Pierce Hitler, Dada Detective

If you crave logical, tightly plotted and realistically gritty crime fiction, wow, are you in the wrong place! Pierce Hitler is a one-eyed, slovenly and not precisely human private dick whose bizarrely random methods rely more on ridiculous chance than on anything resembling professionalism. The six stories in this 20,000-word collection are absurdly amusing, surrealistically strange and delightfully dadaesque. If Dashiell Hammett received a blow to the head with a pipe wrench, if Raymond Chandler had a brain parasite or if James M. Cain got an ice-pick lobotomy, they may have ended up writing tales like these. Or they may have shaved off all of their body hair and become circus acrobats. Hard to say, really. In an oddly touching and anecdote-filled afterword, Dawson recalls the legendary personage who inspired these deranged diversions: one-of-a-kind fellow writer Pierce Askegren.