The Knockout

Fight Card

by Jack Tunney, Paul Bishop (Editor), Mel Odom (Editor)

Brooklyn, 1954Frankie ‘The Piston’ Corleone was an up-and-coming light heavyweight fighter until a broken hand took him out of contention. Now, Frankie works as a private eye, occasionally taking sparring work to stay in shape make ends meet.Cappy O’Brien has trained a lot of fighters, including Frankie. But Cappy has never had a real contender until now ... Candy Marquez is the real deal, and after being battered by Marquez during several rounds of sparring, Frankie has to agree. But the fight game is as crooked as a dog’s hind leg, and other trainers and the mob all want a piece of Cappy’s best prospect.When Cappy winds up dead, it’s time for Frankie to take off the gloves and take The Piston’s punching power to the street to knockout a killer ...

99 pages, Kindle Edition

First published December 1, 2012

About the author

Jack Tunney is the unifying pen name for authors of the FIGHT CARD series - created by Mel Odom and Paul Bishop. Up-and-coming new authors, such as Eric Beetner, David Foster, Kevin Michaels, and Heath Lowrance have all penned entries in the series alongside more established names in the field such as Wayne D. Dundee, Bishop, and Odom.

The books in the Fight Card series are 25,000 word novelettes, designed to be read in one or two sittings, and are inspired by the fight pulps of the '30s and '40s - such as Fight Stories Magazine - and Robert E. Howard's two-fisted boxing tales featuring Sailor Steve Costigan.

Each of the novellas is short, sharp and packs a punch.

FOR MORE VISIT www.fightcardbooks.com

Reviews

[Dave · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Fight Card: The Knockout” is a 2012 novellete by Robert J. Randisi, writing under the Fight Card house name of Jack Tunney. It is a terrific addition to the Fight Card series and firmly placed in the hardboiled world of the late fifties Brooklyn, just after the Brooklyn Dodgers fled to the west coast. This book is not as chunk full of fights as some of the other ones in this series, but it is still a damn good book from the opening line of “The right came at me much too fast for me to duck. The head gear absorbed a good portion of the blow’s power, but it still rattled my brains.”

Frankie “The Piston” Corleone was a fighter once, trained at Father Tim’s orphanage in Chicago, and made the big time briefly before his fist shattered and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put his fist back together again. Corleone stumbed into the PI business and, typical of the fifties hardboiled PIs, sleeps on a couch in his office and wonders if a paying client will ever call. This book is a hardboiled mystery about how a trainer got murdered and how Corleone sorts through the clues to figure out who did it.

The story takes you back in time and, besides the name-dropping, there is just a good old-fashioned feel to the tale that feels so hardboiled and old-timey. There are no sanctioned fights in this one, but a sparring match and a couple of street fights by trained fighters.