The Snatch

Nameless Detective #1

by Bill Pronzini

In his first chronicled adventure, the NAMELESS DETECTIVE hires on to handle the ransom payoff in a kidnapping case. Financier Louis Martinetti doesn't trust the police to deal with the man who snatched his 9-year-old son from his military prep school, nor is it clear that he trusts the members of his own household. On the appointed evening, NAMELESS takes a briefcase that contains $300,000 in cash to a secluded location chosen by the kidnapper. Then all hell breaks loose.

Genres: Mystery, Noir, Fiction, Crime, Mystery Thriller, Audiobook, Detective

213 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1971

About the author

Mystery Writers of America Awards "Grand Master" 2008
Shamus Awards Best Novel winner (1999) for Boobytrap
Edgar Awards Best Novel nominee (1998) for A Wasteland of Strangers
Shamus Awards Best Novel nominee (1997) for Sentinels
Shamus Awards "The Eye" (Lifetime achievment award) 1987
Shamus Awards Best Novel winner (1982) for Hoodwink

Married to author Marcia Muller.

Pseudonyms:
Robert Hart Davis (collaboration with Jeffrey M. Wallmann)
Jack Foxx
William Jeffrey (collaboration with Jeffrey M. Wallmann)
Alex Saxon

Reviews

[Bill Kerwin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Having recently finished all of Lawrence Block’s Matt Scudder mysteries, I’ve been searching for another detective with a long-running series of novels. Then one day it occurred to me, why not read what Lawrence Block once called the most underrated detective series?: the Nameless Detective novels of Bill Pronzini.

Why Nameless? Well, some people think its because Pronzini is a native of San Francisco, and his detective—middle-aged, running to fat—is reminiscent of the Continental Op, Dashiell Hammett’s first sleuth, a guy who was nameless too. But apparently the truth is that Pronzini just could seem to decide what to call him, and the fans started to call him “Nameless”. (After more than a score of books, Bill Pronzini did give his dectective a name. He called him “Bill”.)

Nameless is sort of an average guy. He is forty-seven years old, with a bit of a paunch, a three pack a day habit, and a hell of a smoker’s cough. He has a lady friend name Erika who thinks he’s infuriatingly immature, and who can blame her? He is an avid collector of Black Mask and other detective pulps from the ‘30’s, and Erika is convinced his so-called profession is nothing but a hopeless adolescent fantasy:

“You’re a kid dreaming about being a hero, and yet you haven’t got the guts or the flair to go out and be one; you’re too honest and too sensitive and too ethical, too affected by real corruption and real human misery to be the kind of lone-wolf  private eye you’d like to be.

In this first adventure, Nameless is hired to deliver the ransom for millionaire businessman Louis Martinetti’s young son, but things go haywire, Nameless gets himself stabbed, and somebody turns up dead. Martinetti keeps on paying him, though, telling him that he is afraid the kidnapping may be an inside job, and he wants him to find out the facts.

The is an entertaining, well executed mystery. One thing I particularly liked about it is the rapport Nameless has with his old friends on the SF detective squad: natural, believable relationships, without any of the customary smart-mouth sparring.

I would have rated it higher, but like Erika I thought that Nameless was rather naive for his forty-seven years. He sounds like somebody a couple decades younger, like the twenty-seven year old Bill Pronzini who wrote it. Not a big deal, and it turns out Pronzini eventually agreed with me, gradually bringing Nameless’ age closer to his own.

At any rate, The Snatch is a good place to start, and I intend to explore the rest of the series.

[Carla Remy · Rating 4 out of 5]

08/2022

From 1969
A satisfying mystery, the writing and the setting reminding me of Ross MacDonald. Which is definitely a compliment. It wasn't hard to know who the killer was though.

[Damo · Rating 4 out of 5]

We meet the Nameless detective, in this first of the series, as he is walking up the driveway of an impressive mansion where he is to meet with two men. While he is moving towards the front door of the house he gives us an exhaustive description of his surroundings which essentially serves to confirm that here is a guy who takes in everything around him.

He meets a couple of men in the mansion and sets about giving them a thorough description:

Louis Martinetti: tall, granite-hewn, hair and eyes the color of steel, nose strong and wide, the nostrils in a perpetual flare. He was forty-five, if you believed the newspapers, and from a distance he looked maybe ten years younger; you could almost feel the magnetism if the man reaching out at you across the room and I was oddly reminded of an old pulp-magazine hero of the thirties and forties named Doc Savage.

