MIDHEAVEN

from LIBRARY JOURNAL

June 1, 1980

by Carolyn Isaak Meehan

    "'Then I looked and I heard an eagle crying with a loud voice as it flew in Midheaven, Woe, woe, to those who dwell on the earth." Revelation 8:13 provides both the title and the theme for this first novel, which concerns Jodi McGee, an 18-year-old girl who has hidden herself in a secluded cabin, halfway up a mountain range in the Carson range.

    Although Jodi's situation develops from extraordinary circumstances, her search for self-justification and self-acceptance is a universal theme. As the events that brought her there unfold and her insights into friends, acquaintances. and herself are revealed, the turmoil and pressures of the modern teenager’s life, as well as the problems and heartaches of adult life, are vividly portrayed. Kuhlken is a fine author. He uses subtle satire and humor and writes more than adequately from a difficult point of view--the female teenager’s mind.

by Steven Schwartz for the TUCSON WEEKLY

1981

    There are some novels that are so evocative in their description of nature that they are more breathed than read. Ken Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion is one of these. So is Ken Kuhlken's first novel, MIDHEAVEN.

    The heroine is 17-year-old Jodi McGee, who lives out her senior year of high school in a tumultuous rush. She has an affair with her shy and timid English teacher. She moves away from her parents. She becomes a Christian. She renounces the world (and God) to live as a hermit high above Lake Tahoe in the lofty Sierra Nevadas, an area which Kuhlken has a gift for vividly detailing.

    What makes Jodi's life interesting is her sheer, indefatigable drive. She goes from one experience to another, hungrily and abruptly, catching up with new adventures at a better than four minute mile pace. If there is the opposite of a character struggling through a jaded landscape, bored-and stagnated by a routine, then Jodi is it. She makes us remember how sharp and fresh the world can feel during adolescence, what a wellspring we had for longing and possessing and losing and then longing with equal fervor all over again.

    The book has its bleak side, though. Jodi is definitely of her time and has all the trappings peculiar to her era--a certain schizophrenic tendency to live alone in a cabin (with her gun) and hallucinate a maniacal Gypsy woman who periodically rapes her. So much for the modern world.

    Yet, what's most hopeful about Jodi's predicament is simply her. She has a raw energy that refuses to be compromised in the service of an indecent existence. Even when the conditions around her turn sordid, she remains instinctively kind. Most of all she wants to be fully alive and there's much heat and good writing in MIDHEAVEN that goes into making her so.

from the LEMON GROVE REVIEW, 1981

by Max Goodwin

    Ken Kuhlken’s new novel tells of the joys and despairs of an 18-year-old high school senior in the Lake Tahoe area. But she’s not a giggling adolescent. She emerges a fully mature adult with concerns about her own strengths and weaknesses as MIDHEAVEN unfolds on two levels. One level is her diary in which she views the pleasures and pressures which motivate her. The second level is the articulation of her reactions to events which crowd her youthful exuberance and turn her into a despondent recluse who has chosen to live alone with little food or clothing in a windswept log cabin in the High Sierras. Between these existences, she observes herself as well as her peers, their involvement in sex, drugs and born-again Christianity. Jodi is a caring, sensitive girl who changes from an attractive human creature to a near-crone in the story's two short years.

    Her one meaningful love affair is her high school English teacher. It ends tragically but not before she sadly learns that he was far weaker and less mature than she.

    It is a story of beauty in parts. Kuhlken’s descriptive narration holds the reader’s interest and his Jodi creates sympathy as she stoically accepts what she believes she cannot change. Even running to the, mountain-top cabin where the winter winds sweep through the large chinks between the logs is not painful enough to dissuade her from becoming a recluse as she attempts to separate fear from desperation.   

    The characters who touch her are not dragged in by the whim of the author. They are developed as integral parts of the whole: her family, her friends, her teachers, and her one love.

    In the cabin where she has come to let fate guide her destiny, her final and poignant decision is magnificently bittersweet.

from PUBLISHER’S WEEKLY

June 30, 1980

    Why would an 18-year-old girl like Jodi McGhee lock herself up in a mountain cabin outside of Lake Tahoe, swearing she'll never rejoin civilization? The reasons are revealed to us through her journal entries, entries which detail her recent discovery of Jesus, sex, true love (for her idealistic high school English teacher) and the fact that her surrogate older brother is a thief and a junkie. The entries also chronicle the melodramatic events that lead to her boy friend/teacher’s shocking, and unnecessary, death. The problem with teenage journals, and consequently with this novel,* is that they do sound terribly adolescent, tending to be spotty in important details and self-centered. All other characters, therefore, are quite shadowy and vague--Jodi's beloved teacher especially so. What's more, and this is simply a problem with the novel and not its form, it just is not very believable.

from KIRKUS REVIEWS

April 1, 1980

    In the unusual mix of atmospheres around Lake Tahoe-natural scenic beauty, ski resorts, border gambling casinos--Jodi McGee grows up, a high-school senior. After a skiing accident, and already made receptive by adolescent anxieties and Darvon, she accepts Jesus after a born-again friend puts it to her plain. "Try Jesus, Jodi. . . . He loves you the most. The other is darkness forever." But what happens to a born-again high-school girl (no virgin but still tender-aged) when she falls in love-and not just platonically--with her sensitive and gentle young English teacher, Phillip Oswald" A dilemma: "I could throw myself Mr. Oswald, but if he took me I’d have to make him believe; if he didn’t, it would have to be sin; and if he turned me away I think I might have to blame it on Jesus."

