It's
so damn American. The settler class of white Europeans living away from the big
mean city get conned by a loudmouth bullshittin' big city con man who has never
made an honest buck in his life. He plays into their fears; of brown skinned foreigners,
angry black people still pissed about their ancestors being enslaved, uppity
women who misuse the rights they got, and big city banks and financiers who
just want to take their money and their land.
Promising to keep the scared people safe, the film-flam man goes back to
his rich friends, laughing to himself about how he loves the uneducated.
"Ian Rankin once explained to an interviewer (the head of the Indian Communist Party!) that crime fiction is a way of talking about social inequality. Ron Jacobs applies that same maxim to the Sixties... in his wonderfully noir trilogy of those exhilarating and troubled times. And what Rankin does for Edinburgh, Jacobs amply illuminates for the Movement. Much much more than ripping yarns (though they are that too), from a master who's been there, done that, and lived to tell a tale or two."
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