Review by C.J. Bunce
Take the supporting characters and grimier characters from Smokey and the Bandit, Charley Varrick, and The Getaway, and put them together with some of the more colorful types from Silver Streak and The Blues Brothers and you might arrive at Scott Von Doviak’s Lowdown Road, the latest novel from Hard Case Crime and a finalist for the 2024 Edgar Award. Headed up by a pair of “good old boys”–not really like amiable cousins Bo and Luke Duke from the 1980s The Dukes of Hazzard, these guys are the real thing as bad guys go. On the run for killing a cop in San Marcos, Texas, they are heading to Twin Falls, Idaho, to sell a million dollars in stollen dope at Evel Knievel’s real-life, infamous canyon jump attempt in 1974. But it’s the people on their tail that really make the story feel like you’re watching a vintage movie of the Billy Jack era.
You can almost see the flickering, scratched film quality on the screen itself, as cousins Chuck and Dean take readers on a time travel trip through the back of the back woods of 1970s pop culture. It’s not a car chase movie, but the antics of the players in Cannonball Run (itself a parody of the decade of highway action movies) come through loud and clear. The crime is secondary to the humor of it all, especially the bumbling guys after the cousins. That includes the sheriff boss of the deputy that was killed, who is more Buford T. Justice than Buford Pusser, although Tony Stella’s fun painted cover for the book has him looking like Jack Elam (the cousins look like a young Jerry Reed and Dennis Weaver, one of the guys’ many “conquests” on the journey appear to be a Sheree North type, and the angry drug dealer whose stash was stolen is a cross of Samuel L. Jackson and Richard Roundtree).
Despite scenes reminiscent of contemporary films like Easy Rider, the pop culture is more superficial, like in grindhouse fare. Von Doviak passes up some opportunities to lean even more into the era, but that’s probably for a different book. I couldn’t help thinking it would have been more fun–and more realistic for these two goofs–for them to be listening to more obscure, bad songs on their 8-tracks than bands now looked back on as cool. The author does include Casey Kasem’s Top 40 radio show forever documenting it all, and he covers all the obvious references, like one of the cousins reads a hardcover copy of Jaws (the popular paperback everyone had didn’t arrive until 1975), they talk about The Six Million Dollar Man, about ABC’s Wide World of Sports covering Knievel’s jump, and one cousin goes off to watch some vintage B-movies at a drive-in.
But the best parts call back to minor scenes in 1970s movies, the minor characters of Stir Crazy, the bad cops of the Dirty Harry series, and biker gangs from the genre. It’s definitely like watching a B-movie from the 1970s that you somehow overlooked. Which is exactly what a reader wants if he pulled a book with this cover and title off the shelf at his local Barnes & Noble. (And fair warning: like watching any anti-hero movie of the era, figure you’ll need to leave your P.C. credentials at the door if you want to enjoy this book at all (or the genre, for that matter)).
You could see room for more stupid goofiness of the cousins, less philosophizing about their place in time, which may have made this brand of criminal feel more realistic, but it’s also the kind of tale that could be in Quentin Tarantino’s twisted fairy tale universe, characters who would have gotten along with those in Pulp Fiction and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
Loads of nostalgia and fun, a bit of the vibe of the Quarry and early Nolan novels of Max Allan Collins, but grimier with some sleazy bits typical of pulp novels of the era, Lowdown Road will appeal to fans of action novels of 50 years ago and the library of modern crime books from Hard Case Crime. It’s available in paperback, audio, and eBook here at Amazon.
