 Literary Guild Featured Selection |
1994 - Dirty White Boys (Bantam)
A Bob Lee Swagger book - sort of. |
They busted out of McAlester State Penitentiary–three escaped convicts going to ground in a world unprepared for anything like them….Lamar Pye is prince of the Dirty White Boys. With a lion in his soul, he roars–for he is the meanest, deadliest animal on the loose…. Odell is Lamar’s cousin, a hulking manchild with unfeeling eyes. He lives for daddy Lamar. Surely he will die for him….Richard’s survival hangs on a sketch: a crude drawing of a lion and a half-naked woman. For this Lamar has let Richard live…
Armed to the teeth, Lamar and his boys have cut a path of terror across the Southwest, and pushed one good cop into a crisis of honor and conscience. Trooper Bud Pewtie should have died once at Lamar’s hands. Now they’re about to meet again. And this time, only one of them will walk away….
| Stephen Hunter on Dirty White Boys:I had a hunger - literally, a taste in my mouth - for a work that would be starker, more driven, than my earlier books. I knew also that I wanted it ‘American’ somehow. I wanted a plot that gripped like a vise, expressed in a voice of lyric plainness. I wanted lots of violence, gunfights so incandescent they felt like fever dreams and left you sweaty. And when someone died, I wanted you to feel the pain.What I saw was a modern Western lawman, a state trooper; I saw boots and Berettas; I saw his family and his struggle to be a decent man at war with his impulses to be a satisfied one. I knew his name would be Bud. And I knew he’d be hunting an escaped convict.
And I saw that man, too - Lamar Pye. He was everything other men secretly admire: He was as without fear as he was without remorse. In a kinder world, he’d have been a great soldier, an athlete. In the world into which he was born, he’d become a criminal, a bad, bad boy who would know only one thing about life: what to do next.
With these two men - competing priests in the cult of manhood - the book took off and wrote itself. I wasn’t its author but its recording secretary. |
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You can help support my volunteer website to chronicle Stephen Hunter’s writings by buying Dirty White Boys from Amazon.com. You pay the same - but I get a small commission. Click the image at left to buy the paperback, and thanks for your support! |
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December 8th, 2006 at 1:52 pm
Like many Hunter fans, I read “Point of Impact” first. It had been out for a few years but I didn’t even know it.
I’m now REreading all of the Swagger (Dad&Son) books and am getting even more out of them the second time around.
My favorite though is “Dirty White Boys”.
I think it would make a great movie except that it would have to rival “Gone With the Wind” in length.
I really liked all of ‘em, including the one NOT listed on this site, “Havana”.
Gringo/Downingtown, Pa
July 14th, 2008 at 9:23 pm
Do you know the order of his Earl/Swagger novels? I know it says on sites, but incorrectly. I wanna know what’s a sequel or prequal to what in both the Earl swagger and Bob Swagger series.
July 14th, 2008 at 10:01 pm
Here you go.
September 20th, 2008 at 8:56 am
Is Vern Pye from NIGHT OF THUNDER related to Lamar Pye from DIRTY WHITE BOYS?
September 27th, 2008 at 4:04 pm
Hi. Can anyone tell me how Dirty White Boys is related to Bob Lee Swagger? The only relationship between them I can see is that at the end of Hot Springs when Earl is holding baby Bob Lee and the two boys appear and he gets them lemonade. They are Bub and Jimmy Pye. Any advice?
October 3rd, 2008 at 10:00 am
Angela, the connection is made in two places. The first one you found is at the end of Hot Springs like you mentioned. You then have to read Black Light which sheds more light on the Earl and Bob Swagger connection to Dirty White Boys.
October 6th, 2008 at 2:23 am
Angela;
You need to read Black Light it ties so many things together and you go ‘ah-ha’ a lot because you finally realize stuff. SH should have called Black Light ‘Crystal Clear’
To make it short it IS related to Earl and Bob Lee Swagger
November 29th, 2008 at 6:57 pm
If we look at it throughout the history of all the books Earl and Bob Lee have killed some kin over the years.