The Fools in Town Are on Our Side

by Ross Thomas

Fifth novel by Thomas under his own name. In the first state dustjacket with reviews on rear panel of The Singapore Wink. Unemployed spy Lucifer Dye corrupts a city.

Genres: Fiction, Mystery, Thriller, Crime, 20th Century, Mystery Thriller

383 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1970

About the author

Ross Thomas was an American writer of crime fiction. He is best known for his witty thrillers that expose the mechanisms of professional politics. He also wrote several novels under the pseudonym Oliver Bleeck about professional go-between Philip St. Ives.

Thomas served in the Philippines during World War II. He worked as a public relations specialist, reporter, union spokesman, and political strategist in the USA, Bonn (Germany), and Nigeria before becoming a writer.

His debut novel, The Cold War Swap, was written in only six weeks and won a 1967 Edgar Award for Best First Novel. Briarpatch earned the 1985 Edgar for Best Novel. In 2002 he was honored with the inaugural Gumshoe Lifetime Achievement Award, one of only two authors to earn the award after their death (the other was 87th Precinct author Evan Hunter in 2006).

He died of lung cancer two months before his 70th birthday.

Reviews

[James Thane · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ross Thomas, who died in 1995, deserves to be remembered with other great masters of the crime novel of the latter twentieth century. He wrote a number of intriguing books that were cleverly plotted, filled with interesting characters and that often dealt with the corruption that lies just under the surface of American life.

The Fools in Town Are on Our Side, which was first published in 1970, takes its inspiration from a quote by Mark Twain. The main protagonist, Lucifer Dye, has had a most unconventional life. As a child he was orphaned and then raised in a whorehouse in Shanghai, just before the Second World War. There he mastered a number of foreign languages and learned many important lessons that would serve him well in life. Later he joined the military and was later recruited by a mysterious governmental intelligence agency called Section 2.

When a mission goes wrong, Lucifer winds up spending three months in an uncomfortable Chinese prison (like there might be any comfortable ones?), and at that point he takes his severance pay and leaves the government's employ. At loose ends and with nothing better to do, he accepts an offer from a man named Victor Orcutt to join him and his associates in completely corrupting a small southern town. The objective of the mission is to ultimately clean up the town and, of course, to profit Victor Orcutt Associates.

The team arrives in Swankerton, the targeted town, and gets to work. The task is cleverly designed and involves a lot of odd, strange and curious characters. Inevitably, there's a lot of double-dealing involved and a fair amount of violence. Thomas tells the story, interweaving into it the details of Lucifer Dye's life from the time he was born in a small Montana town until the end of the mission in Swankerton. It's a fun read, very skillfully done and those readers who haven't read Thomas might well want to make his acquaintance.

[Constantinos Capetanakis · Rating 4 out of 5]

No one in Greece reads Ross Thomas. This is too strange.
This is unputdownable. Pure, witty, solid entertainment. The best disciple, if there ever was one, of Raymond Chandler. Jean-Patrick Manchette's favorite writer to translate. These two are good enough credentials.

[John Culuris · Rating 2 out of 5]

★ ★ 1/2

I once heard Thomas described as “readable.” Not sure whether it was intended as compliment or insult but I tend to agree with the description. In alternating chapters this novel follows three time periods in the hero’s life until it catches up to the present day--in this case 1970--where the story moves to an unnamed Southern city. And that’s where things get more than a little troublesome. The N-word is thrown around liberally. Not just with bigots and villains but with everybody: good, bad; innocent, guilty; even with black and white alike. I know recent real-world events have made clear that we are not as enlightened as we once thought, but this open prejudice showered the environment too heavily to allow me to completely enjoy the story, particularly since I know Ross Thomas called it the way he saw it: if it’s is in the book, that’s what he found when he did his research. Even with a twenty-five-year gap, there was too much uncomfortable truth within this piece of fiction.

