A new edition of a 1970 classic: The selfish and morally corrupt characters in “The Fools Are on Our Side” by Ross Thomas are unscrupulous and put greed before loyalty.
“The fools are on our side” is our crime tip of the week.
A stay in prison often forces a career change. This is also the case with the first-person narrator Lucifer C. Dye, who botches a secret service operation in Hong Kong in the early 1970s and ends up in prison there. After three months he is ransomed and can return home to San Francisco, but after his exposure he can no longer be used as a US spy.
Dye doesn’t trust anyone he doesn’t link himself
This is where the eccentric self-made man Victor Orcutt comes in with his shady but seemingly lucrative job offer: In the (fictional) small town of Swankerton on the Texas Gulf Coast, Orcutt wants to use Dye’s know-how to raise the local corruption to a higher level through targeted infiltration and intrigue and make a lot of money in the process. A rough ex-police chief and a former call girl become Dye’s accomplices – even though he doesn’t trust anyone he doesn’t liaise with himself. Dye disguises his general apathy as nonchalance, gains the trust of a local politician supported by the mafia and twists Orcutt’s plan to his own advantage, finally getting away with it with the help of his former employer.
Ross Thomas: The fools are on our side
Alexander Verlag, 2024, 584 pp., 20 euros
Translated from English by Julian Haefs
The American author Ross Thomas (1926 to 1995) is suspected of having been a spy himself. At least, in his ironic crime and spy stories, he weaves historical facts with insider knowledge from his time as a political advisor, diplomatic correspondent and chief strategist for trade union leaders. He astutely diagnoses a social decline during the Cold War, which he exaggerates into social satire with narrative sophistication.
In “The Fools Are on Our Side,” Ross Thomas guides us through a complex but elegantly structured pole
His selfish and morally corrupt characters in this timeless work from 1970 are unscrupulous and put greed before loyalty. With his straightforward style, Thomas guides the reader through a complex but elegantly structured plot, which he pitches into deliciously evil fun with cleverly placed flashbacks to Dye’s past.
With “The Fools Are on Our Side,” Ross Thomas made it onto our list of the best crime novels in September 2024.
