The Wheelman

Synopsis/blurb....... Meet Lennon, a mute Irish getaway driver who has fallen in with the wrong heist team on the wrong day at the wrong bank. Betrayed, his money stolen and his battered carcass left for dead, Lennon is on a one-way mission to find out who is responsible--and to get back his loot. But the robbery has sent a violent ripple effect through the streets of Philadelphia. And now a dirty cop, the Russian and Italian mobs, the mayor's hired gun, and a keyboard player in a college rock band manoeuvre for position as this adrenaline-fuelled novel twists and turns its way toward its explosive conclusion. One thing's for sure: This cast of characters wakes up in a much different world by novel's end--if they wake up at all. About 4 hours of fun reading this in the one sitting on Sunday afternoon. I read this originally back in the late 2000's and rated it a 4 on my own little scoring chart. Selected as my Goodreads Pulp fiction group's monthly read for August, I was initially tempted to give it a miss because of my previous reading. Bu then as the book was available relatively cheaply second hand I thought why not? Glad I did to be honest as second time around it ticked more boxes for me than it managed to a few years ago. Fast and frenetic with an intriguing main character and a decent support cast of double-crossing gangsters, corrupt cops, Russian Mafiya and Italian wise-guys. Horrible people doing horrible things interspersed with mainly "decent" people forced to do horrible things......lovely! It is unlikely that I will enjoy another book as much as this one this month, but hey I live in hope! (But will probably die in despair...) 5 from 5 Obtained second hand from Abe books recently.

I'm fairly new to the crime genre and started with this as it was short and self-contained. The book was a lot of fun (if you like bad things happening to bad people) and the pace was lightning fast throughout. The main character is likeable despite being a nasty piece of work, although the fact everyone else tends to be even worse makes it easier to root for him. One element I'm still not totally sure I liked or not was the fact that all the characters are so interconnected. While it makes the story more cohesive it has the tendency to stretch believability to breaking point as well. The ending is strong and the newspaper clippings at the end provide a funny epilogue.

If I had some spare cash waiting for an investment opportunity I would have sought to buy the movie rights to The Wheelman within the first thirty pages of starting. The novel starts at a ferocious pace and never lets up, driven by snappy dialogue and taut action, with almost every scene containing a twist. In fact I can't remember a story with so many twists and turns, with double, triple and more crosses, as every character seeks to get the better of the others in the hunt for the stolen money. In so doing, Swierczynski drags the principle character, Lennon, through the wringer, so that although he's no saint you can't put help root for the guy. The book is not without its faults - for example, a couple of the scenes lack credibility notably the first scene at the pipe - but ultimately it doesn't matter. The Wheelman is a rollercoaster of a book. I loved it from first page to last.

This slim crime debut from Philadelphia City Paper editor Swierczynski, starts with an awesome Michael Mann-like set piece, proceeds at breakneck pace through some rollicking Quentin Tarantino-like pulp fiction turf, before petering out with a bit of a whimper in a rather unsatisfying ending. Having previously written a non-fiction book (This Here's a Stick-Up) about bank heists, Swierczynski is primed with plenty of info about how they go down. This shows in the opening portion of the story, where a pair of thieves and the titular getaway driver knock over a Wachovia in downtown Philadelphia. The writing is simple, crisp, and intensely cinematic, as their carefully laid plan hits a speed bump or two, but seemingly comes off. But sudden reversals are the running theme of the book, and all does not go quite as expected. We next find the driver, Lennon, in a body bag, about to get tossed into a construction project pit, along with his fellow dead heisters. In a comical and bloody scene somewhat reminiscent of Elmore Leonard, he manages to free himself and get away, setting off a chain reaction of double and triple-crosses, as all manner of people start chasing after the missing money. A drunken ex-cop, remnants of the Italian mafia, the new Russian mafiya, dirty cops, half of a bad cover band, a fixer (like the Jon Voight character in Heat), an annoying college girl, Lennon's lady, and a mysterious man in black. All get into the dizzying mix, and at the center of it all Lennon, a mute Irishman who knows cars, books, and survival, and that's about all. (Rather oddly though, there are no car chases, and other than the very beginning, Lennon's driving expertise is left untapped.) The story is built on fast pacing and pulling the rug out from under characters and the reader. Swierczynski loves to engage in misdirection, and although he sometimes repeats himself a little too much (an overused plot device is that those who appear dead may not actually be dead), and the relationship between Lennon and Katie isn't as camouflaged as he might wish, but the story still has more tricks up its sleeve than any ten average crime stories combined. A corollary to this is how Swierczynski often kills characters very suddenly and unexpectedly, which somehow feels more true to the genre than what one usually finds. And there's plenty of sparse, laconic style, as the body count rises in gruesome fashion. Everything is handled so well that the way everything climaxes in the last ten pages is somehow a letdown. Still, it's a completely entertaining book that will almost certainly be made into a movie, and I will definitely be looking for Swierczynski's next book.

