Rating: 
Summary: EXCELLENT
Review: A few years ago I started reading mysteries on the internet. I found sites like Plots With Guns, The Thrilling Detective, and Judas. This is where I first heard of Victor Gischler. At that time he was writing a column for Plots With Guns called Hardboiled Dixie. And he had short stories all over the place.
Gun Monkeys was his first novel and worth the price of admission for the first paragraph alone. It was a wild ride and I couldn't wait for his next.
Last month The Pistol Poets was published. Was it worth the wait? HELL YES. Gischler has outdone himself.
What's the book about? Glad you asked.
Money
Drugs
Lust
Sex
Murder
And that's all in the first chapter.Professor Jay Morgan: A "gypsy" on the academic circuit he teaches on a different campus from year to year. After finding a girl dead in his bed things go from bad to worse. Harold Jenks: A drug dealer from St. Louis who wants a new life and after stealing a dead mans identity he might just get his wish. Timothy Lancaster and Wayne DelPrego: Two poetry students who get caught up Jenks life and drug deal. Ginny Conrad: A student reporter who gets more than she bargained for. Fred Jones: Mysterious university benefactor who wants to be a poet. And Dele Stubbs: The craziest private eye you've ever read about. There are parts of the novel that made me laugh out loud and other parts that left me sick with grief. In all honesty I hated to finish this book but couldn't put it down. Why? Because I knew that once finished I was going to have a long wait until the next Gischler novel is published. Run to the bookstore and get this one Gischler is a genius, you won't be disappointed.
Rating:
Summary: A must read
Review: Eastern Oklahoma University visiting poetry professor Jay Morgan wakes up to find Annie Walsh sleeping so soundly she seems dead in his bed. However, before he can wake her up, Dean Whittaker orders him to come to his office where Jay is assigned a task that only would go to a professor considered lower than the bottom rung of the food chain. In other words as a visiting teacher with a one year contract that can lead to abuse and misuse, Jay must edit the poetry of grumpy geriatric Fred Jones. Morgan detests the works of amateur wannabes who make up much of the poetry groups and contributors at universities, but loathes even more student reporters assigned to harangue him. Shockingly Jones actually has talent as a poet and at body disposal as the girl in Jay's bed sleeps like a corpse because she is a corpse. Other people also are killed as Jay finds himself in the milieu of a true dead poet's society caused by stolen dope leading to the thief hiding as a student. Though the story line seems thirty degrees beyond improbable, readers will not care as THE PISTOL POETS is an amusing irreverent who-done-it tale that satirizes universities and amateur sleuth mysteries. Jay with the help of Jones keeps the tale somewhat focused though clearly even they perform as stand up comics. Not for everyone, readers who get pleasure from a jocular academic mystery with a joke a sentence including some about people that died will want to read this multi-plotted story in which each subplot adds to the humor and ridicule of icons. Harriet Klausner
Rating:
Summary: A must read
Review: Eastern Oklahoma University visiting poetry professor Jay Morgan wakes up to find Annie Walsh sleeping so soundly she seems dead in his bed. However, before he can wake her up, Dean Whittaker orders him to come to his office where Jay is assigned a task that only would go to a professor considered lower than the bottom rung of the food chain. In other words as a visiting teacher with a one year contract that can lead to abuse and misuse, Jay must edit the poetry of grumpy geriatric Fred Jones. Morgan detests the works of amateur wannabes who make up much of the poetry groups and contributors at universities, but loathes even more student reporters assigned to harangue him. Shockingly Jones actually has talent as a poet and at body disposal as the girl in Jay's bed sleeps like a corpse because she is a corpse. Other people also are killed as Jay finds himself in the milieu of a true dead poet's society caused by stolen dope leading to the thief hiding as a student. Though the story line seems thirty degrees beyond improbable, readers will not care as THE PISTOL POETS is an amusing irreverent who-done-it tale that satirizes universities and amateur sleuth mysteries. Jay with the help of Jones keeps the tale somewhat focused though clearly even they perform as stand up comics. Not for everyone, readers who get pleasure from a jocular academic mystery with a joke a sentence including some about people that died will want to read this multi-plotted story in which each subplot adds to the humor and ridicule of icons. Harriet Klausner
Rating:
Summary: Damn good
Review: Gischler is a pro at making violence funny, without losing suspense or tension. His second effort is assured, exciting, and features some of the most memorable characters in recent crime fiction. If you like Elmore Leonard, Dave Barry, Carl Hiaasen, James Crumley, Joe Lansdale, or Donald Westlake, then you must read Victor Gischler.
