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Hatchet Job is a Harold Adams Carl Wilcox novel from the middle of his long run, and the Carl Wilcox books are one of the most unusual American crime sequences of the late 20th century. Set in 1930s small-town South Dakota, narrated by Wilcox in a tight first person, the books follow a man who scrapes a living as an itinerant sign painter and who keeps falling into mysteries that the local authorities would rather he ignored.
Adams's great trick is the voice. Carl is an unsentimental Depression-era working man with a particular rural Midwestern moral code, and the prose has the kind of clipped honesty that owes more to Edward Anderson than to the standard PI tradition. The historical detail (the WPA, the prohibition aftershocks, the way a small-town economy actually worked in 1934) is rendered without ostentation.
Hatchet Job involves a country-store proprietor, a missing relative, and the kind of accumulated small-town resentment that produces violence. Four stars. The series is criminally underread.
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