Scott Von Doviak
Autor(a) de Charlesgate Confidential
About the Author
Scott Von Doviak is the author of If You Life The Terminator and Hick Flicks: The Rise and Fall of Redneck Cinema. He is a former film critic for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and a current contributor to The A.V. Club. He lives in Austin, Texas.
Image credit: Author Scott Von Doviak at the 2018 Texas Book Festival in Austin, Texas, United States. By Larry D. Moore, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=74185352
Obras por Scott Von Doviak
If You Like The Terminator...: Here Are Over 200 Movies, TV Shows, and Other Oddities That You Will Love (2012) 2 exemplares
Lowdown Road 1 exemplar
Lowdown Road 1 exemplar
Etiquetado
Conhecimento Comum
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Membros
Críticas
PeckerWoodstock
Review of the Titan Books Hard Case Crime paperback edition with reference to the Kindle eBook (both published July 11, 2023).
This is one crazed redneck noir road saga about two cousins who hijack a ton of weed and a taco truck with the goal of selling it all for $1 million dollars at the on-location fan fest of Evel Knievel's Snake River Canyon Jump in September 1974. They end up being pursued by a crooked small town sheriff, the marijuana king-pin, and a hoard of outlaw bikers.
Weed dealer Dean and his cousin prison-parolee Chuck end up in all sorts of unlikely situations along the way including a run-in with a family of bootleggers, a 72-ounce steak eating challenge and a barroom/restaurant brawl. They finally arrive at Snake Canyon, which ends up resembling a scene out of Hieronymus Bosch's Hell panel from The Garden of Earthly Delights.
I read Lowdown Road due to its nomination for Best Paperback Original in the 2024 Edgar Awards.
Soundtrack
This book cries out for a playlist, but no one seems to have assembled it yet. The cousins’ journey from Texas to Idaho is accompanied by songs played on the 8-track like Little Feat's Willin', ZZ Top's Waitin’ For the Bus, Neil Young's Revolution Blues and jukebox and radio plays of songs like Barry White's Can't Get Enough Of Your Love and Eric Clapton's I Shot the Sheriff. Arriving at Snake River Canyon there are live cover band renditions of Santana's Evil Ways, Lynyrd Skynyrd's Sweet Home Alabama and Jimi Hendrix's All Along the Watchtower.
Trivia and Links
Lowdown Road is part of the Hard Case Crime (2004-) series of new works, reprints, and posthumous publications of the pulp and noir crime genre founded by authors Charles Ardai and Max Phillips. GR's Listopia is not complete (as of March 2024) and the most current lists of publication can be found at Wikipedia or the Publisher's own Official Site.
You can watch a documentary about the Snake River Canyon Jump on YouTube here.
Scott Von Doviak's research included reading the article "King of the Goons: Deliver Us From Evel", written about Evel Knievel and the Snake River Canyon Jump by then journalist Joe Eszterhas who wrote for Rolling Stone in 1974 prior to his screenwriting days. The article was written in the so-called "gonzo journalism" style of Hunter S. Thompson so its veracity might be in doubt. The original piece appears to have been completely eradicated from the internet, but an article in the Billings Gazette quotes from it (you have to do a quick screengrab before the paywall comes down) at 40 Years Later, Rolling Stone Article Still Controversial:
Review of the Titan Books Hard Case Crime paperback edition with reference to the Kindle eBook (both published July 11, 2023).
Ahead of a steep downward grade, Chuck noticed the paint had chipped away from the S on a caution sign that had once read SLOW DOWN. “Check it out, cuz,” he said. “We’re on the Lowdown Road.”
“Shit, Chuck. I’ve known that all along.”
This is one crazed redneck noir road saga about two cousins who hijack a ton of weed and a taco truck with the goal of selling it all for $1 million dollars at the on-location fan fest of Evel Knievel's Snake River Canyon Jump in September 1974. They end up being pursued by a crooked small town sheriff, the marijuana king-pin, and a hoard of outlaw bikers.
Weed dealer Dean and his cousin prison-parolee Chuck end up in all sorts of unlikely situations along the way including a run-in with a family of bootleggers, a 72-ounce steak eating challenge and a barroom/restaurant brawl. They finally arrive at Snake Canyon, which ends up resembling a scene out of Hieronymus Bosch's Hell panel from The Garden of Earthly Delights.
I read Lowdown Road due to its nomination for Best Paperback Original in the 2024 Edgar Awards.
Soundtrack
This book cries out for a playlist, but no one seems to have assembled it yet. The cousins’ journey from Texas to Idaho is accompanied by songs played on the 8-track like Little Feat's Willin', ZZ Top's Waitin’ For the Bus, Neil Young's Revolution Blues and jukebox and radio plays of songs like Barry White's Can't Get Enough Of Your Love and Eric Clapton's I Shot the Sheriff. Arriving at Snake River Canyon there are live cover band renditions of Santana's Evil Ways, Lynyrd Skynyrd's Sweet Home Alabama and Jimi Hendrix's All Along the Watchtower.
Trivia and Links
Lowdown Road is part of the Hard Case Crime (2004-) series of new works, reprints, and posthumous publications of the pulp and noir crime genre founded by authors Charles Ardai and Max Phillips. GR's Listopia is not complete (as of March 2024) and the most current lists of publication can be found at Wikipedia or the Publisher's own Official Site.
You can watch a documentary about the Snake River Canyon Jump on YouTube here.
