This is a great BIG book of short stories, 33 to be exact, all revolving around one subject, crime, if you hadn’t guessed from the title.
The book begins with various different stories on crime, missing people, dead bodies, dingy bars and dodgy deals. The characters change from story to story and this makes each story thrilling and exciting.
After the seventh story the books short stories are all based around boxing for at least the next 12 stories. It can get a bit exhausting reading about boxing fight after boxing fight, crooked heavy weight champions and dodgy bet fixing, Louis L’amour doesn’t show much imagination in these stories as they all feel far to similar from each one to the next.
The last 6 stories are different characters but each story has a recurring theme in it. They all have a big showdown fight when they find the perpetrator, It can get a bit repetitive but its a great, energetic, way to end each story and ties in nicely with the previous theme.
Louis L’amour is a great writer and his stories are pretty fast paced page turners but I think in this collection of stories there just a few too many. I wanted each story to have a different angle and subject.
Its a book for real lovers of crime and, in particular, boxing. As a reader that has not much interest in either of these things, I found, towards the end of the book, it hard to concentrate . I would suggest reading this volume of collected short stories between reading other novels, just keep coming back to it, it’s quite a task to read all in one go.