[Mal Warwick · Rating 5 out of 5]

For extended periods over the past several decades, I’ve been reading mysteries by the carload. I thought that by now I’d be reasonably familiar with the best writers in the genre. Somehow, I missed Ross Thomas, who penned twenty-three crime novels between 1966 and 1994 and passed away in 1995. I came across The Fools in Town Are on Our Side in a list of someone’s idea of the 100 best mysteries of all time. I don’t know about many of the other 99, but this one surely belongs on that list.

Published in 1970, The Fools in Town relates a tall tale about municipal corruption set during Richard Nixon’s first term, while the Vietnam War spilled over into Laos and Cambodia. The title comes from Huckleberry Finn: “Hain’t we got all the fools in town on our side? And ain’t that a big enough majority in any town?” According to an introduction to the Kindle edition I read, Thomas reputedly wrote his books from a standing start, without any sense of how they might end. That’s easy to believe about The Fools in Town. In fact, it’s easy enough to imagine that Thomas came across that passage in Huckleberry Finn and decided to write a novel to fit the title!

Lucifer C. Dye — one of several characters in the novel with Dickensian names — is a multilingual former American intelligence operative fired by his agency (not the CIA!) after causing an enormous clusterf**k in Singapore. Soon after he returns to the States he is offered a job for an enormous sum of money by a mysterious young man in a hotel room: Lucifer is to travel to a moderate-size Southern city which is already afflicted by outsized corruption — and corrupt the city even more, so that the good citizens of the town will vote in a reform slate and toss the bums out. Not exactly simple but logical, right? It is, except that Lucifer quickly discovers that the prominent citizens on the so-called reform slate are, if anything, even more corrupt than the bums now in charge.

While the action unfolds as Lucifer gets to work in earnest, his backstory is revealed in alternating chapters. We learn how it came about that he screwed up so badly in Singapore, and why he is so cynical about life that he’s willing to immerse himself in such a questionable enterprise. Improbable, but it all hangs together. The plotting in this novel is a wonder to behold — and so is the writing, especially the dialogue.

If you read crime novels and haven’t yet discovered Ross Thomas, treat yourself to The Fools in Town are On Our Side. It’s one of the most delicious send-ups of small-town politics I’ve ever come across.

[K · Rating 5 out of 5]

If I hadn't already become a Ross Thomas fan having read the first two Mac McCorkle novels, I am most certainly one after reading The Fools In Town Are on Our Side.
Lucifer Dye, the central character and narrator, is superbly drawn, both sympathetic and an anti-hero, for whom the reader will root, yet remain unsure if he/she should do so.

We know that Lucifer has spent three months in a Hong Kong prison and, having been debriefed, has been provided the necessary fake documents along with twenty grand as sort of a severance package from the U.S. governmental agency for whom he had worked. Lucifer doesn't remain unemployed for long, however, as he comes into contact with a rather eccentric mastermind called Victor Orcutt, who has plans concerning a very corrupt, small town in the South. The plan involves any number of clever machinations, and Dye signs on for a considerably generous sum. In the process he becomes acquainted with two of Orcutt's associates-- a former hooker and former police chief with the strange name of Homer Necessary (don't ask). In any event, both of these individuals bring terrific depth to the story and become delightfully central to this terrific novel.

Dye works more angles than an dodecohedron and manages to cross and double cross the corrupt powers that be in the town, creating havoc and, ultimately, a justly deserved resolution to the entire caper. Thomas even gives us a happy ending to a very satisfying story. The characters are richly drawn and the environs equally so. I think this book is actually better than the aforementioned McCorkle series and would make a very good introduction to this talented author. It is simply delicious.

[Tom Stamper · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had never heard of Ross Thomas until this week so I was surprised at how expert he crafts this tale. The main character is Lucifer Dye, an orphan who grows up to be a spy. Most of the characters in this darkly comic story have Dickensian names. The structure of the story alternates time periods with each new chapter for much of the book. Dye as a child. Dye as a spy. And finally Dye as the guy working a scheme in a small southern town.

