Ed and Am Hunter #01: The Fabulous Clipjoint

- Blurb -

In the rough edges of 1940s Chicago, the discovery of a corpse in an alleyway isn' t always enough to cause a big stir-especially when the victim is killed in the midst of a night-long bender, caught between barrooms in what appears to be a mugging gone awry. Which is why the police don' t take a huge interest in finding the murderer of Wallace Hunter, a linotype operator who turns up dead after a solitary drinking adventure that led through many of the Loop' s less reputable establishments. But for his teenage son, Ed, and his carny brother, Am, something about Wallace' s death feels fishy, a fact that grows increasingly bothersome when it becomes clear that some of the witnesses aren' t telling the whole story. In order to get to the heart of the matter, they' ll need all the skills Am picked up in the circus life-skills that young Ed will have to pick up on fast. And in the process of discovering the killer, they make another discovery as well: Wallace was a much different man than the father Ed thought he knew. The Edgar Award-winning novel that announced a legendary voice in crime fiction, The Fabulous Clipjoint is the first in Fredric Brown' s long-running Ed & Am Hunter series. The book' s memorable mixture of a hardboiled mystery with an urban coming of age narrative remains fresh to this day.