THE BOOK REPORT / (bookreport.com)
November 1, 2000

ROBBERS
Christopher Cook
Carroll & Graf
Suspense
ISBN: 0786707763

There has been a lot of hype about ROBBERS and, more specifically, about Christopher Cook, about how he writes like Elmore Leonard or James Lee Burke. Now, how is this guy, with his first published book, going to live up to that? Well… I doubt it was easy, but Cook does it. And let’s toss in some Larry Brown influence and, yeah, maybe even some Cormac MacCarthy chops as well. Yes, yes, Christopher Cook is that good.

I had my doubts for a minute or two; make that one doubt, on the first page, but that was quickly blown away. I never put this book down once after I opened it, except to underline passages and even to write a few of them down. James Crumley, no slouch himself, offers a blurb on the back of ROBBERS that Cook writes like an angel. Just so. But he’s like an angel who was cast down into hell to bear witness to what is going on to those above.

If you’ve done any long distance traveling by automobile you’ve seen Ray Bob and Eddie from ROBBERS. You might have seen them at a roadside rest stop or gas station, or walking into a package liquor store in Kentucky. They’re the guys with the long sleeve shirts that almost but not quite cover the jailhouse tattoos. They’re either on the pay phone and not talking or taking a long time to decide on what six-pack to buy. You automatically avoid eye contact with them and try to keep at least a few aisles, or urinals, between them and you. You don’t know why, but you do it. And then you try to get the hell back on the road, not running, not hurrying, but not dawdling either. Ray Bob and Eddie are the stars of ROBBERS. They are on the run, though they’re taking their time about it. They are totally unpredictable; all that one can say for sure is that whatever they do, it won’t be anything good.

Things begin to change a bit when Ray Bob and Eddie pick up a hitchhiker named Della, a beautician who is on the run herself and who will find the ride to be the best and worst thing that ever happened to her. At the same time, the trio is being pursued by Rule Hooks, a Texas Ranger—yes, there are still Texas Rangers—who seeks them by scent and sight and sound and instinct across the length and breadth of Texas. Matters become more complicated when Eddie begins to fall for Della and decides to clean himself up for her. Ray Bob has other ideas, however; he saw Eddie first, and he’s not about to give up his running buddy without a fight. Or worse.

ROBBERS is a compelling, thrilling tale with characters that are as true to hardscrabble life as a trip down the back roads of America, the roads that the freeways have bypassed and the people have been left behind. And it is that locale, specifically the locale of Texas, that Cook, in a novel loaded with the magic of words, works his greatest spell of all. For his description of east Texas—the Texas not conjured by the name, the rural backwoods that adjoin Louisiana—is as compelling as anything you’ve read. I found it hard to resist jumping into my automobile and making the 18 hour drive there, simply to experience the geography with which Cook provides the backdrop and setting for the tale. And the impulse is still with me as I sit here writing.

(Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub)

BOOKLIST
December 2008

By Bill Ott, Editor & Publisher

“Robbers remains one of my favorite first novels of the last decade. More, please, sir.”

BOOKLIST – Starred Review
October 15, 2000

By Bill Ott, Editor & Publisher

Eddie and Ray Bob are runnin’ buddies, and they run for all they’re worth, through Texas and Louisiana, in this high-octane first novel. Eddie starts shooting first, but it’s really sociopath Ray Bob we have to worry about… Then there’s Della, a hairdresser who hitches a ride in the runnin’ buddies’ ragtop caddy, and naturally, three’s a crowd…

This may sound like a cross between Natural Born Killers and Will and Grace, but, in fact, it’s something very different. Cook takes the noir chase novel (there’s a persistent Texas Ranger on the boys’ trail) on some remarkable detours. Yes, we feel the pathos of white-trash lives gone wrong, but soon enough, we’ve forgotten the big picture; we’re runnin’, too.

KIRKUS REVIEWS
November 15, 2000

First-timer Cook, a former journalist and human-rights activist, serves up “running buddies” Ray Bob and Eddie, who follow up their prison stint with a killing spree motivated by a need for cold beer, pocket money and an amorality so deep it must have been implanted prenatally. Their demonic swathe through most of Texas leads them to Della.

