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Clay Blackburn—poet, book scout, and sometimes detective—cruises the mean, and sometimes not so mean, streets of Berkeley. With his accomplices, a soldier of fortune, a “defrocked” FBI agent, and a smooth and sexy con man, he lives a life of bisexual sensation with a little crime solving on the side. As such, Blackburn is a sly, witty, and more or less reliable raconteur of the last thirty something years of the Bay Area’s radical bohemia and bookselling. And in the tradition of Ian Rankin’s Edinburgh, and Jean-Claude Izzo’s Marseilles, bears uncomfortable witness to Berkeley’s descent from countercultural paradise to neoliberal inferno.
This omnibus collection collects the novels
The Chandler Apartments (2002),
The Incredible Double (2010), and the previously unpublished
Mayakovsky's Bugatti (2025), and includes the Blackburn short story “Righteous Kill” (2021).
“Yet the more we get to know him, the more we’re persuaded Blackburn is a Pure Product of Berkeley. He’s not only queer, but a queer sort of all else he declares himself to be: a queer sort of detective, a queer sort of Communist or Anarchist, and beyond—a queer sort of gourmet, ethical thinker, cat owner, and—for certain—a queer sort of narrator.”—Jonathan Lethem, from the Foreword
About the author
Owen Hill is the author of three crime novels, two books of short fiction, and many collections of poetry. He coannotated and edited
The Annotated Big Sleep (Vintage Crime), and coedited
Berkeley Noir (Akashic Books). He was a buyer at Moe's Books in Berkeley for many years, and now is a union organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World. He lives in Oakland.
