The Wheelman: A Novel

I've been fortunate during the past few months to discover several excellent writers in the action/suspense/mystery genres, whose work I'd never read before (Don Winslow, Charlie Huston, and Brent Ghelfi), and I'm happy to announce that I'm now adding Duane Swierczynski to my list of must-read authors. These are writers who know how to tell a great story with strong, solid characters in them that you either love or hate, and enough surprises to keep you sitting on the edge of your La-Z-Boy recliner right up till the last page. The Wheelman by Duane Swierczynski is the novel that made me an instant fan of this relatively unknown author. Like Charlie Huston's "Hank Thompson" series, the lead character (Patrick Lennon) in this fast-paced novel quickly discovers just how bad a day can get when one simple mistake causes a bank heist to head south in a big way. Lennon, an Irish Mick who came over to the States as a child, is a wheelman, who drives for crews that take down banks. He's probably the best wheelman in the business and never enters an unknown situation that he can't get out of. The clock starts ticking for Lennon in downtown Philadelphia at a Wachovia Bank the moment Holden and Bling find themselves trapped inside a bank's vestibule with $650,000.00 in stolen funds, and unable to get out before the police arrive. Lennon knows exactly what to do to save his cohorts and hammers the gas petal of the getaway car and then drives the rear end of it straight into the bank's entrance, shattering the glass door and enabling the two robbers to get out through a gap and into the car for the getaway. Then, as Lennon, floors the accelerator and shoots the car across the street to their escape route, a lady with a baby carriage magically appears in front of him. To suddenly stop means a long prison term for all three of the men in the car, so Lennon hits the lady, but just manages to miss the carriage, giving the child a chance at life. Lennon now only has a short span of time to make it to a long-term parking lot several blocks away where they can exchange cars and get the hell-out-of-Dodge before the city's law enforcement agencies converge on them like hound dogs cornering a fox. They temporarily leave the money in the trunk of the getaway car, hop into a different vehicle that the police won't be looking for, and hightail it to the airport where the three of them have tickets for safer destinations. Unfortunately, they never make it as a double cross shifts into play and the Russian and Italian Mafia become involved. That's when Lennon's day goes from bad to worse and he has to become a stone-cold killer in order to stay alive long enough to retrieve the money and get out of the city, all in one piece. Before it's over, Lennon will be beat up, tortured, shot, almost blown up in a fireball, have acid poured down his throat, lose someone he loves, find himself betrayed more than once, and stuffed down the same pipe twice as the bad guys try to do away with his body. And, all this does is piss him off to no degree! What the author has created here is a rollercoaster ride of pure adrenaline that literally shakes the brain cells in one's head as the reader attempts to keep pace with the multitude of surprises that zap the lead character every time he turns around to take a quick breath. I don't think it would be a far cry to say that before the story is finished, Lennon finds himself in a hell with no exit doors and a clearer understanding that no one who participates in a life of crime can be trusted, even if that person is your closest friend. Another understanding that comes through for our Irish wheelman is that anyone can be killed, and in this novel, the body keeps growing right to the very end. Along with the above, the characters of Katie, Saugherty, Wilcoxson, Fieuchevsky, and Perelli, as well as many others, are all colorfully drawn with their own distinct personalities that seem to come alive on the written page in a way that reminds you of a bad dream that stays in the back of your memory long after daylight has seeped through the curtains. The ending, however, leaves you with your mouth hanging over, saying to yourself, "Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Let's back up. This can't be happening!" But, it is happening, and the author pulls no punches in leaving you with an ending that shocks and delivers the goods in a way that few books do. Clearly, The Wheelman is the type of novel with regards to sheer craftsmanship and undeniable talent that every beginning author dreams of writing, and Duane Swierczynski has clearly hit a home run right out of the park his first time at bat. If you enjoy reading top-of-the-line crime fiction like Richard Stark and Max Allan Collins, then this is the book to pick up. After that, you'll want to get the author's other two novels, The Blonde and Severance Package. Happy reading!