Allan Channing was similarly dressed, but perhaps as sharp a physical contrast to Martinetti as you could imagine. He was big but not fat, with fine thinning hair the color, or non-color, of dust. He had pink cheeks and a soft mouth, and no particular magnetism at all. His eyes were wide and blue and innocent, containing the earnest guilelessness of an inquisitive child.

Both men are self-made millionaires. In the words of Nameless:

they are speculators, angle boys, long-shot and sure-shot gamblers, wheelers and dealers.

The job that is presented to Nameless by the two men appears simple enough.

Martinetti’s son has been kidnapped from his school and unless Martinetti pays a specified sum of money his son’s body will be dumped in the bay. Martinetti has turned to Nameless rather than involve the police. He doesn’t want the detective to investigate the kidnapping but rather, to perform the money drop.

This series came to be known as the Nameless Detective series because of the omission by Pronzini to supply the reader with a name for his detective through the first four books. There is a little bit of creativity that goes into ways of avoiding the question of his name such as the use of a pet name by his girlfriend, etc. It’s a funny thing but I found myself a little surprised that by the time I got to the end of the book I hadn’t really noticed the fact that his name was not mentioned.

By the same token, there is much to learn about Nameless and what makes him tick. The racking cough and failed commitment to give up the cigarettes causing it is merely one example of his fallibility. Another is pointed out in no uncertain terms to Nameless by his girlfriend and this particular “sin” drives straight to the heart of what makes him such a good detective.

There is a brief insight into the background of our detective and how he came to be working as a private detective. As with many detectives he was originally a police officer and had been dedicated to his job. Nameless stuck it out on the police force for 15 years because he believed that the prevention of crime and the interests of justice and the law are of vital and immediate concern. It is a belief that still holds true now that he is a private detective.

Nameless got out of the police force after walking into a house one day to find it covered with blood and a man sitting in the room with a double-edged woodsman’s axe. The scene was too much for him and he says that he could no longer erect the mental defenses required to go back and do the things a cop has to do.

If ever there is a sentence that prepares the reader for some type of disaster it is something like the following: “Except for a few minutes alone in the darkness with three hundred thousand dollars, it would be a cakewalk for me; as long as nothing went wrong , it did not seem to be worth anywhere near the fifteen hundred dollars I was getting for it.” So it is not surprising that the job is far from the cakewalk that is anticipated.

Nameless is based in San Francisco, he is a smoker although the wracking coughs he endures with each cigarette are begging him to reconsider. He is also a collector of pulp magazines and has an impressive collection displayed carefully on the wall of his apartment. Significantly, it would be his love of the pulp fiction genre that would provide him with an important insight in solving a big mystery in this first case.

[Lou · Rating 5 out of 5]

Is he a hero?
Has he got the guts and flair to be a good P.I?
Is he too honest, too sensitive and too ethical?
Is he affected too easily by real corruption and human misery?
Will he find the snatched boy and solve the case?
Only time will tell!
An exquisite novel of pulp noir fiction from a author who is underrated and a masterful writer. The "nameless detective" the main protagonist in this story who really has not been given a name by Bill is a very human P.I who has the only vice of smoking too much, and at least compared to say Matt Scudder Lawrence Block's main P.I character who's vice includes drinking Bourbon, leads quite a clean life so far in this first novel.
He used to be Frisco cop and served some military service. A San Francisco cop for 15 years until he decided to quit and become a P.I.
He finds himself in a case involving a snatched boy for ransom what seems your usual case of kidnapping and money at first becomes a more complexed web.
I loved every page and was hooked from start to finish. You will be wanting more from this P.I the time the case is done with.

This novel was guiltily sitting on my self and not touched for a few years, it is a signed first edition, I will now cherish it even more after loving the novel. It has been out of press for a while and is now available as an ebook.
In the story its quite apparent the author Bill Pronzini as well as his main protagonist share a love for pulp magazines and mystery novels.
Can The Nameless Detective conduct some real good detective work and is he living out his dream now?
The story ends with some real memorable lines.
"I'm no Hero
I'm just a cop
I'm just a man."