Great read and excellent if not surprising ending there's lots of characters in this and at times it was hard to track. Nevertheless fun read. Great procrastination

I've been fortunate during the past few months to discover several excellent writers in the action/suspense/mystery genres, whose work I'd never read before (Don Winslow, Charlie Huston, and Brent Ghelfi), and I'm happy to announce that I'm now adding Duane Swierczynski to my list of must-read authors. These are writers who know how to tell a great story with strong, solid characters in them that you either love or hate, and enough surprises to keep you sitting on the edge of your La-Z-Boy recliner right up till the last page. The Wheelman by Duane Swierczynski is the novel that made me an instant fan of this relatively unknown author. Like Charlie Huston's "Hank Thompson" series, the lead character (Patrick Lennon) in this fast-paced novel quickly discovers just how bad a day can get when one simple mistake causes a bank heist to head south in a big way. Lennon, an Irish Mick who came over to the States as a child, is a wheelman, who drives for crews that take down banks. He's probably the best wheelman in the business and never enters an unknown situation that he can't get out of. The clock starts ticking for Lennon in downtown Philadelphia at a Wachovia Bank the moment Holden and Bling find themselves trapped inside a bank's vestibule with $650,000.00 in stolen funds, and unable to get out before the police arrive. Lennon knows exactly what to do to save his cohorts and hammers the gas petal of the getaway car and then drives the rear end of it straight into the bank's entrance, shattering the glass door and enabling the two robbers to get out through a gap and into the car for the getaway. Then, as Lennon, floors the accelerator and shoots the car across the street to their escape route, a lady with a baby carriage magically appears in front of him. To suddenly stop means a long prison term for all three of the men in the car, so Lennon hits the lady, but just manages to miss the carriage, giving the child a chance at life. Lennon now only has a short span of time to make it to a long-term parking lot several blocks away where they can exchange cars and get the hell-out-of-Dodge before the city's law enforcement agencies converge on them like hound dogs cornering a fox. They temporarily leave the money in the trunk of the getaway car, hop into a different vehicle that the police won't be looking for, and hightail it to the airport where the three of them have tickets for safer destinations. Unfortunately, they never make it as a double cross shifts into play and the Russian and Italian Mafia become involved. That's when Lennon's day goes from bad to worse and he has to become a stone-cold killer in order to stay alive long enough to retrieve the money and get out of the city, all in one piece. Before it's over, Lennon will be beat up, tortured, shot, almost blown up in a fireball, have acid poured down his throat, lose someone he loves, find himself betrayed more than once, and stuffed down the same pipe twice as the bad guys try to do away with his body. And, all this does is piss him off to no degree! What the author has created here is a rollercoaster ride of pure adrenaline that literally shakes the brain cells in one's head as the reader attempts to keep pace with the multitude of surprises that zap the lead character every time he turns around to take a quick breath. I don't think it would be a far cry to say that before the story is finished, Lennon finds himself in a hell with no exit doors and a clearer understanding that no one who participates in a life of crime can be trusted, even if that person is your closest friend. Another understanding that comes through for our Irish wheelman is that anyone can be killed, and in this novel, the body keeps growing right to the very end. Along with the above, the characters of Katie, Saugherty, Wilcoxson, Fieuchevsky, and Perelli, as well as many others, are all colorfully drawn with their own distinct personalities that seem to come alive on the written page in a way that reminds you of a bad dream that stays in the back of your memory long after daylight has seeped through the curtains. The ending, however, leaves you with your mouth hanging over, saying to yourself, "Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Let's back up. This can't be happening!" But, it is happening, and the author pulls no punches in leaving you with an ending that shocks and delivers the goods in a way that few books do. Clearly, The Wheelman is the type of novel with regards to sheer craftsmanship and undeniable talent that every beginning author dreams of writing, and Duane Swierczynski has clearly hit a home run right out of the park his first time at bat. If you enjoy reading top-of-the-line crime fiction like Richard Stark and Max Allan Collins, then this is the book to pick up. After that, you'll want to get the author's other two novels, The Blonde and Severance Package. Happy reading!