   Kuhlken has, with Jodi, created a character new to us--the born again adolescent who’s in-the-know--and he provides her with a grit and honesty that gives the book, when focused on Jodi, a special flavor. But Phillip’s character and his attraction to Jodi are far less well-rendered. And late in the book--with its doom-and-death ending that will tie off the Jodi-Phillip connection--Kuhlken falls victim to a frequent first-novel failing. He begins to overdose on melodrama*: Jodi's best-friend Charley is, improbably*, a heroin addict, and then gets caught for grand theft auto; Phillip has a last, nightmarish spree in a casino; Jodi, flipped-out, takes to a mountain cabin and becomes a hermit. This accumulating chaos triggers events that all but swamp Jodi and her special, unique presence. But she remains an impressive creation, by far the best thing in a promising fiction debut.

from the NASHVILLE BANNER

August 2, 1980

by Roy E. Perry

    MIDHEAVEN is the story of Jodi McGee, an 18 year-old girl disillusioned by the hypocrisies of her family and friends. She drifts, as it were, in midheaven - a twilight world between truth and lies, reality and dreams, reason and madness.

    "I was tired of guilt, tired of trying so hard," she says. "Everything kind was a deadly fraud. All my gods were dead or dying."

    Jodi has reason to be angry and tired of living. Her affair with Phillip Oswald, one of her high school teachers, ends tragically when Phillip overextends himself at a Reno gambling casino, suffers heavy losses, and commits suicide.

    Jodi has other problems: Her friend and lover, Charley, comes home from Vietnam addicted to heroin and has numerous scrapes with the law; her family misunderstands her and nags at her, adding fuel to the fire of her teen-age rebellion; and her pastor and church, distressingly irrelevant to her needs, talk past her as if speaking a different language.

    Harassed by these pressures, Jodi drops out of the rat race and escapes to a lonely mountain cabin in the Carson Range near Lake Tahoe. In this beautiful region of Mount Tallac and Emerald Bay, in the land of the Washoes and the Paiutes, Jodi struggles to find herself and to recapture the lost meaning of life.

    Told in the first person by Jodi, MIDHEAVEN contains complicated shifts of time sequence: excerpts from her diary, events in the valley and on the mountain, and weird fantasies and dreams.

    MIDHEAVEN may shock, disturb, and even offend the reader. Kuhlken sometimes writes as if he flunked Theology 101*; nevertheless his first novel contains impressive sociological and psychological insights and is not without redeeming features.

    A native of San Diego, Kuhlken lives with his wife and two children in Tucson, where he teaches at the University of Arizona. His short stories have appeared in ESQUIRE and VIRGINIA QUARTERLY REVIEW.

from SAN DIEGO MAGAZINE

January, 1981

by Frances Bardacke

    MIDHEAVEN is a novel of growing up in California. Not Southern California, although Ken Kuhlken who now lives with his wife and children in Arizona is a native of San Diego, but in the South Tahoe area of the Sierras and the Nevada border. It is there that Jodi McGee learns to find her values in a world of conflicting loves. It is a tale of gambling with life and love as well as property. Kuhlken believes it is the process of putting to risk life, love and faith in God that makes the difference. It is that game of chance that his characters have to play to prove themselves. Jodi tells her story in the first person, partially in diaries from the past and partially after the crisis in a mountain hideaway. The novel has a tension that holds its reader and a verisimilitude that convinces even though it borders at times on the bizarre. All in all MIDHEAVEN is a fascinating novel of coming of age in contemporary California.

from Anne Tyler on behalf of P.E.N.’s Ernest Hemingway Award committee MIDHEAVEN one of four finalists)

May 11, 1981

    The pace, clarity and assurance of MIDHEAVEN made it a pleasure to read. We found Jodi a compelling modern-day heroine, and her story held us all to the end.

THE LOUD ADIOS

from the SAN DIEGO TRIBUNE

August 16, 1991

by Charles Harrington Elster

    IF YOU haven't yet heard of local writer Ken Kuhlken, it's time to take a look. There's a pleasant surprise in store for you; especially if you're a fan of mystery and' suspense.

    Back in 1980, Kuhlken's mainstream novel MIDHEAVEN (Viking), was nominated for a Hemingway Prize. Now, with THE LOUD ADIOS -- which was named Best First Private Eye Novel of the year by the Private Eye Writers of America -- Kuhlken takes the mystery/detective genre by storm. This hard drinking, wild-riding, muscularly written book has keenly drawn characters and a ripping plot that will make you think the pages are turning by themselves. And if that’s not good enough, readers who enjoy fiction with a local backdrop will get an extra kick from the setting.

    It’s 1943, and World War II is raging in Europe and the Pacific. But for Tom Hickey, a private dick who's become an MP assigned to the San Diego-Tijuana border crossing, there’s another war going on right here at home ─ inside his own head. At 37, Hickey feels beaten, washed up. His wife has left him for his ex-business partner, taking with her Hickey’s beloved 14-year -old daughter.  "You’re a three-time loser," his wife sneers in her farewell note.

    "Hickey would’ve fought back for his daughter," writes Kuhlken, "But he hadn't even finished a two-week drunk when Uncle Sam jumped in. Saw him down and figured it was the right time to kick him." Hickey tried to forget, but even a river of mescal can’t blot out the pain. And his dreams keep getting in the way, dredging up forlorn images of his lost daughter and the chance he’d passed up or that passed him by.

    The bad dreams are soon interrupted by a real nightmare of depravity and death. One night at the border, while Hickey is half-heartedly keeping a lid on drunken servicemen returning from Mexico, a young Navy recruit named Clifford Rose staggers to the gate, bruised and bleeding from a vicious beating outside a TJ strip joint.