"The shelves, which I had constructed of metal wall brackets and varying lengths of darkly laminated wood, were the only things in the apartment I made a special effort to keep in order. They contained something more than five thousand copies of detective and adventure pulp magazines dating from the late twenties through the early fifties, when the pulp market collapsed and died.
I had them segregated by title, chronologically, with the quality items like Black Mask and Dime Detective and Detective Fiction Weekly on the upper shelves, and the lesser ones-seventy-five different titles, twenty-two separate Volume One, Number 1-filling the remainder. I had turned some of them around at various points so that their covers faced into the room; they were pretty lurid, scarlet robes or slouch hats, clutching huge automatics or gleaming daggers; half-nude girls with too red lips screaming in agony or fear or perhaps ecstasy-but I liked the effect they gave that staid rose-papered high-ceilinged room. It made the whole setting seem impressionistic, somehow, like a pop-art display.
I had been collecting pulp magazines for twenty-five years, and it was the one consuming passion I had in life. I had grown up on the fringe of the Mission District during the Depression, in a neighbourhood not good but not bad, not poor but not well-to-do, and every spare nickel and dime I could cadge or even earn went for pulps from the time I was twelve years old. I had stacks of them in the basement storage room of our building, which my mother later gave to the Goodwill without my permission, and I would spend hours in my room or in the basement reading Black Mask and other detective magazines instead of studying"

"I remembered nothing, and I remembered everything.
Vividly brief scenes with no continuity, like film edited and spliced together by a madman. All in floating , surrealistic white and gray, except for the brilliant red colour of blood. And when the reel of film ended, abruptly only the richest and deepest of blackness.
I knew pain.
Even through the blackness, I knew pain.
It raged and seethed inside me. And then, sated on my flesh, it grew still and became
Little more than dull, half-realized throbbings in my stomach and my head. I lay with it, coming out of the velvet midnight, watching the dawn consume the darkness at the edges, and at first I was calm, waiting.
But then the film began again, without warning, and half comatose and half rational, I relived it all and saw the blood, and I was terrified. A voice cried out in rising decibels, and it was my voice, and my hands beat at the air with the frantic flutterings of a wounded bird."

"She kept on with it. She said,"You want to know the real reason you quit the police to open up that agency of yours, the real deep-down reason? I'll tell you: It was and is an obsession to be just like those pulp-magazine detectives and you never would have been satisfied until you tried it. Well, now you've tried it, for ten years you've tried it, and you just don't want to let go, you can't let go. You're living a world that doesn't exist and never did, in an era that's twenty-five years dead. You're a kid dreaming about being a hero, and yet you haven't got the guts or the flair to got out and be one; you're too honest and too sensitive and too ethical, too affected by real corruption and real human misery to be the kind of lone wolf private eye you'd like to be. You're no damned hero, and it's hurts you that you're not, and that's why you won't let go of it. And the whole while you're eating and sleeping and living yesteryear's dream world, to salve your wounded pride you're deluding yourself that you're an anachronism in a real-life world that couldn't care less one way Orr the other. You're nothing but a little boy, and I'm damned if I'll have a little boy in my bed every night of the year. That's the reason I wouldn't marry you; I can't compete with an obsession, I won't compete with it--"

Is this truth this rant from The Nameless Detective's loved one?
Will he still be with her by the end of the novel? Read it and find out!
Review also here.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Review from Badelynge.
The Snatch is a very early Bill Pronzini novel from 1971 and the very first of his long running Nameless Detective series. And it's a very decent beginning. Pronzini may have been just starting out on his longer form career but he'd already gone some way to developing his skills through his short stories, this book being a reworking of one such. Don't be fooled by the pedestrian seeming set up to the plot, what looks like a routine kidnapping and ransom soon manages to throw a few curve balls. It's all cleanly written and constructed, playing to its pulp noir influences, the most commendable aspect being the character development of our unconventional hero. He's a very engaging character, a devotee to the pulps himself which engenders a neat homage within homage dynamic that blurs the boundaries between Pronzini himself and his nameless protagonist. Within the first few pages, Nameless has already compared someone to Doc Savage and greater props to the author for allowing an image of Lester Leith, Erle Stanley Gardener's crafty pulp creation, to jolt Nameless from a blue funk onto a hotter trail. Nameless's obsession with the pulps is a major aspect of the series, in this first book it highlights the cracks in his already crumbling and damaged relationship with his current girlfriend. Her judgement being," I want a man. Not a stubborn and self-deluding adolescent trying to live the life of a fictional hero." This isn't just fan fiction though, Pronzini just happens to be a very fine storyteller, mastering the art of hard-boiled dialogue and first person stream of consciousness that wouldn't sit uncomfortably next to the 30's pulp maestros both he and Nameless idolises.