The scheme to corrupt a town so thoroughly that it can be purged of all its corruption is the audacious plan of a mastermind, Victor Orcutt, who enlists Dye to help him accomplish everything. Helping them is a former policeman named Homer Necessary.

But the plot is secondary to what is a long first person narrative by Dye about his thoughts and experiences, which no matter how joyful or sorrowful register no emotion from the teller.

Reading about Thomas I saw a passage about Bill Clinton being a big fan of his work. This might be the first time I have ever agreed with a politician on the merits of a novel before. Also, there is a short passage in the book (published 1970) reminiscent of Manchurian Candidate (1950s) where the author name drops William F. Buckley so that the main character can disagree with him. In both cases it seems to be a shortcut device in case you thought the hero might harbor right-wing leanings.

I'm looking forward to reading more Ross Thomas.

[Jake · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest is perhaps my favorite crime novel of all-time. It inspired one of my favorite movies of all time: Miller’s Crossing. It also inspired the Akira Kurosawa classic Yojimbo, which I have not seen, though I want to. Point being: I obviously have a thing for the specific genre where a political actor is caught in a corrupt city and plays both sides against each other for their own benefit.

I don’t know Ross Thomas’ inspirations for Fools in Town but I’d be stunned if Red Harvest wasn’t one of them. This feels like an updated version, only more expansive. Thomas gives his protagonist, appropriately named “Lucifer”, an extensive backstory that also seems to touch on Thomas’ experiences in Asia. Those parts don’t work as well as the rest of the book; I felt like Lucifer’s history could have been condensed to a few paragraphs. The flashback chapters that alternate through most of the first half of the book only serve to halt its momentum.

But once it gets to the fictional city where our hero does his dirty deeds, it becomes a lot of fun. One faction of power hungry mavens masquerading town reformers is combating another cabal of corrupt bureaucrats buttressed by organized crime. There are no real heroes here and Lucifer realizes that, so he kinda just does his own thing pitting both sides against each other. The result is the typical fun we expect from a Thomas novel: great dialogue, fun scenes.

There are some major drawbacks to this book. One in particular…

(trigger warning: rape. Skip the next paragraph if need be.)

is a terribly written, unnecessary rape scene. Most rape scenes are terribly written and unnecessary, as they focus on some perspective other than the (usual) female victim. This one is especially bad and not necessary to the plot at all. I’ve read about five or six Thomas books but I don’t recall anything so egregious regarding rape. Terrible and really pissed me off.

(end TW)

In addition to that, as I said above, the flashbacks don’t work. It’s a longer book than it needs to be and drags more than it should for its first half. Thomas tries to synthesize Lucifer’s back story with what’s happening at the present in the narrative and it doesn’t really work. There’s also the frequent use of the n-word, though it’s more understanding of racism than some of his other works.

Many consider this Thomas’ magnum opus. I still think it’s Briarpatch. It has too many shortcomings to be great but it is really darn good and worth a read.

[David Schlosser · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a really interesting book, and I devoured it in basically one rainy vacation day. As a recovering political/policy guy -- something covered deeply in this book -- I'm not sure how I feel about it. I will probably have to cogitate a while before deciding if I will ever know how I feel about it, but I can tell you it's a terrific read. I know this is true because it's about a bunch of thoroughly dislikeable creeps but you can't stop turning pages. In this vein, consider Thank You for Smoking by Christopher Buckley, which I recommend unreservedly and buy any time I see it at a used bookstore to give to friends.

The Fools in Town are on Our Side definitely worth reading for the high quality of the prose, the masterful quality of the plotting, and the superb quality of the evocation of friendships and relationships. In terms of the politics and policy, I think it probably deserves to be categorized with The West Wing -- generally accurate except in terms of the immediacy of the occurrences. That is, the stuff that happens in this book and The West Wing is the sort of thing that actually happens, but in real life it plays out over weeks, months, or years ... which would be really boring in a novel or 42-minute drama, so the story is necessarily condensed.