    Clifford seems haunted and obsessed by something, and begs for Hickey’s help. When Hickey reluctantly follows him back across the border to the strip joint, he learns (the hard way of course) what is troubling the boy. A stripper they call La Rosa Blanca--a stunning beauty with a mesmerizing aura of angelic innocence--is Clifford’s mentally retarded sister, Wendy Rose.

    "It might have been history’s ugliest year," Hickey muses, "with half the world burning and shooting at each other, and kids like Wendy Rose getting preyed on by rats like the one Clifford said had brought her over the border and dealt her into some kind of slavery there."

    Hickey enlists the aid of his faithful PI partner, Leo Weiss, and a spunky, one-eyed Mexican cab driver named Tito. Together with Clifford, they penetrate the sordid underworld of Tijuana to rescue Wendy Rose. All hell breaks loose when they learn that her captors not only are Germans but also wealthy and powerful Nazi sympathizers who are plotting to take over Baja California ─ and Lázaro Cárdenas, the ex-Presidente of Mexico, may himself be involved. What's more, Hickey finds out the Nazis are sitting on a huge fortune in gold, which he decides he’s going to get a piece of even if it kills him.

    In Tom Hickey, Kuhlken has fashioned a sympathetic hero that detective fiction buffs should find both comfortably familiar and refreshingly original. He carefully develops Hickey’s fascination with Wendy Rose, evoking his restless struggle between compassion and desire. And without getting in the way of his story, he focuses a subtle eye on how it’s hard sometimes to see the difference between honor and selfishness, nobility and greed.

    Kuhlken also manages to work in some nice description of Tijuana and San Diego during the war. Here's one example, as Hickey stands by his office window overlooking Broadway:

    "Even at 3:30, before the rush, hundreds of pedestrians scurried below. Stockbrokers heading toward the Grant Grille for a shot of pedigree Scotch. Navy wives pouring off the buses streaming into Woolworth’s. Pretty girls from Visalia, Barstow, Cucamonga, running in their wobbly high heels out of the YWCA where they shared little closet-sized rooms. In this last year and some, since Pearl Harbor, San Diego had grown to be the most crowded city on earth. You couldn’t get a hotel room without bribing a desk clerk, and the Chamber of Commerce had declared, ‘Don't come here until after the war.’"

    In THE LOUD ADIOS, Kuhlken proves he can write in the mystery genre as well as anyone today. The scenes are expertly structured and the prose is visual and tense. This is a writer fully in control of his craft, one who has certainly earned his place in the vanguard of San Diego's literary community.

from the SAN DIEGO UNION

September 1, 1991

by Robert Wade

    For a city its size, San Diego has been under-represented in the number of mystery writers it has spawned. So it’s always a pleasure to welcome another local product to the ranks, especially when the newcomer demonstrates above-average talent. Which La Mesa’s Ken Kuhlken certainly does; his whodunit has already been named the best first private eye novel of the year by the Private Eye Writers of America.

    For his story, Kuhlken takes us back to the San Diego of 1943. World War II is raging and Tom Hickey, an overage, burned-out and recently drafted private eye, has drawn MP duty at the Mexico border crossing. He is approached by young Clifford, a fellow soldier, who begs him to rescue his sister Wendy from the clutches of a Tijuana white slavery ring. One glimpse of the gorgeous Wendy ─ possibly retarded, certainly traumatized ― persuades Hickey to go to her aid. However, the case is more complicated than he assumes, involving Nazi agents, a bizarre religious cult and a fortune in stolen gold. Enlisting his civilian partner and a one-eyed Tijuana taxi driver, Hickey sounds the charge and the battle for the lass and the loot is on.

    In case you're wondering, the good guys win. So does the reader with this rock‘em, sock‘em homegrown thriller.

from a source whereof no evidence remains 

1991

    THE LOUD ADIOS was the winner of the 1990 PWA/St. Martin's Best First Private Eye Contest, and let me tell you right away that at the price they're asking, it's a bargain.

    Not many authors these days write hard, tough Black Mask fiction any more--short, terse sentences that never pull a punch, and characters who never give an inch--and it's always a pleasure to find one who does. This is it, guys, the real stuff.

    PI Tom Hickey is doing double duty for the Army as an MP watching the border between San Diego and Tijuana. The year is 1943, the war is on, and refugees and politics are on everyone’s minds. Then Hickey takes on a job for a solider about to ship overseas--to rescue a girl doing nude shows in a rundown bar south of the border. The guy claims she is his sister; to Hickey she looks like an angel on earth.

    What neither Hickey nor his client knows is that the stakes are much higher than this--there may or may not be a plot by Germans in Mexico to take over all of Baja California, there may or may not be a fortune in gold available for the taking.

    Unfortunately,* the girl, Wendy Rose, is either all or in part mentally retarded, or she has been so badly traumatized that she does not know reality from fantasy, either of which makes a tougher job even worse.

    The title sounds like Chandler, on the back jacket is the inevitable quote from someone comparing Kuhlken to Chandler, and as usual, the Santa Ana winds are prominently mentioned, but to my mind, most of the book reminded me more of Dashiell Hammett, with a bit of Paul Cain* thrown in. (Kuhlken, by the way, has written one other book, MIDHEAVEN, which according to the flap on the back of dust jacket, was nominated for a Hemingway Prize. He's obviously got the right technique.)

    Unfortunately,* there is a down side to all of this. I wouldn't call the plot line as straight as a string, but in many ways it's like a one-note samba, that simply goes on too long. Until Wendy Rose is finally rescued, Hickey and her brother simply make one sortie across the border after the other, each time getting a bit more daring, bringing along additional reinforcements with each trip, and continuing on until the job is done.