[Ed · Rating 1 out of 5]

Bill Pronzini is a very prolific author with 40 some odd books in this series. The "Nameless Detective" series is obviously very popular to sustain it for 40 years which is why I wanted to start with book #1. Pronzini's talent as an author is quite evident in his descriptive prose detailing his San Francisco area locals and I liked his "Nameless" detective. My problem with "Snatch" was it's slow pace. How slow was it? It was so slow your 90 year old grandmother bumped her grocery cart into the prose to speed it up! I understand that the story takes place in the 1950's or 1960's I think, but still needs a poke with a cattle prod to get it into another gear. My take anyway....

Life is short and unfortunately, I'll have to pass on the remaining books in this series. That damn James Lee Burke set the standard too high, I guess. Just kidding of course as my never ending book search continues.

[Daniel Sevitt · Rating 3 out of 5]

Slow and steady start to a series I have never read before. Pronzini is highly regarded and I thought I would try to find out why. This is clearly a man who wears his love of the pulps on his sleeve going as far as having out nameless PI collect old magazines. The central kidnapping and murder is actually fairly weak. The detective does a little bit of detecting but only after several clues have walked right up to him and introduced themselves. The denouement is also fairly meh with the baddie realizing the magnitude of his own crimes and having a sobbing breakdown rather than firing the weapon he has pointed at our unarmed narrator and making a run for it.

I may seek out another, but it's also possible that this just isn't really for me.

[John Culuris · Rating 3 out of 5]

I can see the elements that were once innovative but have since been washed smooth by time. It does, however, establish a likable hero well worth following over the next forty-plus years.

[Francis · Rating 4 out of 5]

I figured if I was to ever earn a detective/crime readers merit badge I was going to have to read at least one Pronzini or else I was going to be seriously challenged. So I did.

So, lets cut to the chase. Is he good?

I going to stick my neck out, but not to far, and say unquestionably.

So, What's his detective DNA like?

OK, I'm going say Raymond Chandler and Ross MacDonald.

Why?

Cause, he has that lean muscular prose thing, doesn't waste a lot of words and then all of a sudden, like he's got a lot of pent up writer's angst, he let's loose with an astounding amount of complicated prose like in describing places or things, or expounding on his inner self. You know its that, 'writes like a slumming angel', kind of thing, then, it's back to that terse ('Old Man and the Sea'), kind of thing.

Also his detective, what's his name, is also kind of that quiet, sensitive, loner type, that the women all love but can't seem to understand. Not only that, but he's in it for the right things like justice and decency and he's willing to take a job for a couple of bucks and expenses, if he thinks your straight. And, like Raymond and Ross he's a California boy, but in his case, Northern California and in particular San Francisco. And if there is a better place for a mystery, I don't know where it is? (OK, if you mentioned New Orleans or anywhere in England or Scotland or ..well anyway I like San Francisco cause it's foggy and damp, has lots of row houses and steep hills, smells like the ocean and people have those ice plants that squish when you step on em.) - but that's just me.

And this particular story?

Well pretty good, it's the old rich man's son gets kidnapped and we got to figure who done it before the kid gets hurt kind of thing. Maybe a few too many coincidences and little dumb luck but nobody's perfect. (With the exception of course of Ross MacDonald.)

Anyway, for me to mention him and Ross in the same breath? You know I'm thinking, special kind of guy.

[Rambling Raconteur · Rating 3 out of 5]

Shades of Ross MacDonald and classic pulps like Erle Stanley Gardner. Arthur Lyons updated the PI genre to a slightly higher, darker level with his debut. The San Francisco setting is thoroughly built but not necessarily developed.

[Ronald Wilcox · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent introduction to the character that would have over three dozen books written about him by Pronzini. In this series debut, the Nameless Detective is hired by a rich man to help with the drop of a suitcase of money to help the man get back his kidnapped child. Of course the drop does not go smoothly. Nameless is an interesting protagonist and I am interested in reading more in the series.

[Jim Thomsen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Among the authors of crime fiction who have, over their careers, divided their energies between their series novels and their standalones, the standalones are almost always the better work. I don't know what that should be, but it is. I'm a big fan of Bill Pronzini's BLUE LONESOME and A WASTELAND OF STRANGERS, among others, but his Nameless novels disappoint me almost as much as John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee novels do in comparison to his robust standalones like DEEP LOW TIDE and A FLASH OF GREEN, among others. Or Peter Abrahams, who wrote nearly twenty standout standalones before turning to less challenging but more commercial private-eye-series fare under a pen name.

