Penzler Pick, March 2001: Joe Gores is a mystery writer's mystery writer. For more than 30 years he's been writing novels and short stories, many of them DKA files. DKA stands for Daniel Kearny Associates, a fictitious agency specializing in repo work, which is very closely based on the agency Gores worked for while honing his craft as a writer. In a fascinating introduction to the 12 DKA files in Stakeout on Page Street, Gores describes his life as a repo man, his relationship with the real and fictitious characters at DKA, and the encouragement he received from Anthony Boucher, who suggested he make contact with Fred Dannay, who eventually published all of these stories in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine.

Although Gores has written other short stories and full length novels, it is those about the men and women at DKA that most capture the imagination. These stories are procedural, telling of the day-to-day grunt work of the repo man. There are no guns, no flashy showdowns, no huge body counts, because, as Gores explains, nobody wants to kill or get killed over the repossession of a car for the bank. But the stories are gripping nonetheless. How can a simple repossession drive a woman to suicide? In File #1 the answer is: all too easily when you're young and you've picked the wrong man to love.

Gores's sixth full-length DKA novel will be published in 2001, and we owe a lot to the small publishing company of Crippen & Landru for reintroducing us, after a hiatus of several years, to Larry Ballard, Kathy Onoda, Dan Kearny, and all the hard-working folks at DKA. If you haven't met them before, this is the perfect introduction. --Otto Penzler

Book Description
ALL THE DKA FILES STORIES More the 30 years ago a young private investigator named Joe Gores was encouraged by the great mystery critic Anthony Boucher to record his experiences in a series of short stories for Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. Thus began the first series of tales that looked at a PI's cases as they actually happened, from the very serious (for instance, when a repo-man — someone who repossesses cars when loans are in default — can send a woman to suicide) to the comic (as when the Dan Kearny associates have to grab a fire engine that hasn't been paid for). And the characters are just as colorful, ranging from professional conmen to a gypsy who issues a curse as her car is driven away. Stakeout on Page Street includes a new introduction and prefaces to each story by the author, and a complete checklist of Joe Gores's mystery novels and short stories.

About the Author
Since writing the DKA short stories, Joe Gores has become famous as Edgar winner for Best First Novel (A Time for Predators, 1969), the author of such novels as Hammett (and the screenplay based upon it) and the creator of telescripts for Columbo, Kojak, Magnum, P.I., and many other programs.

FROM THE CRITICS

Kirkus Reviews

This collection of the complete shorter works (1967–89) featuring San Francisco's Daniel Kearny Agency, repo men (and women) extraordinaire, demonstrates convincingly how the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts. In fact, Gores's unusually detailed introduction and headnotes root both the twelve individual stories and the private-eye procedural genre they invented so firmly in the realities of his own work in skip-tracing and auto repossession that the first two tales seem barely fictionalized at all. But by the third story, with its briskly evoked carnival setting and its unexpected sympathy for the fleeing embezzler, Gores has hit his stride. Subsequent adventures of the DKA are all over the map. The perps range from a vengeful gypsy to a Dominican nun, the vehicles the agency's assigned to recover from a fire engine to a hearse, the moods from the trancelike calm of"Beyond the Shadow" (a puzzle story that pays off in a particularly handsome surprise) to the rollicking gaiety of"The O'Bannon Blarney File." Yet each one contrives to mingle vivid backgrounds, authentic procedural detail, the cleverness of the Kearny regulars—maverick Larry Ballard, ex-boxer Bart Heslip, eternally sozzled Patrick O'Bannon, brainy Giselle Marc—and soap-opera outtakes from the saga that's continued from Dead Skip (1972) through Contract Null and Void (1996), with another installment due later this year. Best of all, the DKA files remind you that one reason detective stories are so much fun to read is because detective work itself can be so much fun to do.