    This takes over half the book. The remainder consists of gathering weaponry, forces and (most importantly) nerve, and then (but not till then) finally going back to finish the job--either making themselves rich, or saving America from a growing evil to the south. Or both, or neither--and that is something I simply shouldn't tell you.

    This is more than mere quibbles, but even without my seeing the rest of the entries in the contest, I think the judges made the right choice. Even though he hasn't made much of his life so far, Tom Hickey is no loser in my book.

from CHICO (California) NEWS AND REVIEWS

by Michael Baumann

1991

SONG OF INNOCENCE

    The strangest thing about Ken Kuhlken’s novel, THE LOUD ADIOS, is that some of the characters come alive in ways one almost wishes they wouldn’t. At least this reader was more strongly moved by sympathy and wonder than he had expected to be on contact with three of the novel’s principal characters.

    I’m neither an addict of private eye novels nor a particular connoisseur of the genre. But I’ve read enough of them to know that I don’t really care what happens to the people I’m reading about and to suspect that I’m not supposed to care. As long as the suspense generated in me keeps my eyes glued to the text and all the conflicting facts and motives that have aroused my curiosity get explained and the loose ends tied up at last, the P.I. novelist has done his job of work and fulfilled his obligations toward me.

    Kuhlken easily fulfills those obligations in THE LOUD ADIOS. But I think he does something more. Halfway through the novel, after a scene of terrible mayhem, he expands on a heretofore mysterious character and, from one moment to the next, he raises the unanswerable question of innocence. Is true innocence only possible in the totally non-materialistic individual, in one who may even appear to the experienced person to be mentally retarded.

    This question, which Dostoyevski had asked in THE IDIOT, will henceforth throw a long shadow over the action and add to the complexity of Kuhlken’s P.I., because Tom Hickey keeps asking that question. The innocent Wendy Rose, whose character Kuhlken explores and illuminates, becomes a powerful and enormously attractive force; she is the cause of whatever happens in two senses: as victim of foul play whom Hickey attempts to save and as symbol of what motivates Hickey in everything he does, for he is--and has always been--in love, as we finally realize, with innocence.

    Not that the book ever bogs down in pure cerebration. It is action packed: no P.I. fiction page-turning reader will be disappointed. The time of the action is World War II (April 1943); the place is San Diego-Tijuana; the political and historical background (threat of Japanese military invasion and/or Nazi takeover of Baja) plays an important role. THE LOUD ADIOS is almost perfectly crafted and clearly written by a mainstream novelist.

    Kuhlken asks himself and his readers by what values a man shall live, and he answers the question. This means Hickey does a good deal of soul searching along the way, and if he appears to be asking Little Lamb Who Made Thee? he is also asking Who Made Me? So the novel at times takes on an almost unbearable intensity, not in its mayhem but in its human beings and concerns.

from the LOS ANGELES TIMES

June 14, 1992

by Charles Champlin

    A book I missed when it was published late last year I (but which I find is still available) is the fifth and latest winner of the annual competition for the best first private-eye novel. It is THE LOUD ADIOS by Ken Kuhlken.

    Set in San Diego and Tijuana in wartime 1943. it is the first of a planned trilogy featuring a San Diego private eye named Tom Hickey, who has become an MP working the Mexican border. A young GI asks Hickey to rescue his sister, who has fallen into the wrong hands and is dancing nude in a Tijuana club. She is childlike, perhaps retarded, a lost innocent.

    The kid has been beaten up for his own efforts to save her, and very quickly Hickey gets well-clobbered, too. The action escalates to a full-scale military-like attack mounted by Hickey with a ragtag platoon of Native Americans and Mexicans, including a one-eyed cab driver who is a fine invention. The girl’s patrons prove to be a collection of Nazis and Nazi sympathizers who evidently had been planning their own forays against the United States.

    What is notable about the novel is that Kuhlken has not only captured the period but also the hard-edged private-eye style that flourished in those same years, as the heirs of Dashiell Hammett emulated his laconic prose, his nonstop action and his protagonists who, like Kuhlken’s Hickey, mask their sentimentality and sense of honor with a thin veneer of tough-talking cynicism.

Hickey puts life and savings at risk in a good cause, and, like that famous tonic water, it’s curiously refreshing. A very promising debut.

from PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

June 28, 1991

    Winner of the publisher's annual Best First Private Eye Novel contest, this brooding, atmospheric tale set during WW II stirs a heady brew of corruption, Nazis, a blameless young girl and a fortune in gold. PI Tom Hickey, drafted in his late 30s and deserted by a wife who deems him both too honorable and too poor, agrees to help young soldier Clifford Rose rescue his beautiful but simpleminded young sister, Wendy, from the Tijuana dive where she dances nude. Hickey, an MP stationed at the border crossing near San Diego, Calif., has useful connections. But the mission is complicated by the sinister Señor Zarp, a Nazi thug using Wendy in certain bloody rites designed to rally the local German populace and corrupt Mexican officials in their support of the fatherland. Freeing Wendy, Clifford is killed and Hickey finds himself the guardian of an otherworldly innocent to whom he is painfully attracted. When she tells him about a mountain of gold being held by Zarp and an obscenely wealthy Mexican family, Hickey, with the aid of a few poor Indian laborers, attempts to commandeer the loot and derail a Nazi invasion scheme. Kuhlken weaves a complex plot around a complex man, a weary hero who tries to maintain standards as all around him fall to temptation.