All you have to do is read the first few pages of THE SNATCH and see that not only is it wholly a product of its time — it was published in 1971 — but it is a a creature of middle age that has aged very, very poorly. In part that's because society has evolved, and in part because it is a middling-at-best examplar of the private-detective novel on its on merits. This first Nameless Detective lacks the retro charms, debatable as they are, of other private-eye series of the era. Not just because of its reductive views of women and wealthy people (McGee and Spenser, among others, have those to spare), but because of its flat, stentorian prose and often dialogue so histrionically pitched it would get laughed out of an episode of a Quinn Martin TV series.

Consider those first few pages. In 1971, novelists must have been so convinced that the very fact that they were able to publish a book means that they were granted automatic command of an audience, for how else can you explain an author who would dare assume a reader wouldn't set down a book after pages of this kind of description? Here's the opening line:

"Tamarack Drive was one of these oak- and elm- and eucalyptus-shaded affairs that are supposed to make you think of rustic country lanes. There were no sidewalks on either side; instead, there were narrow creeks with mica rock beds and a trickle of water and root-tangled red-earth banks."

OK, so maybe it isn't fair to find one sentence too underwhelming, even if it is the first sentence. A few pages in, things dribble on in this vein. And on and on and on:

"The study was considerably longer than it was wide, redwood-paneled, with a beamed ceiling in a kind of diamond design. A large patterned-stone fireplace was set against the far wall, with staggered bookshelves flanking it and filling the near end wall; the mantelpiece and some of the shelves contained heavy hammered copper ewers and demijohns and the like. Next to the entrance doors on the left was a built-in stereo unit, and beyond that a recessed alcove that contained an impressive redwood-and-leather bar. The furnishings themselves were of the same style and materials: three thickly padded chairs, two long, low couches—one facing the fireplace; the other set before a massive oblong desk with a black leather executive’s chair behind it—some heavy tables and a couple of mohair-shaded reading lamps. The desk was placed diagonally before the far left-hand corner, and dark brown damask drapes were drawn over windows extending the same distance on either side, forming a background V for the desk. It was very dark in there, and in spite of the appointments, I had the impression of austerity rather than solid masculine comfort, as if no one ever used this study simply to relax."

If THE SNATCH had been published in 2020, there's no way in hell this book would have landed an agent, let alone a credible publisher. There's simply no undercurrent of pleasurable uncertainty here. Especially disappointing is the wasted opportunity to establish Nameless as a compelling character by allowing him a critical and even satirical take on what he sees. Instead, his subjective observations are as bland as his subjective ones, and as a result passages like these are as flat and flavorless as a Wikipedia entry.

Possibly not forgivable in 1971, and definitely not now, is Nameless' view of women. Every single female he encounters has her breasts described, and their dialogue is unheated at best and beyond histrionic at worst. Singled out for particularly shabby treatment is Nameless' erstwhile girlfriend Erika, who is sent from zero to bitch in about six seconds for the capital crime of not capitulating to A Man Doing What A Man's Gotta Do:

“You want to know the real reason you quit the police force to open up that agency of yours, the real deep-down reason? I’ll tell you: it was and is an obsession to be just like those pulp-magazine detectives and you never would have been satisfied until you’d tried it. Well, now you’ve tried it, for ten years you’ve tried it, and you just don’t want to let go, you can’t let go. You’re living in a world that doesn’t exist and never did, in an era that’s twenty-five-years dead. You’re a kid dreaming about being a hero, and yet you haven’t got the guts or the flair to go out and be one; you’re too honest and too sensitive and too ethical, too affected by real corruption and real human misery to be the kind of lone wolf private eye you’d like to be. You’re no d*mned hero, and it hurts you that you’re not, and that’s why you won’t let go of it. And the whole while you’re eating and sleeping and living yesteryear’s dream world, to salve your wounded pride you’re deluding yourself that you’re an anachronism in a real-life world that couldn’t care less one way or the other. You’re nothing but a little boy, and I’m d*mned if I’ll have a little boy in my bed every night of the year. That’s the reason I wouldn’t and I won’t marry you; I can’t compete with an obsession, I won’t compete with it—”

Later, all Nameless can say in response is what he can't say: "What was the matter with her, what the hell was the matter with her? Why couldn’t she understand, why couldn’t she empathize, didn’t she know how it was with a man and the work he had to do?"

Pronzini is particularly bad with figurative language, too. "I could not see the road below; the mist was an impenetrable pocket, and as thick and clinging and grayly vibratory as gelatin" is a fairly representative example for his occasional efforts to channel Raymond Chandler.

