Robert Crais

California-based suspense novelist Robert Crais is best known as the author of the Elvis Cole detective series, featuring the wisecracking title character and his enigmatic, heavily armed partner, ex-Marine Joe Pike.

Crais began his career as a writer for television, and all of his novels are highly cinematic. Still, only one of them has been made into a movie (2005’s Hostage), and Crais has thus far resisted Hollywood’s demands to transform his two most beloved characters into unrecognizable caricatures of themselves*.

*We would commend him for this, but we don’t want to tempt fate. The minute hope dawns in our hearts that an author isn’t going to sell out seems to be the minute that they decide to sign the dotted line.

Note: Crais’s first Joe Pike-centered novel, The Watchman, was the feature of one of our Book of the Week reviews.

Aftertaste:
See the review.

Availability:
Everywhere.

Other Recommendations:
Anything by Raymond Chandler.

Anything by Cornell Woolrich

Anything by Dashiell Hammett

Anything by James M. Cain

Website:
http://www.robertcrais.com/ -