THE VENUS DEAL

from the SAN FRANCISCO EXAMINER and CHRONICLE

May 9, 1993

by Peter Handel

MYSTERY, MURDER AND MAYHEM EVERYWHERE

    For fans of the inveterate private eye, though, it's still hard to rival the burgeoning nouveau riche fantasyland of World War II era Southern California as an ideal setting for detectives and their clients. With a perfect mix of an esoteric cult reminiscent of those found in Dashiell Hammett's writing, descriptions of neighborhoods and ethnic mobsters in the vein of Raymond Chandler and a tough but thoughtful detective not unlike Lew Archer, THE VENUS DEAL by Ken Kuhlken is a rich and satisfying excursion into the world of mean streets and twisted family secrets.

    Tom Hickey is a family man and sometime PI who co-owns. a nightclub catering to the navy personnel and related shipyard workers in the San Diego of 1942. When his club's top draw, a mythically talented and beautiful 17-year-old big band singer named Cynthia Moon, vanishes, Hickey sets out to track her down. The search takes him deep into her family’s sordid past, with near-tragic implications for himself as well Cynthia. Awash in a sheen of slightly hallucinatory prose, THE VENUS DEAL never falters.

from KIRKUS REVIEWS

March 1,1993

    A prequel to THE LOUD ADIOS that finds PI Tom Hickey sharing ownership of a San Diego bar with suspected mobster Paul Castillo back in 1942. When Cynthia Moon, the singer who's been luring servicemen and wartime workers into the bar, goes AWOL with a loaded gun, Hickey hires himself to track her down. Cynthia's luridly written journal--which blames her mother Venus for the deaths of Venus's sister Ophelia, Cynthia's protector Madame Esme, and semi-famous poet Will Lashlee--indicates that Cynthia’s gone after Venus’s lecherous spiritual leader, a Theosophist Master whose former experimental community, Otherworld, collapsed in a cloud of death and mystery. Even after Cynthia returns, Tom will have to deal with more mobsters, a plot to buy up the land around the town of Dunsmuir, and a moment when he’ll have to decide whether to save the Master from a hired killer--and then have to live with the consequences.

    Tangled and murky ─ long on violence, bloodlust, atmosphere, and loose ends.*

*What loose ends? Show me even one.

from the SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE

1993

By Robert Wade

    When the armed forces reject him following Pearl Harbor, Tom Hickey figures that if he can't fight in World War 11, he can at least profit from it. Not as a private eye, his sometime profession, but as part-owner of a nightclub catering to the servicemen and defense workers flooding into hitherto sleepy San Diego. The club proves to be a big success, thanks largely to Cynthia Moon, a gorgeous young singer, whose voice and other attributes have the male clientele swooning.

    Imagine, then, Hickey's dismay when Cynthia disappears and the club's profits follow suit. Nothing to do but to don his private eye hat and track down the missing chanteuse.

    That’s easier said than done because the young woman has led a most bizarre life--that is, if her lurid diary can be believed.

    Following Cynthia’s trail, Hickey encounters her family, as dysfunctional as any before Charlie Manson’s. Father Henry is an embittered man dying in a nursing home; mother Venus and older sister belong to a sinister religious cult led by a priapic Indian guru.

    There’s little love lost among them, and when a hit man arrives on the scene, Hickey feels sure a murder has been arranged.

    Though burdened with personal problems--his nightclub business partner is probably a crook, his adored wife is possibly unfaithful--Hickey lifts the lid on an unsavory stew of rape, fraud and madness. While he cleans up the mess as best he can, almost no one comes out a winner, including Hickey.

    With his second Tom Hickey caper (a prequel to the first), San Diego’s Ken Kuhlken establishes himself as a major player in the hard-boiled thriller field. His story is complex and convincing, he tells it with plenty of snap, crackle and pop, and his re-creation of wartime America is right on the mark.

from TOWER BOOKS NEWSLETTER

1993

    Set in an era when patriotism ran high, Kuhlken mixes together the necessary ingredients and creates a compelling story. He provides a strong sense of place and a detailed mystery, but more importantly, a finely tuned feel for time.

Set before his previous novel, THE LOUD ADIOS, HIS CHARACTER, Tom Hickey, returns in a tale that trudges deeply through the American psyche.

Christmas, San Diego, 1942. This is the time of Pearl Harbor. A time of blackouts (". . . not a single Christmas light sparkled.") A time when loaded gunnery ships sat off coastal America and a time when, if you went out after dark, ". . .more likely it was to drink or pray than to shop." A time of military mechanisms, civilian efforts, and the varying diversions to relieve the consuming stress.

    Hickey, a sometime PI, has invested in a successful San Diego nightclub. Catering to the military/wartime nightlife, the club’s main attraction is a young female singer named Cynthia Moon. The other highlight is that Hickey’s partner, Paul Castillo, has a source for such wartime no-no’s as real butter, lean red meat and Maine lobster.

    When Cynthia disappears, business falls precariously and Hickey assumes responsibility for finding her. The task takes him away from other impending issues (his wife may be involved with Castillo) and it becomes an ambitious quest that reveals a strange and tragic past.

    Steeped in Chandler’s tradition, Hickey finds himself drawn into a web of deceit, scandal and murder. Cynthia has ties with the mob; her mother, Venus, is harboring a dark past and now belongs to a portentous cult; her father, is a dispirited dying man broken by the woman he loved; and amongst all this is the "war."