All that said, THE SNATCH does, I guess, do what it sets out to do, nominally: tell a story that makes Nameless look heroic and fill it with enough twists to atone at least in part of its tedious pacing and tepid words. If I read other Nameless novels from time to time, it is only because I am fascinated with the attitudes and anachronisms of the 1970s, and the best way to get their particular flavor is through the fiction of the time. But that's a personal fixation for me, and hardly a recommendation for anyone who isn't me.

[John Bunyan · Rating 3 out of 5]

There tone of the writing is very much in the style of classic hard boiled PIs. But The Nameless Detective, in contrast to Spade and Marlowe, is uncomfortable and awkward with his rich client and just in general softer than those guys. He also enjoys a good relationship with the police.
There is less action than in Chandler or Hammett. Nameless doesn’t really do a lot of investigating. It’s slow in parts.
It’s a fair first book of a series - good enough to try the next one.
The worst aspect is the depiction of women. They are all defined by their breasts. Women with large breasts, narrow waists and full hoops are good, all others are flat-chested and mousey or manly.

[Jason McCracken · Rating 2 out of 5]

A completely by-the-number detective novel with the Nameless Detective being much too moral and perfect for me to continue this series. It doesn't help that peripheral characters are used to reinforce this at every opportunity. Jesus, just read this shit, "You’re too honest and too sensitive and too ethical, too affected by real corruption and real human misery to be the kind of lone wolf private eye you’d like to be."

Also, the final twist is obvious from the beginning and it's just annoying when the kidnapper is finally revealed.

[The Shayne-Train · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was exactly what I wanted it to be. A great noir-esque detective story with a caring protagonist just trying to do his best, for himself and his clients. Flavors of 40's pulp set firmly in a "that time has passed" 70's.

I think I shall be following Nameless through very many more adventures.

[Greg Trosclair · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really tight fast easy read. Snatch is the first nameless Detective novel. It pays homage to so many of the past detectives and yet still stands on its own quite nicely. Loved that the detective is a fan of pulps. The story of a kidnapping gone wrong is great. It is something that could have gone horribly wrong but does not here as Pronzini masterfully sails the seas of an old plot device that he gives a pretty fresh spin to. I think that it plays well even today.

[Maddy · Rating 4 out of 5]

The very first Nameless Detective book, written in 1971

Once upon a time, there was a young author by the name of Bill Pronzini. The year was 1969, and he wrote a short story called “The Snatch” for Alfred Hitchcock Magazine. Unbeknownst to most of the readers of that story, a star was about to be born. In 1971, Pronzini developed the story into a full-length novel of the same name. He introduced a detective who was never referred to by name. And thus, the Nameless Detective was born, a character who has lived and flourished for more than 3 decades.

Louis Martinetti is a successful entrepreneur who is living well in San Francisco. And then he gets the call that any parent would hate—someone showed a note in his handwriting to the head of his son’s school and released the 9-year-old to the strange man. Now the kidnapper is demanding $300,000, no cops involved, the usual. Martinetti decides to hire a private detective to take care of dropping the money, ergo, the Nameless Detective comes into the picture. He enters a scene where there are a lot of situations bubbling beneath the surface. Martinetti’s wife is distraught, but seems to be involved with Louis’ male secretary, Dean Proxmire. Martinetti is short of funds and needs to borrow the money from Alan Channing, a man who has made it a practice of never loaning money and who cares about his cash above the child’s life. Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble.

Nameless goes to make the drop, and as he is leaving the scene, hears a wrenching cry. When he returns to the drop point, he finds a man dying and the cash gone. From that point on, he devotes himself to trying to find the child as well as to figure out who knew enough about what was going on to intercept the money.

The Snatch is the first book in a long-running series, and it is very interesting to see the novelist back at an early stage in his career. Pronzini was 27 years old when he wrote the book. His biographical information states that he is “currently a bachelor…living in Germany”. Even at this early point in his career, Pronzini was a word master. He exhibits his characteristic excellence at describing people and places. His impression of Proxmire when he meets him: “And as I neared him, I could see that something was bothering him, weighing heavily on his mind—and that whatever it was had cracked the granite of his physical being with a network of hairline fractures, like a solid substance about to fragment itself from some inner pressure.” And even in this early book, Pronzini excels at developing a complex plot with an unexpected resolution.

On the other hand, some of the prose is dramatically overdone and ponderous. The dialogue is somewhat clunky, particularly in the interchanges between Nameless and the woman that he loves, Erika. However, the Nameless character is essentially the man that readers of the later books will recognize: a pulp fiction collector, an honest and sensitive man who is affected by human misery, not a hero, but a man obsessed and dedicated to doing his job.