Rating:
Summary: A Great Mix of Humor and Violence
Review: Here is a wonderful example of black humour as the unlikely mixture of poetry and gangland violence are brought together in a hugely enjoyable story. It's wildly entertaining, managing to go from laugh out loud funny to viciously violent in the blink of an eye. Harold Jenks is a lieutenant to a St Louis drug lord who sees his only opportunity for escape from the life lies in assuming the identity of a scholarship-winning poetry student. Stealing the name Sherman Ellis along with a bag full of his boss's drugs he heads for Eastern Oklahoma University and a new life of academia. Jay Morgan is the poetry professor who doesn't quite know what to make of Jenks / Ellis, but points out to his fellow professors that Ellis' poetry is just as awful as his fellow students. Anyway, Morgan has his mind on more important matters, not the least of which is working out what to do with the body of the dead girl in his bed. Finally, there's the enigmatic Fred Jones, an inspired character giving a refreshing injection of the unusual to the story. Jones is a rich old man who has promised to donate a large sum of money to the university with the understanding that someone (Jay Morgan) agrees to help him to get his poetry published. Not surprising to us, but very surprising to Morgan, the poetry is very, very good. But it's Jones' other talents that Morgan finds he has a more immediate use for. Of course, all sorts of hell and mayhem are rained down upon the quiet university town of Fumbee, when Harold Jenks' former boss and his team of thugs come looking for his drugs. Between this mob and a rogue private investigator who becomes a one man crime wave, there's no shortage of action. The cold violence displayed in the book appealed to the hardboiled reader in me, but it was mixed with plenty of humorous moments which managed to take the wicked edge off and put a smile on my face even as the bodies piled up. After reading this, the old gun lobby catch-cry may have to change to "Guns don't kill people - poets kill people".
Rating:
Summary: Son of a gun
Review: It's tempting to give PISTOL POETS a quick-n-easy blurb description ("It's DEAD POETS SOCIETY as directed by Quentin Tarantino) but that wouldn't come close to describing the originality, humor and muscle of this excellent crime novel. I loved every page of it. And after enjoying this on the heels of GUN MONKEYS, it's official: I'm buying everything Victor Gischler writes.
Rating: 
Summary: It's good.......but.....it's not Gun Monkeys
Review: Maybe I was unfair with my high expectations for this book. If I had never read Gun Monkeys, I would have been pleasantly amused by the Pistol Poets, and might have looked for more from Victor Gischler, (but, frankly, not with a real effort). So, maybe I set myself up for failure because Gun Monkeys was so good. (It really is a great book!) So, I expected a book of at least the humor and "pathos" of GM. What I got was something that seemed more a "kooky kopy" of Dave Barry/Kinky Friedman/Carl Hiaasen, etc. Good writers, but they do the wacky mystery novel better than this - much better. I was disappointed. Most characters are one dimensional, and fairly uninteresting, (with the exception of "Jones", the amatuer poet/mob boss). They have implausable and unbelievable things happen to them, not as a consequence of a believable chain of events, but just to keep the "kookiness" at a high level. About halfway through the novel I lost interest, and put it aside for about two weeks, which I almost never do with a book. Even Professor Jay Morgan, the protagonist, lost my sympathy towards the end. The book had great potential, and I suspect was the victim of editing rewrites - at least I hope that that was the case. I look forward to the next Gischler novel, but if it is no better than the Pistol Poets, it'll be my last. Well, at least in hardback :)
Rating:
Summary: Entertaining and Funny.
Review: This book does call for considerable suspension of belief, but
fiction tends to call on us for that suspension; in this story,
the reader has to be ready to suspend a large amount of belief
and logic, but that said, this is a very entertaining and funny
book.
One point of the story is that we tend to expect the life of a
small-college professor, especially just a visiting prof., to
be rather one-dimensional and even dull. But this particular
prof. suddenly finds himself immersed in those famous trilogy
of high-living qualities, guns, drugs and sex.
He bounces from one problem to another, and along the way, his
friends and students get more and more involved, to the point
where they end up getting shot, beat up, robbed and generallly
knocked around, and the prof. himself seems only interested in
getting a little "action" with some women and in gaining some
employment.
It is difficult to describe crimes and violence and make it
seem funny, knowing as we do the horrible reality of it from
our reading and daily lives, but this author manages to do just
that. When you read some of these violent encounters, and meet
the vicious characters involved, it is hard to laugh, but laugh
we will.
With the multiple plots and characters moving along, the pace
is very good and fast, and the results are sometimes surprising.
Life in a small college town may not be like this, but this writer does make it all sound intriguing.
There are gangsters, drug dealers, college girls on the make,
professors who seem to have little interest in teaching, mysterious mobsters who are hiding out while writing poetry,
and more characters than we can almost keep track of, and they
are all interesting, and we can't help but want to keep reading
about them.
The author does a very nice job of maintaining a very high level
of interest, and most readers will keep wanting more.
Rating:
Summary: A Great Book from a Major New Writer
Review: Victor Gischler's "Gun Monkeys" was my favorite crime novel of 2002, and I'm pleased to report that "Pistol Poets" is even better. The satirical academic novel is a time-honored genre that's hard to pull off any more, but to my knowledge no one has ever tried to cross-breed it with hard-boiled pulp. Gischler succeeds brilliantly and breathes new life into both forms. Pick it up; you won't be sorry.
Rating:
Summary: A Great Book from a Major New Writer
Review: Victor Gischler's "Gun Monkeys" was my favorite crime novel of 2002, and I'm pleased to report that "Pistol Poets" is even better. The satirical academic novel is a time-honored genre that's hard to pull off any more, but to my knowledge no one has ever tried to cross-breed it with hard-boiled pulp. Gischler succeeds brilliantly and breathes new life into both forms. Pick it up; you won't be sorry.
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