    Kuhlken’s portraits of wartime America, the San Diego bar scenes, and the ardent war efforts become heartfelt. So do the streets with weary Christmas shoppers and the innocent young boys waiting their turn to tour world madness. Kuhlken knows this time and uses it well.

from PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

March 1, 1993

    Beautiful prose and a hopelessly convoluted plot* distinguish this prequel to Kuhlken's well-received THE LOUD ADIOS of 1991. It’s winter of wartime 1942 and San Diego nightclub owner and sleuth Tom Hickey is trailing his missing headliner, the enchanting chanteuse Cynthia Moon. After taking her diary and a drawing of three tattooed figures from her rented room, he locates her embittered father dying in a nursing home and then heads into the Sierra Nevada mountains.* There, in a period piece of Twin Peaks-style lunacy, he finds a cult, including Cynthia’s acquisitive mother, Venus, living in the Otherworld* with the Master, the Bitch, Laurel, and assorted other flawed acolytes, all intending to harm the missing girl, who is on a mission of her own. Hickey's personal odyssey is a subplot that works much better. His lot, embracing a semi-criminal PI partner, pushy wife and daughter poised at the edge of full-fledged Lolitadom, could turn anyone to crime or even to a religion that preaches the superiority of little men in lonely hillside caves and the value of money. Though it is sometimes chaotic, this intriguing novel will have readers looking eagerly for the, projected third volume.

*Hopelessly convoluted for those who only read on the beach or in subways.

from the LOS ANGELES TIMES

April 11, 1993

by Charles Champlin

    Ken Kuhlken’s THE LOUD ADIOS won a prize as best first private-eye novel in 1991. It was the first of a projected trilogy set in San Diego just before and during World War II. The second book, THE VENUS DEAL now appears as a prequel to the first.

    Tom Hickey, a military policeman when we first met him, is this time an ex-cop who is both a private-eye and part-owner of a nightclub, which is flourishing because his dubious partner can lay hand to black-market steaks and gas coupons.

    As before, a missing femme fatale drives the plot. In THE LOUD ADIOS it was a young GI's kid sister, forced to dance nude in a Tijuana nightclub. This time it is Cynthia Moon, the gorgeous chanteuse from Hickey's own club. The plot has a complexity that might have given even Raymond Chandler pause, the more complicated because a terrible past is revealed partly through Cynthia's journal, which is sometimes coded and not necessarily trustworthy at best. She has been abused, there has been a murder and Hickey does another in a good cause. Never did a damsel in distress cause so much distress.

    As in the first novel, Kuhlken captures the wartime Southern California past in remarkable detail; that the new book lacks is the straight-ahead* storytelling that also characterizes the private-eye form but that is here weakened by the awkward* handling of time.

*translation ─ he prefers a perfectly linear storyline.

from the CHICO NEWS AND REVIEWS

June 3, 1993

by Mike Baumann

HIDDEN HORRORS

    Ken Kuhlken has written another whodunit, THE VENUS DEAL. It contains enough hints of the horrors hidden behind mother-daughter and sister-sister relationships to send shivers up our spines.

    The book raises questions about the general awfulness of human beings and suggests some rather frightening answers. Luckily, it does so in a way that leaves us an out. It is the presence in the novel of a few human beings who are what we hope we are most of the time: decent, sincere, compassionate. Also, the nightmare Kuhlken involves us in seems to be crying out at every moment that we are going to wake up in a second or two and find out it isn’t so! Nothing is so. Human beings aren’t this fiendish!

    Surely, the world is a better place than we thought it was a moment ago, and Kuhlken’s main character is going to wake up, too, by golly, and discover a solution that is totally different from the one he has arrived at!

    THE VENUS DEAL is the second in what may become a series of Hickey novels. Tom Hickey is a fortyish private eye during the Second World War in San Diego who tries to understand the crazy world he lives in and still remain an honest man.

    Beautiful young women seem to be always crossing his path and arousing his righteous instincts, whereupon he becomes their Lancelot. It goes without saying that these instincts are more fatherly than wolfishly masculine, even if other characters in Kuhlken’s books, including Hickey's own wife, continue to question his involvement with such pretty young innocents.

    This time, the girl is Cynthia Moon, a 17-year-old singer in Hickey’s own nightclub--an enterprise he got into on a part-time basis together with what turns out to be a disreputable partner whose actions Hickey has reasons to become increasingly suspicious of.

    The world Cynthia Moon leads Hickey into is that of an occult religious sect dominated by Cynthia's mother Venus and a Satanic man who personifies our fears of the Rasputin in our midst. Traditional notions of good and evil are tested against what Kuhlken seems to be saying about women, namely, that they fear and abominate all other women, but most particularly their own mothers, daughters, and sisters.*

    Just as Dashiell Hammett, in THE GLASS KEY, suggested an emotional bond between men that, in the '50s, would have been called an unconscious homoerotic relationship and might, today, be designated as no more than the expression of a normal if somewhat bizarre power game (why else would a worldly, intelligent Ned Beaumont allow himself to be beaten virtually to death time after time by the henchmen of the unworldly, primitive Paul Madvig and still remain loyal to him and even try to protect him from a society he has wronged?), so Kuhlken, in THE VENUS DEAL, suggests a searing rivalry, a deathly distrust between women that would rend society, were it to recognize emotions and motives so destructive and permit them to flourish.

    It is in this way, I think, more than in his tough-guy prose or his detailed descriptions of persons and things, that Kuhlken is genuinely afflicted by what George Bush not too long ago called--in a kind of despair, because he himself didn't have it--"the vision thing."

    THE VENUS DEAL has an odd contemporary relevance. We need only think of what happened at Waco. What Kuhlken writes about is real enough. Perhaps the extent to which he allows us to get to know Venus will help us, next week or next month, to deal with the next David Koresh.