Meantime, Texas Ranger Rule Hooks and his tracking dog Lucky are closing in, as is another old-time lawman, out to avenge a relative who became one of the buddies’ victims.

Della, whose mentors are drawn from soap operas and the sleazier talk-show hosts, is appallingly funny, while Ray Bob’s behavior makes a powerful case for capital punishment without trial.

DALLAS MORNING NEWS
January 7, 2001

Cook’s first novel rips through the state’s seamy underbelly
like a twister through a slush pit

By Bryan Woolley / The Dallas Morning News

ROBBERS
By Christopher Cook
(Carroll & Graf, $24.95)

Christopher Cook’s first novel, Robbers, is a full-tilt boogie of a tale that wraps nearly every genre of Texas fiction into one tightly wound bundle. It’s a buddy story, a road story, a murder story, a manhunt story, a travelogue, a love story and one of best novels of contemporary Texas yet written.

The buddies are Ray Bob and Eddie, two ex-cons. Ray Bob is every decent person’s nightmare, a sociopath who robs, rapes and murders without a whiff of conscience touching his brutish brain. Eddie is Ray Bob’s pliable sidekick. He dreams of becoming a blues guitarist. Unnecessary murder bothers him a little, but not enough to free him from Ray Bob’s thrall.

Their crime spree begins on a hot afternoon in Austin, where the footloose pals murder a 7-Eleven clerk over a penny, sexually assault a couple of UT-Austin coeds, kill a cop, then hit the road in their classic Caddy convertible, heading toward Galveston, leaving a trail of dead convenience-store and gas-station clerks in their wake.

On a roadside, they pick up Della, a sort-of-pretty blond single-mom beautician who likes to pretend she’s a model. She’s on the lam, too. She hates and fears Ray Bob but falls in love with Eddie and becomes a canker on the bond between the buddies.

Pursuing this trio of losers in his red Dodge pickup is Rule Hooks, a Texas Ranger who resembles Porter Wagoner and is dealing with troubles of his own. He’s involved in an unsatisfying affair with the wife of a colleague, and he’s trying to re-establish a fatherly relationship with a grown daughter who wants nothing to do with him.

Hooks is being trailed, too, by Harvey Lomax, a small-town reserve deputy whose wife was one of Ray Bob and Eddie’s gas-station victims. Lomax, a religious fanatic with vengeance on his mind, follows Hooks in his wrecker, hoping the Ranger will lead him to the killers. Mr. Cook’s gritty descriptions of the sun-blasted, fast-food-blighted, trailer-park landscape through which the Caddy and the pickup and the wrecker travel become an oil-and-rubber scented documentary of the seedy, soul-crushing Texas we’ve all seen flash by our car windows along the interstates.

Mr. Cook weaves in and out of the minds of his five characters, shifting points of view, guiding the reader into mental places that are terrifying in their banality and evil. And his narrative moves at such a breathless pace that for page after page he has no time for sentences, as in this description of present-day Austin on the opening page:

“Austin, state capital, university town. Former counterculture magnet and slacker haven now balling the jack on a fulltilt bender. Sucking wind under the onslaught of money, a stripmall gangbang straddling the Balcones Fault. The mellow chilled-out days mere mythic history. Silicon Gulch now, hightech hysteria and the California influx, a city overrun by cyberokies on the rebound two generations after the dustbowled western plunge, returning flush, pockets stuffed with plundered gelt.”

In the second half of the story, however, Mr. Cook switches to a more traditional literary style, which slows the pace of the narrative until the two showdown scenes – in a Big Thicket swamp and a tacky Gulf Coast beach house – come across in the slow-motion style of a Sam Peckinpah bloodletting.

Blurbs on the jacket compare Robbers with the works of Elmore Leonard and James Lee Burke. It’s as good as anything either of those masters has written. It’s a book to stay up all night with.

Bryan Woolley is a staff writer of The Dallas Morning News. His latest book is Mythic Texas.