Detour: A Classic Noir Novel of Fate, Crime, and the Road to Los Angeles
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Book Overview
A broke nightclub pianist hitchhikes west toward Los Angeles and walks straight into one of the bleakest traps in American noir. In Detour, Al Roberts is trying to reach the woman he loves, but the road turns into a nightmare of bad luck, desperation, fear, and suspicion. A stranger's death, a dangerous woman, and one terrible decision after another pull him into a tightening spiral where innocence, guilt, and fate become almost impossible to separate.
Martin M. Goldsmith's novel is lean, bitter, fatalistic crime fiction, driven by the same hard-edged atmosphere that later made the film adaptation a landmark of film noir. The story moves through highways, cheap rooms, bars, borrowed identities, and the psychological wreckage of people living close to the edge. Its power comes from the voice of a man who insists he is trapped by circumstance even as his choices keep making the trap worse.
For readers of classic noir, hard-boiled crime fiction, Depression-era and wartime American fiction, psychological suspense, and film-noir source novels, Detour remains a sharp, compact study of doom on the open road. It is a perfect Black Curtain title: fast, dark, morally cornered, and haunted by the possibility that fate may simply be the name people give to their own worst decisions.
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