Street Level

Duncan Sloan #1

by Bob Truluck

Winner of the 1999 St. Martin's Press/ PWA Award for Best First Private Eye Novel

When we meet private detective Duncan Sloan he's just handed back a five thousand-dollar check meant as advance payment on a job. The wealthy prospective client wants Sloan to find a woman with an eyeball tattooed on her bottom. All he knows is the tattoo, that she's very young, white and probably somewhere in or near Orlando, Florida, Sloan's hometown. Thanks but no thanks; that's not enough. But when the five grand reappears in Sloan's mailbox, he uses it for a Costa Rican vacation and never mind the job.

Pike, however tracks him down. When he explains the assignment, Sloan finds it bizarre enough to say "yes." Isaac Pike is the only son of a top-ranked tycoon. He is also gay. Because he genuinely wants to be a father, he has deposited sperm with a reputable clinic while he searches for a suitable mother. But a paroled convict working at the clinic steals the sperm, impregnates a teenager with it, and blackmails Pike - send money or we abort the child.

Although Pike's idea of a suitable mother is not quite a waif from an Orlando trailer park, he is decent enough to be genuinely concerned about both mother and child.

Sloan pursues the thief and his buddies and, he hopes, the girl, through the Florida city's sad neighborhoods and outlying cheap motels, calling on his drug-enhanced informers and a contact in the police. Getting closer brings him to the mangled bodies of the young mother-to-be's relatives, and closer to his own danger as well. On he goes -- Duncan Sloan may be a reluctant detective, but when he's wound up he's hard to stop.

Street Level is Bob Truluck's first novel. It was chosen as the Best First Private Eye Novel of 1999 in the contest sponsored by Private Eye Writers of America and St. Martin's Press.

Genres: Mystery Thriller

256 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 2000

About the author

Bob Truluck, suspected pop-noirist, resides in Orlando where he lives life to the fullest with his wife and ardent supporter, Leslie. Truluck has been nominated for some good stuff and has actually garnered a couple of nice looking awards. His influences would include Raymond Chandler, Elmore Leonard, Charles Willeford, Nathan Heard and James Crumley, but not necessarily in that order. Bob has no favorite color or lucky number and will eat most anything but rutabaga.

Reviews

[Mikel Pfeiffer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ending my noir November with Street Level, a modern day noir (well, 1999 anyway). Duncan Sloan is the detective, Isaac Pike is his client. He's hired to find the woman carrying his baby. There's more to it than that but not as much as I usually get from these twisty noirs. There's a string of characters that come into play, maybe too many, I could have used more time with fewer characters. The story, as the title suggests, is very Street Level, the criminals aren't very smart and they don't have much up their sleeve. I wanted more meat in this story, maybe less action. There's lot of fighting, gun play, killing and even some torture but Truluck manages to do it without being too graphic. The ending is pretty tight, the last twist that usually comes in a book like this isn't there but maybe that was the twist.

[Rory Costello · Rating 4 out of 5]

After reading Bob Truluck's "Flat White" -- and enjoying it -- I wanted to go back to the start of his Duncan Sloan series. I liked this one just as much and expect to get to the others too. The wisecracking private eye can be difficult to pull off. For example, Fletch (especially the smarmy movie version) gave me a pain. But Truluck's off-kilter sensibility makes Sloan different, engaging, and genuinely funny. Sloan also recognizes when he's being not so funny, which makes it work too.

Truluck set up a good story line here, but it's the secondary characters whom I really relish -- especially Booker and Raleigh. Their mock-antagonistic dialogues with Sloan are superb.

[Stacey Adams · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not necessarily a likeable main character but interesting and funny. A private eye (without a license to practice) is hired by a wealthy gay man who has had his semen stolen. An unscrupulous man took it and now his girlfriend is carrying the man's child...and they are asking for money. While the story was compelling I found too many characters to keep track of and was lost at times. There are a horrible group that's also after this pregnant girl and doing terrible things to people surrounding her trying to get information. It's brutal. Duncan Sloan's job is to save her before this other group gets to her..luckily he has many resources and "friends" to help him. Twists and turns make the story interesting and it pulls you along. I began to care about this girl and the child she was carrying. I wanted the father to be able to be a father. He was likeable and being taken advantage of. I wanted him to win.

[Jeff · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good PI Novel, enjoyed it.

[Marissa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Was confusing & hard to follow in some spots. The ending was good.

[Maddy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Isaac Pike is a rich gay guy who has a yearning to be a father, possibly as some sort of retribution for everything his own father was not. He makes a deposit at the local sperm bank, which is promptly stolen and used to impregnate a young girl who is a topless bar dancer. The thieves have taken the girl and are now blackmailing Pike and threatening to perform an abortion if he doesn’t pay up.

Not knowing what to do, Pike hires a private investigator by the name of Duncan Sloan. Sloan has street smarts, but that’s not enough to stop the villains from killing a lot of people. Sloan is willing to work with whoever he can find to help him, whether it be a stubborn cop or a redneck father. He spends most of the book greasing the palms of everyone he meets in a quest for information. After some nasty double dealing and a few more dead bodies, the book comes to an overly saccharine conclusion.

This book really didn’t have any special appeal for me. I was not involved with the characters. The book felt very self-conscious to me, as though the author were trying to write to the wise guy private eye formula. Sloan just never came to life, and I wasn’t involved or interested in the outcome of the events in the story. The setting was Orlando, but the book could have taken place in any low rent district. On the plus side, the plot is nicely complex and the dialog well rendered. The book has been nominated for several awards, but I fail to see why.

[J.T. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bob Truluck’s first novel is a knockout. It’s fast, appropriately furious when it needs to be, but with a lot of heart underneath the hardboiled surface. Truluck has a flair for the oddball vernacular, but he keeps it grounded. The plot and characters go to places you don’t expect, but the complexities never get in the way of the enjoyment of the read: they underline and enhance it. Highly recommended.

[Richard · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very good, but I had a hard time getting into the author's style of writing. But by 3/4 of the way in - it was a great read.

[Beth · Rating 2 out of 5]

Private eye in Orlando.

[John Stanley · Rating 4 out of 5]

I just found a new author! This is private detective/tough guy to the max. A great story, action, pulp fiction style writing (although maybe tries a bit too hard at times), just lots of fun. I'll definitely read more of Truluck's stuff - at least the Duncan Sloane character.