Billy Verité

The Driftless Trilogy #2

by Rick Harsch

In this rollicking adventure, Rick Harsch again displays the flair for sophisticated dark comedy and detective parody that earned him high marks in The Driftless Zone. In this second novel, Billy Verite, the title character is a former snitch, a failed gumshoe, an ugly man who believes he can succeed on style--his version of style. Enter Lola, a sexy, sneering moll who, for a variety of reasons, finds herself forced to hide out with Billy from a sinister underworld kingpin named Skunk. The two take refuge on a deserted island in the Mississippi River where Billy creates a fortress full of traps and homemade weaponry, bearing such names as Death Pit Six, Binocular Tree, and Forbidden Sector II. Here, he and Lola haphazardly prepare for their inevitable showdown with soon-to-be-mayor Skunk and two traitor cops who want them dead. As Billy and Lola join forces against Skunk, the narrator takes over the detective work in a novel-within-the-novel, attempting to solve the mystery of a murdered prostitute while setting the stage for Billy's escape from a faltering seedy civilization to the twisted concoction of his own brave new world. Rick Harsch is an entertaining new author whose writing spins you between hard life and dark hilarity. --Susan Swartwout

Paperback

First published September 1, 1998

About the author

Publisher, chief editor of corona\samizdat press; Izola, Slovenia....www.corona\samizdat press; rick.harsch@gmail.com
The Manifold Destiny of Eddie Vegas, a novel;
and
Walk Like a Duck, a Season of Little League Baseball in Italy
As of April 24, 2020, these two books are available in a world edition from corona/samizdat, as explained in the following youtube video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4JUl...

I have finished a two volume anthological novel, The Assassination of Olof Palme, a an anthological novel, which involves the contributions of at least 50 writers from about 20 countries, and extracts the fungus of the Reagan years, montagerates the murderous manners of secretive Nato/CIA folk in Post WWII Europe, particularly in Italy and France, pays some attention to the Assassination of Olof Palme, while exploring a sort of alternative notion of the autobiographical novel and putting an end to proofreading.




Skulls of Istria, published by River Boat Books, June 26, 2018
Not available on Amazon, only direct from:
http://www.riverboatbooks.com/our-books

Voices After Evelyn was published by Maintenance Ends Press, the Avant Garde wing of Ice Cube Press, in November of 2018
This novel is available at 19.95, from http://www.icecubepress.com/


Author of three novels published by Steerforth press:

The Driftless Zone
Billy Verite
The Sleep of Aborigines
[The Driftless Trilogy]

These three were published in translation in France, two were subsequently chosen for mass market publication and I received a copy of each before the press went bankrupt.



Author of a chapter in Creative Nonfiction's Anatomy of Baseball, prefaced by Yogi Berra.

Living now in Slovenia, where Amalietti&Amalietti of Ljubljana has published:
Several of my own novels have now been published by corona\samizdat, along with works by
Chandler Brossard
David Vardeman
Vesna Radić
Jeff Bursey
Bori Praper,
and coming soon
WD Clarke
Joao Reis
Mark Douglas
Phillip Freedenberg (with Jeff Walton)
Jomme Keller
Giuliano Vivaldi (with a co-translator)
Roberto Alt
Prasenjit Gupta
Zachary Tanner

and more

Arjun and the Good Snake (memoir)
and, in Slovene:
Arjun in dobra kača
and the novels:
Kramberger z opico (Kramberger with Monkey)
Adriatica Deserta
Istrske Lobanje (The Skulls of Istria)

2019:the novel Voices after Evelyn by a new imprint of Ice Cube Press (Iowa)
here is a review by Chris Via: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NISsr...

Reviews

[W.D. Clarke · Rating 5 out of 5]

So far this new year I've been trying to be a bit more focused on the 18th century, but this book was always my "treat" to come back to at the end of the day. And what a treat it has been! Might I say in brief (due to the 40*** cms of new snow that soon need shoveling), that while I admired the heck out of Mr. Harsch's debut novel, The Driftless Zone: Or, A Novel Concerning The Selective Outmigration From Small Cities, this one, his sophomore effort, was simply evidence of the parthenogenetic Master adding still more to his pallette: whilst opting to restrict himself to a tightly-plotted form, the author still manages to invent himself into a delicious tizzy of a straitjacket, with the kind of imaginative abandon that you might more properly find in a Rabelais or Laurence Sterne (or Jean Paul [Richter], whose Maria Wutz not only resembles this volume in terms of sheer, demiurgic play, it was to 2021 what this book already is to 2022 for me: a head-over-heels favourite), a submerged, enshackled Houdini, if you will.

Billy Verité himself (like rogue cops Torgeson and Stratton) is a carry-over from that first novel, but by no means must you read it before this one, and Billy's bizzarro, genius-level idiot-savant adventures and schemings on an island in the Mississippi (just west of LaCrosse, Wisconsin), not only make him a Robinson-Crusoe-meets-Piggy-from-Lord-of-the-Flies-meets-Steve-Buscemi-from-Fargo, but also make this novel worth the price of admission alone.

And, much like that Remington guy from the 70s who liked his razor so much he bought the company, I so admired the heck out the chapter which introduces baddie Skunk Lane Forhension I got permission from the Dude to put it on my blog, so yeah, as always caveat lector, etc., cos I know the author from the interwebs, etc., etc.

***[Edit, couple days later: that was a conservative guesstimate, official tally was 56 cm! A record for us, I think, and a pretty good mid-continental drift...Still a fair ways short of the Northeastern Blizzard of 1978 that I experienced as a boy south of Boston—which seemed like a meter at the time, but which was actually "only" 70cm, and closed the schools for a week!]