In my research I came across a 1974 Rolling Stone article by Joe Eszterhas called “King of the Goons.” Long before he penned Showgirls, Eszterhas went full gonzo journalist on Knievel’s Snake River Canyon event, making it sound like something out of a Mad Max movie. Having subsequently read more about the event in Leigh Montville’s definitive biography Evel and the quickie paperback Evel Knievel on Tour by Sheldon Saltman (and viewed clips on YouTube and in the 2015 documentary Being Evel), it seems clear that Snake River was indeed a horrific shitshow, but the account in these pages is fictional. - from the author's Afterword.
Scott Von Doviak's research included reading the article "King of the Goons: Deliver Us From Evel", written about Evel Knievel and the Snake River Canyon Jump by then journalist Joe Eszterhas who wrote for Rolling Stone in 1974 prior to his screenwriting days. The article was written in the so-called "gonzo journalism" style of Hunter S. Thompson so its veracity might be in doubt. The original piece appears to have been completely eradicated from the internet, but an article in the Billings Gazette quotes from it (you have to do a quick screengrab before the paywall comes down) at 40 Years Later, Rolling Stone Article Still Controversial:
Weeks have passed since I left the canyons of the snake. ... My pores have finally been freed of that foul dust and my sun-broken lips have finally shed their deadman’s crust. God damn it, though, I can still hear the howls behind that kiddyland picket fence; a jiggling Jello-like wall of flesh is strung around rocks, cottonwoods and sagebrush. Thousands of voices, hypnotic and obsessed, howl at the sun. ‘Eeeeeeeeeeevel. Eeeeeeeeeeeevel. Knieeeeeeeevel!’ Then with a whoosh the beer-bottle-shaped rocket zooms the blue sky and the cheap picket fences come creaking down and swarms of shrieking bodies are hurtling wildly through the dust storms of their own demented creation toward … the abyss, a few hundred feet from them, where the earth stops and there is nothingness, a headlong suicidal swan dive into the vomit green waters of the forsaken Snake.… (mais)
“I tried the Boy Scouts when I was a kid. You know the problem with the Boy Scouts? No girls.”
They are now Dean. They are now.
Awesome song playlist in this book! VERY awesome!!!
The cousins' adventures at the Silver Dollar roadhouse might have been my favorite part of the book! Hilarious! And being chased by THREE separate parties that want them dead, makes for a decent tale! All roads lead to the big event and climax - Evel Knievel and his attempt to jump the Snake Canyon River! And, like Evel, not everyone makes it...
“I was the death waiting for you all along.”… (mais)
They are now Dean. They are now.
Awesome song playlist in this book! VERY awesome!!!
The cousins' adventures at the Silver Dollar roadhouse might have been my favorite part of the book! Hilarious! And being chased by THREE separate parties that want them dead, makes for a decent tale! All roads lead to the big event and climax - Evel Knievel and his attempt to jump the Snake Canyon River! And, like Evel, not everyone makes it...
“I was the death waiting for you all along.”… (mais)
Enjoyable, like the 3 storylines across different time periods, the ‘86 line was a bit bloated
Estatísticas
- Obras
- 8
- Membros
- 151
- Popularidade
- #137,935
- Avaliação
- 4.1
- Críticas
- 6
- ISBN
- 13
- Marcado como favorito
- 1
Review of the Titan Books / Hard Case Crime Kindle eBook edition (September 18, 2018).
I was curious to read Charlesgate Confidential (2018) after discovering Doviak's Lowdown Road (2023). The earlier book has the same sort of extrapolation of historical events as did the new one, which was built around Evel Knievel's Snake River Canyon Jump of 1974. Charlesgate Confidential takes the story of the still unsolved (as of 2024) 1990 art heist at Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and time-shifts it back to 1946. It ties the theft into the historic Charlesgate apartment building and then continues the story with the same building's University dormitory days in 1986 and then further into its luxury condominium apartment days of 2014.
That all tends to spread the story a bit thin and I had a degree of impatience with it. The book cycles continuously through its 3 story lines of 1946 to 1986 to 2014, most of the chapters cutting off at cliffhangers. That sort of writing does build suspense, but the constant time shifts become wearisome over 60 chapters worth of material. All 3 story lines do resolve, sometimes very abruptly, but the endings still verged on Unsatisfactory Ending Alert™ material. I found reading about the historical theft and the paintings themselves to be more fascinating. See below in Trivia and Links for more on that.
See photo at https://buildingsofnewengland.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/img_7888.jpg?w=1024
The Charlesgate apartment hotel in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. Image sourced from Buildings of New England.
I read Charlesgate Confidential from picking it up as a $1.99 Kindle Deal of the Day and after enjoying the same author's recent Lowdown Road (2023).
Trivia and Links
Charlesgate Confidential is part of the Hard Case Crime (2004-) series of new works, reprints, and posthumous publications of the pulp and noir crime genre founded by authors Charles Ardai and Max Phillips. GR's Listopia is not complete (as of March 2024) and the most current lists of publication can be found at Wikipedia or the Publisher's own Official Site.
See painting at https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c8/Vermeer_The_concert.JP...
See painting at https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f3/Rembrandt_Christ_in_th...
The paintings "The Concert" (1664) (above) and "Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee" (1633) (below). Images sourced from Wikipedia (see links below).
The two most famous paintings stolen in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum art heist of 1990 are Vermeer's The Concert and Rembrandt's Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee. The Vermeer is considered to be the most valuable stolen object in the world, valued at $250 Million dollars (Estimated value in 2015).… (mais)