The protagonist, Lucifer Dye, is so interesting that I can't believe he survives in only one book. His cronies and fellow travelers (the ones who survive this story, anyway) are similarly fascinating and drawn deftly and truly. The story is complex and complicated -- bordering on outrageous, even discounting the condensed time, and probably better conceived as at least mildly satirical despite the existence of the civic/public corruption Thomas describes -- but plausibly developed and told efficiently. The dialogue is a highlight: snappy patter that tells you more than what the words mean.

This was my first Ross Thomas book. It won't be my last, by a long shot.

[Craig Pittman · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like a novel with a plot so twisty that you can't tell what's going to happen next. Holy cow, is this that book! I'd only read one Ross Thomas book before, and that was yeeeeears ago, when I was too young to fully appreciate his bemused and cynical take on everything. I had heard that this book, which takes its magnificent title from a quote in "Huckleberry Finn," was his magnum opus, so I thought i'd give it a try. I am glad I did.

The narrator is the improbably named Lucifer Dye, a spy for an obscure U.S. agency known only as "Section 2." Through a set of circumstances beyond his control, he's been arrested in an Asian country and tossed into a jail where his only amusement is killing the lice he finds on his body. Then his superiors pay a ransom to free him -- and promptly cut him loose, because they don't think he can work for them anymore.

At loose ends, and unable to apply for any straight jobs because he's unable to explain what he's been doing for the government for the past few years, Dye takes a bizarre job offer from an effeminate genius named Victor Orcutt. The job: Corrupt an already pretty shady small Southern town on the Gulf of Mexico. Orcutt's plan is that by making the city much worse, the disgusted voters will turn out the rascals in charge and put in a reform ticket (which is who hired Orcutt in the first place). Orcutt's team already includes two other employees: a beautiful ex-hooker named Carol Thackerty and an ex-police chief with one blue eye and one brown one who bears the oddly on-the-nose name of Homer Necessary (he's really necessary to the plot, I mean).

Before we really get to the corrupting of the town, though, Thomas keeps jumping us backward in time so Dye can tell how he got to this point in his life where doing this seems like a good idea. The result is three (or maybe even four) interlocking stories as we learn about how Dye has lost pretty much everyone and everything in his life that ever meant anything to him.

The story takes on an epic sweep, jumping from Montana to Asia and back to America again and then back to Asia. The most engrossing part concerns how Dye's mother died in childbirth and his father, an incompetent doctor who failed to save her, volunteers as a missionary in Asia. That's how they wound up in Singapore during its bombing by the Japanese in 1937. Thomas' description of what happens next is absolutely electrifying.

"I found myself lying there in the street, still clutching my father's left hand. There was the hand and the wrist and part of the forearm. And that was all. I couldn't find any more of him as I wandered among the dead, trying not to step into pools of blood or on pieces of flesh. Everybody seemed dead. I walked around, still holding my father's hand so that the end of his forearm dragged in the dirt and blood. It was quiet. Almost the only sound I could hear was my own voice, speaking Mandarin, asking a man without a head, "Have you seen the rest of my father?'"

The orphaned child is saved by a Russian woman who runs Singapore's fanciest cathouse, and so Dye spends his formative years there, tutored by her international cast of hookers to speak seven or eight languages and learning on his own how to roll the drunks and opium addicts for their cash. Not until an American newsman with the wonderful name of Gorman Smalldane shows up does anyone bother to teach him how to read and write, though.

Thomas takes us through Dye's whole history -- his internment by the Japanese after Pearl Harbor, his wartime service in Korea, his recruitment by Section 2, his marriage and its brutal, bloody end -- and all of it delivered in Dye's own tersely snarky voice, all of it pointing to a man who's become dead inside and who does the things he does only because the alternative may be suicide and he can't quite bring himself to do that either. And now we know why he's so annoyed about his most recent set of jailers swiping his watch -- it was his father's.