*Whoa. These are the women of one family. I meant women, and men too, have the potential for such fears and hatreds.

from MYSTERY NEWS

July 1993

    Very surprisingly, this sequel to St. Martin's best first P.I. novel of 1990, THE LOUD ADIOS, is actually a prequel. ADIOS was a wonderful tale set in San Diego and Tijuana, as temporarily, P.I. Tom Hickey, found himself an M.P. in the Army and having to deal with a young soldier’s attempts to rescue his sister from the clutches of some Mexican gangsters. One of the strengths of ADIOS was the baggage that Tom carried with him, adding depth to his character and fueling the fires that drove him to play Lancelot. Here we have all that baggage beautifully displayed in a tense, tight package of noir-like stylization. Tom is struggling to keep his marriage to Madeline together, especially for the sake of his daughter, Elizabeth. Competition from his nightclub partner, Paul Castillo, and the loss of Cynthia Moon, the sensational lead singer for their club’s band, means Tom must dust-off his P.I. skills. With detective partner, Leo Weiss, Tom sets out on the trail of Cynthia, meeting her dying father, her cult-obsessed mother, and the hired killer set loose by the naive girl.

    An adeptly created historical novel, Kuhlken creates WWII San Diego, Denver and Tijuana, with both their beauties and their flaws, and fills this setting with fascinatingly complex characters. But the real strength of this book lies in the dense writing where mysticism, a journal full of poetic folklore, and the noir-like dialog push an especially complex plot from start to finish. Along with Gaylord Dold and Max Allan Collins, Kuhlken joins the ranks of P.I. authors presenting their character in a historical setting and pulling the deed off with skill and grace. Highly recommended.

Gary

THE ANGEL GANG

from the SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

8/07/94

by Peter Handel

    THE ANGEL GANG is the final volume of Ken Kuhlken's trilogy featuring Tom Hickey (THE LOUD ADIOS and last year's THE VENUS DEAL). Hickey, one of detective fiction's most original and intriguing creations, is living at Lake Tahoe in the early ‘50s.

    Contemplating a quiet life and the forthcoming birth of his child by his second wife, Wendy, whom he rescued from horrific circumstances in THE LOUD ADIOS, Hickey gets a call to return to San Diego and help another woman from his past, the mentally unstable Cynthia Moon. "Hickey suddenly recalled what it meant to fraternize with Cynthia. Like a gifted preacher, every meeting she’d lure you a step deeper into her bizarre world."

    He agrees to go south for a few days but is nervous about leaving Wendy behind. In the course of getting Cynthia out of trouble, Hickey pits one group of mobsters against another and before he can return home to Tahoe, a key player is kidnapped in revenge. His puzzle is to determine which faction is the culprit so he can orchestrate a rescue.

    THE ANGEL GANG is much more than a straightforward whodunit. Beneath the surface, it's a tense psychological portrait of an obsessive man who mistakenly believes he's finally overcome a troubled past, ready to settle down and absorb the unconditional love of his new wife.

    "Wendy had cured him of the suspicion that either he possessed an uncanny knack for sabotaging every break he got or life was rigged against him." Yet when the kidnap occurs, he is paralyzed. "You only have to glimpse the universe from the wrong angle, he thought, and it looks as if all the malevolent forces of nature, the cruelest angels and demons, have made a pact to liquidate you."

from KIRKUS REVIEWS

June 15, 1994

    San Diego shamus Tom Hickey, now retired to Tahoe with his very pregnant wife, Wendy, thinks the summons from hellion Cynthia Jones, who's sitting in a San Diego jail for torching her hated brother-in-law’s house with him inside, has plopped him into the middle of an updated RED HARVEST (not very updated since it’s 1950). He'll buzz down the coast, make enough waves to set the probable killers ─ rival gangsters Mickey Cohen and Angelo Paoli ─ against each other, and then sit back while the two gangs rub each other out. But the plan develops an unexpected twist: Somebody (well-entrenched Cohen? New Jersey emigre Paoli?) gets mad enough to snatch childlike Wendy, while another pair of thugs grab Tom’s Old partner, Leo Weiss, and starts working him over real bad, real slow. With his great instincts and contacts, Tom doesn’t have to ride herd on the case in San Diego; after dropping a few dark threats that spring Cynthia from jail, he high-tails it back home, ostensibly to persuade Wendy's kidnappers that he’s off the case but actually to convince them that they messed with the wrong expectant mother.

    Fast and fervid as the first two installments of the trilogy, with detective logic overwhelmed by enough hired guns for a whole season of hallucinatory TV shootouts.

from the LOS ANGELES TIMES

8/14/94

by Charles Champlin

    THE ANGEL GANG concludes Ken Kuhlken’s trilogy set in and about San Diego in the years just before, during and just after World War II. Now 44 and bald, Tom Hickey, sometime cop, MP and private eye, is playing sax for a living up in Tahoe, with his wife Wendy, whom he had rescued in an earlier caper, expecting a baby.

    The past beckons: a call from a singer he had also helped in an earlier caper, now under arrest for murder and demanding his help. Subtlety is not Hickey's M.O., and he pokes enough anthills back in San Diego to endanger himself and his wife, who is kidnapped in Tahoe, to make Hickey back off.

