What's in this book
- Timothy Hallinan's 2012 Junior Bender debut - a Los Angeles burglar moonlights as a private investigator for the criminal underworld
- First book of the Junior Bender series; canonical contemporary American comic crime fiction
- 320 pages of close-first-person Junior Bender narration across his first PI investigation",
- Series continues across Little Elvises, The Fame Thief, Herbie's Game, King Maybe, Fields Where They Lay
- Peter Berkrot audiobook is the definitive audio production
- For readers of the broader Junior Bender series, the Elvis Cole series, and canonical American comic crime
Buy this book
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Crashed is the 2012 debut of Timothy Hallinan's Junior Bender series, and I think it is one of the most genuinely funny crime novels of the last fifteen years. Junior is a professional burglar in Los Angeles who has been quietly running a sideline as an investigator for other criminals, in the kind of role only someone with his particular standing could fill: a fixer for problems that cannot go through legitimate channels. The job that opens Crashed is the rescue of a former child star who is now being blackmailed during the shoot of a porn film a criminal is attempting to coerce her into.
What Hallinan does with this premise is the right thing. Junior is genuinely competent, genuinely funny, and genuinely moral within the bounds of his particular profession. The plot accumulates the kind of comic-thriller machinery that Donald Westlake perfected, with Junior trying to manage half a dozen escalating problems simultaneously and his ex-wife and teenage daughter providing the emotional anchor.
The LA geography is rendered with the kind of affection that the form rewards. The supporting cast (Junior's mentor Herbie, the dangerous Russian client Trey Annunziato) earn their pages. The closing chapters are some of the most satisfying I read in any 2012 crime novel.
Five stars. The right entry point to a sequence of comic-crime novels that deserve a much wider readership. Recommended without reservation.
Related reads
If you liked Crashed
Little Elvises
by Timothy Hallinan
The second Junior Bender novel. A 70s music-industry investigation, a senior-citizen Mafia kingpin, and Hallinan tightening every dial.
The Fame Thief
by Timothy Hallinan
The Fame Thief by Timothy Hallinan review. The 3rd Junior Bender LA comic-crime novel. A 1950s Hollywood blacklist mystery, an ensemble of nonagenarian Mafia, the series at its absolute peak.
Herbie's Game
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Herbie's Game by Timothy Hallinan review. The 4th Junior Bender comic-crime novel. Junior's mentor Herbie Mott dies. Hallinan's most emotionally weighty entry yet.
The Fear Artist
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The Fear Artist by Timothy Hallinan review. The 5th Poke Rafferty Bangkok thriller. A travel-writer father, a dying CIA contact, and the Thai military police as the antagonist. Genuinely terrifying.
For the Dead
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For the Dead by Timothy Hallinan review. The 6th Poke Rafferty novel. A stolen phone, a dead Thai colonel, and Miaow at the center of the crisis. The series in family-thriller form.
The Lincoln Lawyer
by Michael Connelly
The Lincoln Lawyer by Michael Connelly 2005 review. Mickey Haller, a Los Angeles defense attorney who works out of the back of a Lincoln Town Car, takes a case that pulls him into something larger. The novel that launched a series and a film franchise.
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