Thomas has a view of humanity that pretty well matches Mark Twain's own jaundiced view (read his "Letters from the Earth" to see what I mean). For instance, Orcutt is gleeful about manipulating not only the crooks who run the town of Swankerton (aka "Chancre Town") but also the clients who hired him, agreeing readily to expose a couple of them as corrupt as part of a ploy Dye dreams up. Necessary, we're told, started out as a Serpico-like do-gooder in his police department, then turned around and took advantage of all the possibilities of corruption that he'd exposed others for doing. Thackerty earned a Phi Beta Kappa key in college, but paid her tuition by turning tricks. And these are the GOOD guys. (Fair warning on language too -- this book was written in the late 1960s, so some characters, particularly Necessary, use a lot of racial slurs, which can be hard to get past as well.)

By the time I arrived at the main corrupt-a-city plot, I really wanted to see how it would all play out and what would happen to Dye. I gulped down the last third of the book in a big rush, amazed at the twists and turns and violence at the conclusion. That was probably for the best, because only after I finished did I realize that Thomas' propulsive writing carried me right by a couple of major logic flaws (which is why I don't give this book five stars, although that was my first inclination when I finished the last page). But it was still one heck of a ride, and I am now trying to figure out which of his other books I should tackle next. Although I sincerly doubt any of them can match this one.

[The Professor · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Lucifer Dye might rise to live again”. Disgraced intelligence agent Lucifer Dye is hired for a singular mission: to drag an already corrupt city even further into the mud and drive its voters to commit to change. It’s an amusing hook for a pulp crime novel but around it Ross Thomas builds an entire super structure of compulsively readable backstory and characterisation. Dye must become a literal agent of change with Thomas suggesting that the soul of a city – or a person – must hit rock bottom before recovery is possible. “Fools” is a tale of spiritual resurrection. It’s also damn funny.

The moment that made me sit up straight at the start of “Fools” involved shady Shanghai businessman Li Teh taking his first and last polygraph and it announced the always welcome arrival of chaos and unpredictability to proceedings. Time and again in this novel the wildly unexpected happens whether it be electrocution, the bombing of Shanghai or the fate of Victor Orcutt, the man who hires Dye to corrupt Swankerton City. Usually in these things a protagonist is on a set of train tracks from the first sentence and the fun is watching him fruitlessly trying to wriggle free of his fate. In “Fools” Thomas repeatedly throws flaming meteors at Dye’s train tracks as if militantly asserting the whole concept of a set path through life for a man is a damned lie. Indeed having been thrown around like a cork on stormy seas throughout his technicolour upbringing Dye’s eventual redemption comes by consciously taking control of destiny, taking the job to deliberately alter the fate of Swankerton City and thereby meeting Homer Necessary and of course Carol Thackerty. Victor Orcutt’s business is basically “Destiny Management”. This is a tale of a man coming to terms with his extraordinary past and taking control of his life and as with all writing by unsentimental authors who deign to ladle on the treacle it ends up emotionally affecting. “You’re not quite dead after all, are you?” says Dye’s mentor Gorman Smalldane and via small moments of humanity (Dye refusing to kill the men who harmed his wife) we know that to be true and want him to prevail.

For all the subversion of fate, however, Thomas does give us plenty of conventional comforts. Bad guys get their comeuppances (the Swankerton Chief of Police gets satisfyingly offed) and good guys get their rewards. Thomas has scenes of shocking violence (both described and depicted) yet fields comic turn mafia hoods (Lucarella’s anger management issues comes decades before ‘The Sopranos’ or ‘Analyze This’), ace one-liners (“You think the mayor’s nutty?”/“As peanut brittle”) and characters with names like Carmingler, Shoftstall and Homer Necessary. “Fools” is also a novel noticeably on the side of children and those who do harm to children do not escape the novel intact. My only minor nit-pick is that while Thomas fastidiously describes and characterises the smallest bit-part player Carol Thackerty gets noticeably underwritten beyond droll brainy bombshell. Dye’s first wife leapt off the scant pages she appeared in so I have no doubt Thomas could have added a few extra brushstrokes to Carol.