    The new book is swift and active, but the first of the trilogy, THE L0UD ADIOS, remains the best of the three in its recapturing of the period and its portrait of the younger, even wilder Hickey.*

* I wish Champlin had read this book on its own terms instead of wanting it to be like another.

from PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

July 11, 1994

    The final book of Kuhlken's WW II trilogy, begun with The Loud Adios, which won the Private Eye Writer’s of America Best First PI Novel Award in 1991, is set in the 1951 world of hot jazz, hard-boiled fiction and black-and-white television. PI Tom Hickey, who plays jazz saxophone and clarinet, has set off from his Tahoe, Nevada, cabin and his sweet, slightly slow, pregnant wife Wendy to investigate the murder charge against Cynthia Tucker Jones, an old girlfriend,* in San Diego. Hickey's involvement sets off a chain of kidnappings which endanger the lives of his Tahoe neighbor, a casino owner; his former partner, 70-year-oId Leo Weiss; Wendy; their unborn child; and a collection of ne’er-do-wells. During Hickey’s travels from snowbound Tahoe to sunny San Diego and back, Weiss has his nails plucked out, his kneecaps cracked and eyelids slashed, while Wendy is dragged through the woods by two thugs. The angels of the title intercede to save most, but not all, of the worthy characters in this gritty, brutal tale, which is tenderized by the PI's near palpable devotion to his wife.

*She wasn't any girlfriend of his.

from the SAN DIEGO TRIBUNE

August 21, 1994

by Robert Wade

    Ever wonder what San Diego was like in the 194Os? (Those who were here at that time need not answer.) Well, Bunky, if stepping back into our city's past is what you hanker for, Ken Kuhlken is an author you should meet

    Kuhlken, a local talent, has chosen to write about his hometown, not as it is but as it was a half century ago, in a series of hard-bitten whodunits. The first two, THE LOUD ADIOS and THE VENUS DEAL, depicted San Diego during World War II, as seen through the eyes of middle-aged private eye Tom Hickey.

    In this one, No. 3, it’s now 1949, and Hickey has abandoned the city's postwar turmoil in favor of tranquil Lake Tahoe. There, with his young and very pregnant wife, Wendy, whom he rescued from a Tijuana bordello, he settles down to a new life, sans violence.

    However, much as he would like to, Hickey cannot shuck the past completely. It pops up again in the person of Cynthia Tucker, an amoral young woman whose troubles Hickey has attempted to solve before, for the most part unsuccessfully. Cynthia is in a real jam this time--she's being held for the arson death of her brother-in-law. Won’t good old Tom help her out?

    No thanks; good old Tom knows from experience that Cynthia is all-around bad news. Wendy, a naive and trusting lass, sees things differently and insists that he ride to Cynthia’s rescue. What’s a loving husband to do? Right--it’s back to San Diego, although with great reluctance.

    Hickey’s instincts prove correct; he finds he has stepped into a quagmire. Cynthia may be innocent but she is clearly demented, consumed by a longstanding hatred for her sister Laurel, who has been granted custody of her two children. Furthermore, Laurel’s husband, the man Cynthia stands accused of torching, turns out to have been a henchman of the L.A. gangster Mickey Cohen.

    Hickey suspects the killing may be connected to a power struggle between Cohen and the San Diego mob. Pursuing the theory gains him some dangerous enemies, one of whom kidnaps Wendy to force him to the sidelines.

    Hickey rushes home in a murderous rage to rescue his bride but finds there's little he can do other than to enlist--at gunpoint--the dubious services of Harry Poverman, Tahoe's gambling czar, who may know more about what's going on than he admits.

    Meanwhile, back in the southland, Hickey's old partner and mentor, Leo, deals himself into the game by attempting to strong-arm the Cohen faction. It proves to be a mismatch. All Leo accomplishes is to place his own neck in a noose, thus adding the responsibility for yet another life to Hickey’s already weary shoulders.

    Time is growing short and things are looking mighty grim when Hickey, with an assist from Poverman, finally gets the break that leads him to the kidnappers’ hide-out.

    Wendy insists that angels, in whom she firmly believes, are responsible for the miracle. Hickey isn’t about to argue the point; after all the evil he’s experienced, it’s good to be on the side of the angels at last.

    When it comes to writing historical fiction, the prudent author is well advised to pick a period so far removed from the present (Victorian England, for example) that no survivors remain to dispute his accuracy. Kuhlken has chosen a more daring course by evoking an era many San Diegans recall vividly. His geography is correct, but that’s no neat trick; any old street map will assure it. Much more difficult is capturing the peculiar ambiance of the times, the values and attitudes of its men and women--and in this Kuhlken succeeds splendidly.

    In addition, he has managed to re-create the private eye as he existed then in all his rough-edged glory; hard-boiled and violent, yet with a central morality that defined good and evil. Tom Hickey--far from a smooth operator, sometimes not even a smart one--is at home on the mean streets Raymond Chandler described.

    This is not to say that Kuhlken’s novel is without flaws. The story is more complicated* than it needs to be, and it meanders a bit on the way to its bang-bang finish. But always there is Kuhlken’s unerring sense of time and place to compensate.

    THE ANGEL GANG is billed as the final installment in the Tom Hickey trilogy. If so, let's hope his creator will at least stick with the period he portrays so skillfully. Kuhlken is an original writer and in these days of cookie-cutter fiction, originality is something to be prized.

*I think this one is simple, straight ahead.  Ah, well..

from LIBRARY JOURNAL

8/01/94

    As the final third of a trilogy, this title's plot belongs to a larger whole: it continues the story of post-World War II P.I. Tom Hickey. At the insistence of his pregnant and vulnerable young wife, Hickey leaves his Lake Tahoe cabin to help a scrappy San Diego singer accused of killing her brother-in-law. Anxious to resolve the case, Hickey brashly antagonizes rival mobsters, one of whom apparently kidnaps his wife to get even. A nicely orchestrated rescue set in simpler times, with sturdy prose, nonstop action, and steady suspense. Recommended.

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