Although this book is out of print, it is well worth finding to see the genesis of one of our greatest crime fiction writers. If you’ve read some of the other Nameless books and not been exposed to this one, you’ll really appreciate the nascent skill exhibited in this work. A real treasure!

[LJ · Rating 4 out of 5]

SNATCH (PI, “Nameless,” San Francisco/Bay Area, Cont) – VG
Pronzini, Bill – 1st in series
Random House, 1971, US Hardcover, ISBN: 0394472268
First Sentence: Tamarack Drive was one of these oak- and elm- and eucalyptus-shaded affairs that are supposed to make you think of rustic country lanes.
*** “Nameless” is hired by a financial speculator whose son has been kidnapped. This job, deliver the $300,000 ransom. This supposedly simple task leads to a murdered man and 27 stitches for our detective. Now he’s investigating who kidnapped the boy in the first place. To complicate his life, “Nameless’” lady love has issued an ultimatum for his to choose between her and his job.
*** Although he had written several short stories, it’s fun to go back and read the second full book by Pronzini, and the first in the “Nameless” series. It was interesting to see how Pronzini created the character, fully developed but without taking a lot of the story to so do. There is a particular section toward the end which explains why being a PI is so important to the character. One of Pronzini’s great strengths is his ear for dialogue. The plot is quite good and even though I suspected the villain, I enjoyed watching the investigation unfold and I completely missed one of the clues that brought the investigation to it’s conclusion. It is interesting to read a book set in a time when people had answering services and had to look for a pay phone, and the cars included a Plymouth Valiant and a Chevy Corviar, but that only added richness to the story. Even with this early book, it is clear to see why Pronzini is one of the masters of the detective genre.

[Karl · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here is a list of all the books (in order) Happy Reading.

1971 The Snatch Random House
1973 The Vanished Random House
1973 Undercurrents Random House
1977 Blowback Ramdom House
1978 Twospot Putman
1980 Laybrinth St. Martin's Press
1980 A Killing In Xanadu Waves Press
1981 Hoodwinked St. Martin's Press
1982 Scattershot St. Martin's Press
1982 Dragonfire St. Martin's Press
1983 Bindlestiff St. Martin's Press
1983 Casefile St. Martin's Press
1984 Quicksilver St. Martin's Press
1984 Nightshades St. Martin's Press
1984 Double St. Martin's Press
1985 Bones St. Martin's Press
1985 Grave Yard Plots St. Martin's Press
1886 Dreadfall St. Martin's Press
1988 Shackles St. Martin's Press
1988 Small Fellonies St. Martin's Press
1990 Jackpot Delacorte
1991 Breakdown Delacorte
1992 Quarry Delacorte
1992 Epitaths Delacorte
1993 Demons Delacorte
1995 Hardcase Delacorte
1996 Spadework Crippen & Landru
1996 Sentinels Carroll & Graf
1997 Illusions Carroll & Graf
1998 Boobytrap Carroll & Graf
1999 Sluths Five Star
1999 Duo Five Star
2000 Crazybones Carroll & Graf
2002 Bleeders Carroll & Graf
2003 Spook Carroll & Graf
2003 Scenarios Five Star
2005 Nightcrawlers Forge
2006 Mourners Forge
2007 Savages Forge
2008 Feaver Forge
2009 Schemers Forge
2010 Betrayers Forge
2011 Camouflage Forge
2012 Hellbox Forge
2012 Kinsmen Cemetery Dance
2012 Femme Cemetery Dance
2013 Nemesis Forge

[Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first "Nameless Detective" wasn't written in the pulp/noir heyday of the '40's and '50's, but in the early '70's. But, it easily could have been written thirty years earlier. The prolific Pronzini and his "Nameless" series is still going 40 years later. Will be interesting to continue along with this series, how his clients don't ask his name, we never will hear his name...interesting touch.
With our PI being a pulp collector....just adds to the wonderful feel of a noir mystery. Great stuff.

[Nik Maack · Rating 3 out of 5]

The plot is ridiculous. The mood and tone are great. So this winds up being a bit of a mixed bag.

Fun, readable, but with a storyline that's either entirely random (a solution appears!) or comically over the top. More enjoyable is the self-referential play with what it means to be a private detective.

There's enough in here that I would consider reading more by this author. Maybe his handling of plot gets better with time.

[Kris · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overall it was a decent read, not a lot of fleshing out of any characters or much twistiness to the plot, but still interesting. SOme of the interactions with the female characters have not aged really well, but they're downright progressive if compared to Raymond Chandler. (Pronzini is a breast man).