THE WHEELMAN is an excellent down-and-dirty crime thriller that explodes into action from the opening pages. Lennon comes across as an anti-hero that could be anybody. After the bank robbery in Philly goes sour, Lennon's just a guy looking to square the deal and get his money back. Unfortunately, he's been set up six ways from Sunday and is being chased by a crooked ex-cop who doesn't mind getting bloody, the Philadelphia Italian mob, and the Russian mafia who are looking to settle a blood score. Duane Swierczynski delivers a full tilt boogie of a novel with THE WHEELMAN. An editor-in-chief of the "Philiadelphia City Paper" and author of the non-fiction book about bank robberies, THIS HERE'S A STICK-UP, Swierczynski already has another novel coming out, THE BLONDE. The book features over-the-top action and tough-guy talk aplenty. It has has several characters and short, punchy chapters. The geography of the Philly area comes alive on the pages, and the characters -- though featured to the extreme in some cases -- come across as real. The thing that kept me reading the whole way through was the sheer frentic pacing, the way everything invariably kept getting worse and worse. But the large cast of characters sometimes overshadowed the plot and the pacing. I sometimes stumbled over who was who, and whether they were for or against Lennon at the moment. The ending wasn't what I expected either. It came together too quickly, and not in the manner I wanted. This is a great little book (only 224 pages) that will keep you nailed to the pages and is remindful of Richard Stark's Parker books as well as many film noir movies. I've already got THE BLONDE pre-ordered and want to see how Swierczynski delivers on his fiction career.

Swierczynski has put together a fun, fast paced crime novel, but the Kindle edition, in addition to being priced nearly as high as the print edition, practically screams out for proofreading. Every chapter shares a formatting error in connection to what I can only assume were intended to be drop capitals. Spelling errors abound -- errors that any spellchecker program should catch. The proofreading issues are occasionally so prevalent within a given chapter as to actually distract from the book. And that's a shame, because the pace is the book's greatest strength and it's diluted by the distractions. The most effective "gimmick" is the fact that the main character, Lennon, is mute. While Lennon's thoughts are directly revealed to the reader from time to time, he also appears in scenes in which he is not the viewpoint character, and his lack of dialog in those scenes emphasizes the shift in POV to a greater extent than in many novels. The breakneck pace may contribute to the novel's greatest (non-formatting related) weakness, however, which is its rather unsatisfying ending. Two hundred plus pages of very effective tension-building creates high expectations for the climax, but Swierczynski just doesn't deliver. The events stop more than they end. On the other hand, that very abruptness mitigates the impact of the weak ending, because The Wheelman is just so much fun right up until the ending, which is to say right up until the last few pages.

This one starts about 100mph and doesn't let up much. Being a fan of Hammett, I liked how the lead character is the kind that can be knocked down, over and over, and keeps on getting back up. I love Swierzinski's writing style. Very noir, but with modern gore. If you can't stand to read about someone getting beaten, you'll probably cringe a lot reading this. People get truly mangled, over and over. Duane is very good at what he does. He doesn't just write the same story over and over. Some of his books are slow burners that grow (Secret Dead Men), others are nitro-injected straight-thru, like this one. He usually has enough characters that keeping a score can at times be handy. Some reviewers disliked the ending. I loved it. Were I to write the screenplay, I'd title it "Die Laughing".

Lennon is the wheelman - a career criminal with no regrets, living on the edge, doing what he does best - driving the getaway car in bank robberies. He is no small time punk, but a true professional, refining his craft with no less dedication or diligence than a surgeon or a lawyer. Lennon meticulously plans each caper, staking the city, plotting the routes, mapping his strategy like a battlefield general. So Lennon is a thug, but he is committed, even passionate in his trade. Author Duane Swierczynski rips this, his first novel, with a similar passion. His prose is rough, jolting, uneven, and jarring, reminiscent of Charlie Huston ("Caught Stealing", Six Bad Things"). Exactly what you'd expect if you were going to chronicle a nightmare in the life of a wheelman. And it takes tough prose to capture this vicious tale as Lennon finds himself facing off Philadelphia mobsters and crooked cops, barely surviving refreshingly unique bouts with sewer pipes and propane tanks. While almost cartoonish in the violence of the increasingly savage beatings Lennon endures, this is nonetheless a white-knuckled thrill ride seen from the back seat of a getaway car. With absolutely no social redeeming value to weigh it down, this is the literary equivalent of Mel Gibson's brutal "Payback", a short and sweet little adrenaline rush of a novel that promises a bright future for rookie Swiercznski.

