cover image White Leg

White Leg

Max Martinez. Arte Publico Press, $19.95 (254pp) ISBN 978-1-55885-098-9

While his writing style here echoes Jim Thompson's almost to the point of mimicry, Martinez generates enough suspense in his second novel (after Schoolland, 1988) to make it a thoroughly enjoyable walk on the wild side. Gil Blue, 32, is the hard-boiled narrator, a blue-collar worker in tiny White Leg, Tex., who turns to small-time robbery to meet the expensive tastes of his young wife, Hildy, after the local job market heads south. Gil's luck goes from bad to worse when a Texas Ranger walks in on him as he's robbing a convenience store. Determined to stay out of jail, Gil kills the cop, the store clerk and a young Mexican couple. As the FBI flocks to White Leg, the outlaw discovers that his philandering wife is involved in an elaborate scheme to snatch the grandson of the town patriarch and use him for blackmail. Martinez's account of the convenience store robberies is pedestrian, but the scenes that depict the unraveling of the kidnapping are tight and well crafted, full of the sort of vintage plot twists that make Thompson's lurid prose so compelling. Despite its stylistic echoes, this tough tale marks Martinez as a crime writer to watch. (Mar.)