The overall sense, therefore, is of being in the hands of a “can do anything” writer who j-u-u-st misses the basketball hoop with “Fools”. It’s a great near-masterpiece that anticipates “Empire Of The Sun” and “The World According To Garp” and depicts an emotionally bereft man emerging from “zombieism” . It’s a fantastically more-ish novel with the fundamental message “Change Is Possible” and if that isn’t worth reading in 2021 I don’t know what is. “Monsters of all kinds shall be destroyed.”

[Martinw · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a wonderful noir novel, with only the ending breaking some of the noir rules. (Fine by me, I liked it.) I would call it a political thriller, were it not for the small scale of the politics in this book. But that’s another characteristic of noir stories, isn’t it? The scale is small, the story takes place on a very personal level.
Details in a nutshell: A former agent of an obscure US intelligence agency loses his job and is therefore in need of a new one. I cannot quite decide if he is a cynic, or if he just grew very cold through no fault of his own. He is found by an eccentric guy with a ton of brains who adds him to his team, and gets the task to corrupt a town. The swamp we dive in afterwards is magnificent.

The story is told in first person POV, and until about halfway through the book, we have different time lines: The current one, one for the events that lead to him losing his job, and one for the main characters childhood in Asia, when he lost his father und grew up in a whore house. Come to think of it, there is a short fourth one, surrounding the time with his wife.
But the second half of the book centers on the (further) corruption of the fictive Southern town Swankerton, and I really liked it. Maybe not quite a masterpiece, so I give it four thumbs up, but I could upgrade that when I reread the novel in a few years.

[Al · Rating 4 out of 5]

Four and a half stars. Ross Thomas--little known and little appreciated today. His genre-busting fiction, ranging across espionage, crime, noir, action and even comedy is deceptively simple but beautifully crafted. The plots are sometimes complex, but almost beside the point because his characters and dialog are the main show. In this tour de force, in my opinion one of his best, the protagonist, Lucifer Dye, is a failed spook recruited by an unlikely trio of adventurers to help take over the crime management of a small city in the South. Interesting complications ensue, and Dye's back story and related set pieces are as good as the main story. Try it, you'll like it.

[Ben Peyton · Rating 4 out of 5]

I almost didn't finish this book. I found the first half a little slow but once the book gets going in the second half it's a wild ride. After I finished it, I thought it sort of reminded me of take on Red Harvest by Hammett. Both books are the story of an outsider ending up in a lawless town and they must work with the local characters there to solve a problem. There is also a lot of scenes spent in hotel rooms which is, oddly, something I remember about Red Harvest. But, of course, this version is a little more violent and a little more nihilistic. This was the first Ross Thomas book I've read and I look forward to reading others.

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a surprisingly good read, my first by Ross Thomas. Well written great characters, with the story spanning about twenty-five years, from just before the Korean War, into the 60’s.
Sort of a “what happens to a spy when he is no longer a spy, story.

[Gunnar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lucifer Dye arbeitet für einen amerikanischen Geheimdienst in Hongkong, ist aber nach einem Patzer inhaftiert worden, wurde freigekauft, ist aber nun in Ungnade gefallen. Da bietet ihm ein gewisser Viktor Orcutt einen interessanten Job an: Lucifer soll für ihn die korrupte texanische Stadt Swankerton unter Kontrolle bringen. Doch kaum ist er dort, bietet ihm auch die Gegenseite etwas an. Lucifer nimmt an und nun fragen sich beide Seiten, für welche Interessen er eigentlich arbeitet.

Ross Thomas ist der ungekrönte König des amerikanischen Politthrillers. Dieser Roman erschien erstmals 1970, in deutscher Übersetzung um die Hälfte gekürzt und nun erstmalig in vollständiger Übersetzung. Ein raue, böser Thriller über einen Sumpf von Intrige und Korruption mit viel Sprachwitz und einer schillernden Hauptfigur, deren Vorgeschichte vielleicht einen Tick zu ausführlich ausgebreitet wird. Trotzdem lesenswert, erinnert an Dashiell Hammetts „Rote Ernte“.