I love the genre and I wanted to like this book more than I did. It was an exciting read, but maybe a little too exciting. The main character was shot, beaten, stabbed, set on fire, kicked, tied up, tied down, burned with acid, blown up, and thrown down a pipe so many times that he should have been dead six times over. My bullsh*t meter went off a few too many times. The story twisted too violently too much. It was just too much of a good thing that left me tired and a little confused. It was nice that the ending was so unpredictable, but introducing apreviously almost unheard of main character in the last few pages to clean everything up and tie up the loose ends seemed a little....cheap and unsatisfying. This really isn't a bad book. It's just not a great book. The anti-heroes of writers like Andrew Vachss and Richard Stark are more fun, more interesting, and more likeable.

I stumbled across this book when a friend recommended it to me. It is a quick read, only about 200 pages so you can read it in a few hours if you're a quick reader and once you start reading you won't want to put this book down. (The same can be said for the sequel to this book "The Blonde") If you are a fan of stark bloody violence, such as you might see in a Quentin Tarantino movie then you will find Duanes books highly entertaining. Like one of the reviewers above said, this book is almost cartoonishly violent (the man writes comic books for a living, so what else would you expect?) yet the strong under currents of humor are a nice change from other crime novels. The main character is almost superhumanly tough and hard to kill. There's a million plot twists and turns that will keep you gleefully entertained and unable to put the book down. In a word, Duanes books are ENTERTAINING! If you like violent movies such as "The Final Destination" movies and the aforementioned Q.T. movies then you will love this book and it's sequel.

Robberies, car chases, hand to hand fighting, narrow escapes...the action is hot and heavy. Your man is a human cyclone of criminal activity and enterprise. Trained and experienced in the ways of the bad guys-- The trouble for me as the reader is the improbable nature of the various scenarios of mayhem. I kept thinking as I read the book, 'ah, no, that's just too bizarrely unlikely...no professional book publisher would let this author get away with it. No, it can't happen that way.' But there it is, page after page of unbelievable scenes like this from page 57: "Lennon should have passed out by now. A gunshot wound and pistol whipping in the trunk of the car...should have sent vital instructions to his brain to shut down already. But no. Lennon stayed painfully conscious, albeit in a thick brain fog, the entire time: across the city's bumpy streets, into a garage, out of the trunk, and onto a thick wooden door which rested on two short metal cabinets." No, its not just me. Is it? Somebody will love this thing I'm sure...maybe its not the wrong book, maybe I'm the wrong reader.?

Synopsis/blurb....... Meet Lennon, a mute Irish getaway driver who has fallen in with the wrong heist team on the wrong day at the wrong bank. Betrayed, his money stolen and his battered carcass left for dead, Lennon is on a one-way mission to find out who is responsible--and to get back his loot. But the robbery has sent a violent ripple effect through the streets of Philadelphia. And now a dirty cop, the Russian and Italian mobs, the mayor's hired gun, and a keyboard player in a college rock band manoeuvre for position as this adrenaline-fuelled novel twists and turns its way toward its explosive conclusion. One thing's for sure: This cast of characters wakes up in a much different world by novel's end--if they wake up at all. About 4 hours of fun reading this in the one sitting on Sunday afternoon. I read this originally back in the late 2000's and rated it a 4 on my own little scoring chart. Selected as my Goodreads Pulp fiction group's monthly read for August, I was initially tempted to give it a miss because of my previous reading. Bu then as the book was available relatively cheaply second hand I thought why not? Glad I did to be honest as second time around it ticked more boxes for me than it managed to a few years ago. Fast and frenetic with an intriguing main character and a decent support cast of double-crossing gangsters, corrupt cops, Russian Mafiya and Italian wise-guys. Horrible people doing horrible things interspersed with mainly "decent" people forced to do horrible things......lovely! It is unlikely that I will enjoy another book as much as this one this month, but hey I live in hope! (But will probably die in despair...) 5 from 5 Obtained second hand from Abe books recently.

Great read and excellent if not surprising ending there's lots of characters in this and at times it was hard to track. Nevertheless fun read. Great procrastination