THE WHEELMAN is an excellent down-and-dirty crime thriller that explodes into action from the opening pages. Lennon comes across as an anti-hero that could be anybody. After the bank robbery in Philly goes sour, Lennon's just a guy looking to square the deal and get his money back. Unfortunately, he's been set up six ways from Sunday and is being chased by a crooked ex-cop who doesn't mind getting bloody, the Philadelphia Italian mob, and the Russian mafia who are looking to settle a blood score. Duane Swierczynski delivers a full tilt boogie of a novel with THE WHEELMAN. An editor-in-chief of the "Philiadelphia City Paper" and author of the non-fiction book about bank robberies, THIS HERE'S A STICK-UP, Swierczynski already has another novel coming out, THE BLONDE. The book features over-the-top action and tough-guy talk aplenty. It has has several characters and short, punchy chapters. The geography of the Philly area comes alive on the pages, and the characters -- though featured to the extreme in some cases -- come across as real. The thing that kept me reading the whole way through was the sheer frentic pacing, the way everything invariably kept getting worse and worse. But the large cast of characters sometimes overshadowed the plot and the pacing. I sometimes stumbled over who was who, and whether they were for or against Lennon at the moment. The ending wasn't what I expected either. It came together too quickly, and not in the manner I wanted. This is a great little book (only 224 pages) that will keep you nailed to the pages and is remindful of Richard Stark's Parker books as well as many film noir movies. I've already got THE BLONDE pre-ordered and want to see how Swierczynski delivers on his fiction career.

Swierczynski has put together a fun, fast paced crime novel, but the Kindle edition, in addition to being priced nearly as high as the print edition, practically screams out for proofreading. Every chapter shares a formatting error in connection to what I can only assume were intended to be drop capitals. Spelling errors abound -- errors that any spellchecker program should catch. The proofreading issues are occasionally so prevalent within a given chapter as to actually distract from the book. And that's a shame, because the pace is the book's greatest strength and it's diluted by the distractions. The most effective "gimmick" is the fact that the main character, Lennon, is mute. While Lennon's thoughts are directly revealed to the reader from time to time, he also appears in scenes in which he is not the viewpoint character, and his lack of dialog in those scenes emphasizes the shift in POV to a greater extent than in many novels. The breakneck pace may contribute to the novel's greatest (non-formatting related) weakness, however, which is its rather unsatisfying ending. Two hundred plus pages of very effective tension-building creates high expectations for the climax, but Swierczynski just doesn't deliver. The events stop more than they end. On the other hand, that very abruptness mitigates the impact of the weak ending, because The Wheelman is just so much fun right up until the ending, which is to say right up until the last few pages.

This one starts about 100mph and doesn't let up much. Being a fan of Hammett, I liked how the lead character is the kind that can be knocked down, over and over, and keeps on getting back up. I love Swierzinski's writing style. Very noir, but with modern gore. If you can't stand to read about someone getting beaten, you'll probably cringe a lot reading this. People get truly mangled, over and over. Duane is very good at what he does. He doesn't just write the same story over and over. Some of his books are slow burners that grow (Secret Dead Men), others are nitro-injected straight-thru, like this one. He usually has enough characters that keeping a score can at times be handy. Some reviewers disliked the ending. I loved it. Were I to write the screenplay, I'd title it "Die Laughing".