[Eileen · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 to 4 stars. A classic, midcentury detective story featuring a private eye who's never identified by name. Good plot and characters, well written. Reminds me of John D. MacDonald and Lawrence Block, two authors I've enjoyed for many years. You have to like this genre (which I do) to appreciate it.

[Pam · Rating 4 out of 5]

AUTHOR Pronzini, Bill
TITLE The Snatch
DATE READ 02/28/2019
RATING 4.5/B+
FIRST SENTENCE Tamarack Drive was one of these oak- and elm- and eucalyptus-shaded affairs that are supposed to make you think of rustic country lanes.
GENRE/ PUB DATE/PUBLISHER / # OF Crime Fiction/1969/kindle speaking volumes/158 pgs
SERIES/STAND-ALONE #1 Nameless
CHALLENGE GR 2019 Reading Goal 30/111
GROUP READ
CHARACTERS Nameless -- approaching 40, former cop, private detective
TIME/PLACE Late 1960's/Northern California
COMMENTS I love the Nameless series and read many of them years and years ago. Going to start again from the 1st. I really like his descriptive yet to the point style of writing. There is something about these shorter older crime fiction books that is very appealing to me. We meet "nameless" on a kidnapping case with a less than scrupulous local businessman. His girlfriend Erica makes a brief entrance onto the scene and a quicker departure … she believes his dalliance in being a private eye is a boy playing and not something a grown up man would be doing. SO … that relationship is Adios. We barely get introduced to Eberhardt, his sometimes sidekick and long-time friend. Great intro to the series!

[Jonathan · Rating 3 out of 5]

: THE SNATCH by Bill Pronzini - I’ve had books from Pronzini’s “Nameless Detective” series on my “to read” list for year and years; so long, in fact, that I had forgotten any of the specifics of how/why it got on my radar and why the people who had recommended it to me thought it was worth recommending. This is the first novel in the series, which I bring up because I’ve noticed that a lot of notable crime/detective series take a few volumes to find their stride: so, when I say that I liked it, but wasn’t especially carried away by it, that doesn’t mean I won’t be reading more from Pronzini. One thing that’s notable already: though he’s Nameless, the detective’s personality and personal life plays a bigger role here than, say, Lew Archer’s or Philip Marlowe’s does in their first novels. Contrariwise, the supporting cast is a little duller, more as-expected than with those from Macdonald’s or Chandler’s work.

[Christopher Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pronzini tends to deliver, although I wasn't super happy with the one western of his I read. The Nameless Detective series is pretty famous, with a detective that never is given a name, or even that much of a description. Like the Continental Op, he gets through his cases anonymous to the reader, and this case is pretty good. Things don't go as intended and the nameless detective is not a particularly tough guy although he's well respected by his peers and the police.

His girlfriend is pretty worthless, and he's treated poorly by some people in this case, but he manages to find his way through and solve it through some good luck and good detective work.

[Carol · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Snatch is the first "Nameless" book by Bill Pronzini. I was able to ask the ILL to track this book down, it is very old (1971) and I appreciate this library department tracking it down. The book holds up well today. It is the story of a wealthy family whose nine year old son is kidnapped. Nameless, who we find out in later books is named Bill, is hired to handle the money transfer. Naturally something goes wrong. This first book shows Nameless as a competent trustworthy detective. This was a great first book in a wonderful series.

[Mikel Pfeiffer · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've been wanting to read some Bill Pronzini after reading some of his short stories and writings on crime fiction. The Nameless series is a detective series set in San Francisco. I'm not really sure why he's "Nameless," you could just give him a name and I don't think it would change things much. This first book has the detective tracking down a kidnapping and finds there's more behind the kidnapping than just ransom money. I mostly liked the details behind Nameless, I liked reading about the things going on in his life with his girlfriend and his fascination with pulp magazines. There's a lot of books in the series. I have 3 more on my shelf and I'm looking forward to reading them.

[Adam Christopher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bill Pronzini is a master. This book is great; published in 1971, it is the first in a very long detective series with a very believable private detective. He is not a "Hollywood PI". I have read 45 of the 46 books in this great series. My only complaint would be that as Pronzini gets older, his more recent books (books published around 2006) start to take a politically partisan edge. It's nice to escape politics in the world of fiction, but even that is starting to become difficult.

[Keith Lytton · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the first book in the series...from about 44 years ago...so was funny to read about dialing phones...no cell...but more interesting to see how the character has developed over the years...the character in book one has so little resemblance to the character now...but was a very excellent book...starting book two tonight...