[Cathi Davis · Rating 5 out of 5]

A terrific writer very easy to read lots of cultural references. (IFStone’s “weekly”!) movies music etc they fly by and I am sure I missed most of them. A compelling spy/protagonist with an unlikely story…mother dead at his birth father killed my bomb raised in a whorehouse fluent in six languages (see upbringing in Shanghai/Hong Kong 3 months in a Japanese prison “adopted” and shipped out in a prisoner exchange then educated and becomes a spy then….finally after a “misadventure” an ex-spy and the present day of the story begins which…I know…is an even more unbelievable story than what came before..the despoiling of an already spoiled Southern town. Language can be a bit rough (sexist/racist) even when it is conveying the character of some unseemly characters, it is hard to read.
So unlikely story …at no point did I really understand it or believe but…merrily we continue to a sudden end.
The preface mentioned this was one of Bill Clinton’s favorite authors…not too surprising..but it really is NOT in the same class as LeCarre despite the preface’s claim to that so…five stars to all authors

[Judy · Rating 5 out of 5]

The hallmarks of any Ross Thomas outing are twisted plots, colorful characters, political satire, sparkling dialogue, and scoundrels galore. This one - the solo appearance of Lucifer Dye, who learned languages and life from the ladies of a Shanghai whorehouse where he was raised - is no exception. Dye has one job: corrupt the fools in the Texas Gulf Coast town of Swankerton to make sure "our side" profits. He does that by playing them against one another. Homer Necessary (yes, that's his name and his role) tells Dye, "I bet there are times when you yourself don't know what side you're on." The reader, too, loses track.

Dye uses guile to set his schemes in motion; "I smiled my boyish grin, the one I kept in reserve for famine, flood, and afternoon sessions with professional country boys." He maintains his cool even when dealing with cons with "eyes that contain less warmth than you would find in a slaughterhouse freezer."

There's plenty of perfidy to go around. When the former power-brokers no longer hold power, out-of-state gangsters quickly move in to garner the spoils. They include a New Orleans mob boss, Giuseppe "Joe Lucky" Lucarrelli, who negotiates with the highly improbable and deliciously satirical advice of an analyst who tells him he should channel his inner-directed rage into something constructive. These well-drawn profiles of even minor characters are where Ross Thomas shines.

Thomas calls 'em as he hears 'em, and since this story is set in the late 1950s, it contains some unfortunate racial and cultural slurs you'd expect of the times. I was put off, though, by the unaccustomed violence I don't remember in later books.

[William · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's impossible not to like reading Ross Thomas' stuff. It's sort of a cross between Donald Westlake and Hunter Thompson. Like Westlake, this is a zany caper, but like Thompson, it has a dark side like a bad dream.

Reading the comments in other reviews, I seem unusual in finding the plot a bit confusing, but Thomas writes so engagingly that I found myself not caring very much and just enjoying the ride.
The story provides an impressive catalog of just about every kind of urban corruption.

However, in an era of trigger warnings, this is not a book for the politically correct or faint of heart. The "N-word" appears repeatedly (which is normal for the South in 1970, but still uncomfortable or worse), there is a fairly graphic rape, several awful things happen to parts of a few bodies here and there, and there is an uncomfortably specific reference to pedophilia. Yeah, I know, all that in a mostly comic novel.

Thomas is not to be missed, for sure. Though this one is not among my favorites of his, it was for the most part (aside from the ugly jolts) fun to read.

[David Miller · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book seems different in tone from Thomas's books on Artie Wu ("Out on the Rim" and others), and his books about McCorkle ("Twilight at Mac's Place" and others). This one is more intense, more feverish, more personal. Only about half the book takes place in the present tense (late 1960's USA). The other half is the narrator's history, starting in China during the Japanese invasion, through the Korean War and his induction into espionage. Some passages are quite lurid and hard to forget; a few other passages are quite touching, rare for this most bleak and least sentimental of writers. The end is near-apocalyptic, but at the point where Shakespeare would have killed everyone off ("everyone dies at the end"), Thomas pulls back and achieves a point of serenity.

