, who's still knocking out hot copy for magazine called SLAP, a rag owned by an eccentric Italian millionaire named Nino Napitano. Easily bored, Nino enjoys publishing exposés and hatchet jobs on all the glitterati and showbiz scum that crawl around LA. He also enjoys sending his acolytes on the eponymous scavenger hunts, where young starlets and wannabe celebs cruise the streets of LA looking for all manner of artefacts in order to win the game, including a 'nude group photo at a recognizable LA landmark', which is why we find Jimmy, his friend Rollo and tempting twins Tamra and Tonya, standing naked in front of the Hollywood sign, posing before a polaroid camera. The last item on this particular scavenger hunt list is an Oscar, so the feckless four decide to borrow the statuette from Garrett Walsh, a one-time hotshot writer/director just out of jail, whose career went careering when he was imprisoned for raping and killing a teenage girl, bashing her pretty young head in with one of his two Academy Awards. Walsh tells Jimmy that he's written the perfect script, ominously and prophetically called Fall Guy , and which Jimmy refers to as 'the Most Dangerous Screenplay in Hollywood', which poses the question as to whether he really did kill the girl seven years previously and offers a suspect who might actually have done the dreadful deed.

Intrigued, Jimmy pays another visit to Walsh, only to discover that the director has scripted and shot his last scene and is now consigned to the cutting room floor forever, feeding the increasingly fat fish in the koi pond. Furthermore, the script is missing and Jimmy starts to suspect that maybe Walsh was innocent. Loose strands proliferate, gradually unravelling as Jimmy starts investigating Walsh's murder, and discovering that he was set up by somebody who wanted revenge for something. As the case progresses, and Jimmy turns over more stones, more corpses appear; people who were connected to the framing of Walsh. Multiple slayings, pornography, infidelity, Hollywood celebs who'll stop at nothing to protect, or salvage their reputation, an agency dealing in under age 'performers' and a very sinister ex-cop who goes by the name of Sugar are all masterfully added to the mix, until Jimmy, aided and abedded by his girlfriend, Detective Jane Holt, cracks the case wide open and has to fight for his life, his only weapon the one bit of evidence that'll reveal the murderer's identity! As if all this wasn't enough, Ferrigno has one more surprise in store for us all, and, it's an absolute killer. Scavenger Hunt is a witty, sexy and utterly enthralling mystery from a writer who's just so much better than most of his more celebrated peers, that his relative lack of exposure is, well, a crime.