Quotes
"Joe Hustle may be the best novel yet from the always reliable Lange: a harrowing and occasionally hilarious character study in resilience. This is a home run."—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Lange describes a sunset with wind that is 'hot and pushy. Black clouds limned with moonglow roll in.' Later, 'a persistent orange glow keeps the stars at bay.' This eloquence stands in stark contrast to the story detailing the state of the counterculture in Southern California, a sad world of idlers, stoners, and parasites, pessimism and depression. Joe Hustle is in this world but not totally of it . . . The uproar in the last quarter of this hard-knocks, atmospheric tale offers hope, however tentative and half-hidden."—Don Crinklaw, Booklist
"The latest novel by a first-rate storyteller refusing to be pigeonholed . . . Lange is best known for cuttingly funny novels about killers, dealers, and con men . . . Here, though not without an assortment of bad deaths, he returns to the romantic mode of The Smack (2017), with a beautifully toned-down story about a pair of mismatched characters who win our sympathy not in spite of their doing and saying dumb things, but because they just can’t help it. It’s a real pleasure to read."—Kirkus Reviews (starred)
“Joe Hustle is downright brilliant—delightfully dark, deeply poetic, and a little bit heartbreaking. Richard Lange’s novel is a masterclass noir filled with the twisted souls and grisly pleasures of down-and-out Los Angeles. I goddamned loved it.”—Ivy Pochoda, author of Sing Her Down
“Lange is Shakespeare with a shank. His writing comes straight from noir’s obsidian heart, and it cuts to the bone. This novel is a dark love song, a long poem about being so damn low you can walk under a snake. Each line Lange writes is a firecracker, and Joe Hustle is a whole lotta dynamite.”—Gabino Iglesias, author of The Devil Takes You Home
“Joe Hustle takes us into a rich, vividly sleazy underworld in the company of a protagonist that we grow to care about deeply. Richard Lange is one of our very best practitioners of noir, and this book is yet another gem.”
—Dan Chaon, author of Sleepwalk
“Lean and mean. Hard-boiled and hard-hitting. Gritty and noir-y and full of hangdog heart. That’s what this piping hot serving of Angeleno crime fiction is. Richard Lange’s Joe Hustle crawls under your skin and stays there till the last page.”
—Gregg Hurwitz, author of Lone Wolf and the Orphan X novels
"Lean and gritty, thoughtful and nuanced, Joe Hustle delivers all the goods, right down to my favorite final page in years. It's a book with the muscle to keep you up all night and the heart to haunt you the next day. I'll read anything Richard Lange writes."—Michael Koryta, author of An Honest Man
"As he spends his life cycling through odd jobs and making questionable life choices, veteran Joe Hustle’s main credo is ‘don’t die.’ A wonderfully bittersweet and darkly humorous tale, Richard Lange’s Joe Hustle is part love story and part recorded memoir of a man whose main goal is to just make it through life alive. Hard to put down and easy to get lost in."—David Swinson, author of The Second Girl and Sweet Thing
Praise for Richard Lange's Rovers: