Synopses & Reviews
The Loud Adios is set on the home front during World War II. Tom Hickey is in the army, an M.P. working the Tijuana-San Diego border, when a farm boy draftee about to ship overseas begs for help rescuing his sister from a gang of German and Mexican Nazis.
Review
"A book I missed when it was published late last year I (but which I find is still available) is the fifth and latest winner of the annual competition for the best first private-eye novel. It is THE LOUD ADIOS by Ken Kuhlken.
Set in San Diego and Tijuana in wartime 1943. it is the first of a planned trilogy featuring a San Diego private eye named Tom Hickey, who has become an MP working the Mexican border. A young GI asks Hickey to rescue his sister, who has fallen into the wrong hands and is dancing nude in a Tijuana club. She is childlike, perhaps retarded, a lost innocent.
The kid has been beaten up for his own efforts to save her, and very quickly Hickey gets well-clobbered, too. The action escalates to a full-scale military-like attack mounted by Hickey with a ragtag platoon of Native Americans and Mexicans, including a one-eyed cab driver who is a fine invention. The girl's patrons prove to be a collection of Nazis and Nazi sympathizers who evidently had been planning their own forays against the United States.
What is notable about the novel is that Kuhlken has not only captured the period but also the hard-edged private-eye style that flourished in those same years, as the heirs of Dashiell Hammett emulated his laconic prose, his nonstop action and his protagonists who, like Kuhlken's Hickey, mask their sentimentality and sense of honor with a thin veneer of tough-talking cynicism.
Hickey puts life and savings at risk in a good cause, and, like that famous tonic water, it's curiously refreshing. A very promising debut." --The Los Angeles Times
Review
""The strangest thing about Ken Kuhlkens novel, THE LOUD ADIOS, is that some of the characters come alive in ways one almost wishes they wouldnt. At least this reader was more strongly moved by sympathy and wonder than he had expected to be on contact with three of the novels principal characters.
Im neither an addict of private eye novels nor a particular connoisseur of the genre. But Ive read enough of them to know that I dont really care what happens to the people Im reading about and to suspect that Im not supposed to care. As long as the suspense generated in me keeps my eyes glued to the text and all the conflicting facts and motives that have aroused my curiosity get explained and the loose ends tied up at last, the P.I. novelist has done his job of work and fulfilled his obligations toward me.
Kuhlken easily fulfills those obligations in THE LOUD ADIOS. But I think he does something more. Halfway through the novel, after a scene of terrible mayhem, he expands on a heretofore mysterious character and, from one moment to the next, he raises the unanswerable question of innocence. Is true innocence only possible in the totally non-materialistic individual, in one who may even appear to the experienced person to be mentally retarded.
This question, which Dostoyevski had asked in THE IDIOT, will henceforth throw a long shadow over the action and add to the complexity of Kuhlkens P.I., because Tom Hickey keeps asking that question. The innocent Wendy Rose, whose character Kuhlken explores and illuminates, becomes a powerful and enormously attractive force; she is the cause of whatever happens in two senses: as victim of foul play whom Hickey attempts to save and assymbol of what motivates Hickey in everything he does, for he is--and has always been--in love, as we finally realize, with innocence.
Not that the book ever bogs down in pure cerebration. It is action packed: no P.I. fiction page-turning reader will be disappointed. The time of the action is World War II (April 1943); the place is San Diego-Tijuana; the political and historical background (threat of Japanese military invasion and/or Nazi takeover of Baja) plays an important role. THE LOUD ADIOS is almost perfectly crafted and clearly written by a mainstream novelist.
Kuhlken asks himself and his readers by what values a man shall live, and he answers the question. This means Hickey does a good deal of soul searching along the way, and if he appears to be asking Little Lamb Who Made Thee? he is also asking Who Made Me? So the novel at times takes on an almost unbearable intensity, not in its mayhem but in its human beings and concerns."" --Chico News and Reviews
Synopsis
On the home front during World War II, Military Police border guard Tom Hickey calls on his skills as a private eye to help a naive farm boy retrieve his sister from a sordid Tijuana dive, where she is the prisoner of a gang of German and Mexican Nazis. Reprint.
Synopsis
San Diego private investigator Tom Hickey has traded in his fedora for an M.P. uniform. Though WWII is still raging in Europe and the Far East, things seem quiet for Tom at the Tijuana border. At least until farm boy Clifford Rose enlists Hickey to help rescue his emotionally traumatized sister Wendy from a sordid Tijuana night club. But when Tom finds Wendy enmeshed in a Nazi plot against the U.S., he's unsure if he, Clifford, or their street-wise, one-eyed taxi driver will be able to protect the home front and save Wendy.
About the Author
Ken Kuhlken is a compulsive storyteller who drifted from his home in the southwest to the University of Iowa to study in its Writers' Workshop. After publishing a story in Esquire, he believed he was golden. But the world proved to be a rougher arena than he'd foreseen, and he drifted through eight colleges teaching writing. Meantime, he fathered three amazing children and did three years as a newspaper columnist.