Friday Fiction: Pete Dexter

--by Hanje Richards

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Pete Dexter began his writing career working for The Palm Beach Post, but quit in 1972 because the paper’s owners forced the editorial page editor to endorse Richard Nixon over George McGovern.
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Later, he worked as a columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News, the Sacramento Bee, and syndicated to many newspapers such as the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
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Dexter began writing fiction after a life-changing incident in 1981, in which thirty drunk Philadelphians, armed with baseball bats, beat him severely because they were upset by a column he had written about a drug-deal-gone-wrong murder. As a result of this beating, Dexter was hospitalized with several injuries, including a broken back, pelvic bone, brain damage, and dental devastation.
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Deadwood - Legendary gunman Wild Bill Hickcock and his friend Charlie Utter have come to the Black Hills town of Deadwood fresh from Cheyenne, fleeing an ungrateful populace. Bill, aging and sick but still able to best any man in a fair gunfight, just wants to be left alone to drink and play cards. But in this town of played-out miners, bounty hunters, upstairs girls, Chinese immigrants, and various other entrepreneurs and miscreants, he finds himself pursued by a vicious sheriff, a perverse whore man bent on revenge, and a besotted Calamity Jane. Fueled by liquor, sex, and violence, this is the real Wild West, unlike anything portrayed in the dime novels that first told its story.
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Paperboy - The sun was rising over Moat County, Florida, when Sheriff Thurmond Call was found on the highway, gutted like an alligator. A local redneck was tried, sentenced, and set to fry.
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Then Ward James, hotshot investigative reporter for the Miami Times, returns to his rural hometown with a death row femme fatale who promises him the story of the decade. She's armed with explosive evidence, aiming to free -- and meet -- her convicted "fiancé."
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With Ward's disillusioned younger brother Jack as their driver, they barrel down Florida's back roads and seamy places in search of "The Story," racing flat out into a shocking head-on collision between character and fate as truth takes a back seat to headline news...
(1996 Literary Award. PEN Center USA)
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Paris Trout - A respected white citizen of Cotton Point, Georgia, Paris Trout is a shopkeeper, a money-lender, and a murderer of blacks. And his friends, family, and foes do not realize the danger they face in a man who simply will not see his own guilt.
(1988 National Book Award for Fiction)
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Spooner - Warren Spooner was born after a prolonged delivery in a makeshift delivery room in a doctor's office in Milledgeville, Georgia, on the first Saturday of December, 1956. His father died shortly afterward, long before Spooner had even a memory of his face, and was replaced eventually by a once-brilliant young naval officer, Calmer Ottosson, recently court-martialed out of service. This is the story of the lifelong tie between the two men, poles apart, of Spooner's troubled childhood, troubled adolescence, violent and troubled adulthood -- and Calmer Ottosson's inexhaustible patience, undertaking a life-long struggle to salvage his stepson, a man he will never understand.
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Train - Train is a 18-year-old black caddy at an exclusive L.A. country club. He is a golf prodigy, but the year is 1953 and there is no such thing as a black golf prodigy. Nevertheless, Train draws the interest of Miller Packard, a gambler whose smiling, distracted air earned him the nickname “the Mile Away Man.” Packard’s easy manner hides a proclivity for violence, and he remains an enigma to Train even months later when they are winning high stakes matches against hustlers throughout the country. Packard is also drawn to Norah Still, a beautiful woman scarred in a hideous crime, a woman who finds Packard’s tendency toward violence both alluring and frightening. In the ensuing triangular relationship, kindness is never far from cruelty.