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

A remarkable "thriller". Far, far beyond the pack in terms of writing, complexity, cynical double-crosses, and simultaneous story lines. Two scenes are almost unforgettable: one in which the narrator and his father get caught in the bombing of Shanghai, and one in which the narrator meets with the "good ole boy" VIPs of the town he's been contracted to corrupt.

This was the first Ross Thomas novel I read (in 2009! Shame on me...), and I've since read several others, which were good to excellent in varying degrees but didn't quite manage to equal the mind-blowing The Fools in Town Are on Our Side. Very highly recommended.

[Sharron · Rating 4 out of 5]

I quite frankly wondered whether or not I would find a story this old (40+ years) as entertaining and relevant as I did when I read other titles by Ross Thomas back in the 70s and 80s. Happily for me, I did. Few authors have created characters more colorful and outrageous than Thomas. And you would be hard pressed to find one with a more cynical yet humorous view of human nature -especially when it comes to individuals with wealth and power.

[Gu Kun · Rating 4 out of 5]

Five - minus one - on moral grounds: like I would subtract a (at least "a") star from anything written by ... say ... Louis-Ferdinand Céline. I will refrain from preaching to the converted and those with hearts and minds, or shocking the (huge majority of) goggling starry-eyed "wir haben es nicht gewußt" ("we have it not known") "Mädel" with inconvenient tidbits on human-created atrocities. You don't get it? Read the book. It's very well-written.

[Hoolie · Rating 5 out of 5]

To get better, it must get much worse. Ain't that the truth. I loved this. Forget the airport action thrillers, and the current favored gruesome best selling novels that seem to condone violence against women. This is the best. It's pure fiction but so well written that everything trite comes off original. Reminded me of Wild At Heart (the book) but less hot pink and more worsted wool.

[David C Ward · Rating 4 out of 5]

Continuing to re-read Ross Thomas. This one is pretty ambitious with both the story and then the background autobiography of L Dye. The corruption of the town is more interesting - the ending resembles Hammett's Red Harvest.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Shockingly affecting for a book this schematically absurd. I don't know how Thomas managed that, but I'm kind of in awe of the skills. Oh, and funny as hell, except when it really isn't at all.

[Karl · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read in 1970

[Glenn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Most sprawling Thomas I've read. Startling.

[Brian Grover · Rating 3 out of 5]

The rare book that I only read because I liked the title - and I like the Mark Twain line from Huckleberry Finn that inspired it even more: “Hain’t we got all the fools in town on our side? And ain’t that a big enough majority in any town?” Certainly feels relevant in the MAGA era!

Anyway, Thomas had a long career as a writer of crime fiction, something like 25 titles and won a couple of Edgar Awards, so why not check him out. Turns out Thomas wasn't just influenced by Raymond Chandler, he seems to have set out here to write the book that Chandler would have written had he been active in 1970.

The dialogue is impossibly snappy - not just the protagonist, every character. That's fun for a while, and offsets the fact that the plot is fatally flawed from the start, and just goes completely off the rails in terms of plausibility down the stretch. If this tough-guy noir is your cup of tea, you could do worse than this book. You could also do better, and read Raymond Chandler. Or for that matter read Mark Twain!

[Matt Sabonis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lucifer Dye (that’s his real name) is a spy on the outs who gets hired to corrupt a small town so that his boss can then step in and improve it. That’s what they’ve all been hired for, after all.

What follows is a fairly interesting and entertaining crime novel about getting back to okay, about being numb and repairing yourself.

But of course it’s also about bad people doing bad things to other bad people in a fairly entertaining fashion and hijinks ensuing.

[Charlystante · Rating 4 out of 5]

Spannend. 4,5 Sterne

Auch nach fünzig Jahren noch aktuell.
Hochkomische, fantastisch boshafte Dialoge, die es wert sind, ein zweites Mal gelesen zu werden.
Einer der besten Thriller und Spionageromane, die ich gelesen habe.