Title: Webb Wilder, Last Of The Full Grown Men
First published: 1996
Description: This is the first book in a series that has never been completed. This first issue offers some fantastic promise, so maybe there will be more some day.

Webb Wilder, Last of the Full Grown Men is faithful to the hard-boiled detective / film noir visions of the 1940's and 1950's, but set in the pop culture world of today. Webb Wilder, as a detective, is a semi-urban hero dealing with characters that are bigger than life and twice as impossible. Webb gets dragged, suckered, or voluntarily dives into situations that seem incredible at first, but logic and luck win out in the end. With all of this intrigue, dark images and odd casting, "Webb Wilder, Last of the Full Grown Men" is also very funny. Consider if Raymond Chandler had written Philip Marlowe for a hybrid of Andy Griffith, John Stewart and Humphrey Bogart.

Two stories plus a tease to the third story, are published in one edition. Published as a standard paperback, "Mole Men" and "The Doll" are printed together, with each book's cover on reverse sides of the book. Thereby if you flipped the book over, end-over-end, you would find the second book. This style of publishing was very popular in the 1950's with Western's and Science Fiction paperbacks, but never Detective novels. The Prologue to the third story, "Psychotronic Serenade," is offered as a tease for the second book, which has yet to be published. Here's a synopsis of all three stories.

MOLE MEN
Just another case of money, murder and madness, featuring a cropduster, Mole Men, a worm ranch and a blonde named Ruby Falls. As Webb tries to solve two cases with the same nightmare, he investigates St. Vegas county's largest fire ant hill, has to keep calm under a sultry beauty's "helping hands" and tries to figure out how to eat a worm burger and still be polite.

THE DOLL
This tawdry tale of attempted assassinations, psychotic moms and a little doll torn in two, shows that no matter how full grown Webb might be, he's still only a man. Barbie's are not Webb's kind of plaything, as a fractured doll drives two mothers to the brink of killing each other's kids -- while the kids try to get married to each other. The final twists turn to the ultimate in greed during the last chapter.

PSYCHOTRONIC SERENADE
A mind is a terrible thing to control as Webb unearths revenge from Louie LeCoat, a stung Canadian ex-professional baseball player. Psychotronic engineering reins havoc in St. Vegas, and if Webb doesn't stop it soon, pandemonium is in store for the seventh inning stretch.
Subjects: American Detective and mystery stories, Detective and mystery stories, American, Fiction, mystery & detective, general, Wit and humor
Places: Florida, St. Vegas
LC classification: PS3552.O9315 W43 1996