books in order

Pete Dexter Books In Order

Novels

  1. God’s Pocket (1984)
  2. Deadwood (1986)
  3. Paris Trout (1988)
  4. Brotherly Love (1991)
  5. The Paperboy (1995)
  6. Train (2003)
  7. Spooner (2009)

Non fiction

  1. Paper Trails (2007)

Novels Book Covers

Non fiction Book Covers

Pete Dexter Books Overview

Deadwood

Deadwood, DAKOTA TERRITORIES, 1876: Legendary gunman Wild Bill Hickcock and his friend Charlie Utter have come to the Black Hills town of Deadwood fresh from Cheyenne, fleeing an ungrateful populace. Bill, aging and sick but still able to best any man in a fair gunfight, just wants to be left alone to drink and play cards. But in this town of played out miners, bounty hunters, upstairs girls, Chinese immigrants, and various other entrepeneurs and miscreants, he finds himself pursued by a vicious sheriff, a perverse who*re man bent on revenge, and a besotted Calamity Jane. Fueled by liquor, sex, and violence, this is the real wild west, unlike anything portrayed in the dime novels that first told its story. From the Trade Paperback edition.

Paris Trout

A respected white citizen of Cotton Point, Georgia, Paris Trout is a shopkeeper, a money lender, and a murderer of blacks. And his friends, family and foes do not realize the danger they face in a man who simply will not see his own guilt. Penguin.

Brotherly Love

In Philadelphia city, 1961, a division of power exists between the Italian mobs and the predominantly Irish labour leaders. When the youngest daughter of union man Charley Flood is accidentally killed by one of the Mafia’s cops it is the beginning of a suicidal chain of retaliation.

The Paperboy

From Publishers Weekly Moat County, Fla., is located where the St. John’s River flows north a geographical rarity and, in literature, a signal that we’ve entered the strange and violent world of National Book Award winner Dexter Paris Trout. Narrator Jack James is the son of the Moat County Tribune’s editor and publisher. While Jack’s older brother, Ward, reports for the Miami Times, Jack has settled for a job delivering papers for the Tribune. But when Ward and his partner, evil dandy Yardley Acheman, come to Moat County to investigate the four year old murder of the local sheriff, Jack assists them in the inquiry. After a vicious beating by two sailors lands Ward in the intensive care unit, Yardley finishes the story without Ward and Jack, fabricating evidence to do so. Accompanying his traumatized brother Ward back to Miami, Jack takes a job as a copyboy at the Times. It isn’t long, however, before Yardley’s wrongdoing comes to light, generating more trouble for the Jameses. Dexter’s writing is rock solid, he offers acute observations about the nature of reporting and his grip on the Southern male psyche is unquestionable. The powerful thematic drive of Paris Trout is missing here, however, and the story line is so complicated that it loses focus and then almost peters out. But if this isn’t Dexter’s best, it’s still a provocative offering from one of the most exciting novelists around. Major Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Train

Los Angeles, 1953. Lionel Walk is a young black caddy at Brookline, the oldest, most exclusive country club in the city, where he is known by the nickname Train. A troubled, keenly intelligent kid with no particular interest in his own prodigious talent for the game, he keeps his head down and his mouth shut as he navigates his way between the careless hostility of his totes and the explosive brutality of the other caddies. Miller Packard, a sergeant with the San Diego police department, first appears on the boy’s horizon as a distracted gambler, bored with ordinary risks. Train names him the Mile Away Man as they walk off the first tee, and even months later, when they have become partners of a sort and are winning high stakes matches against golf hustlers all over the country, the Mile Away Man is a puzzle to Train, remote and intimate, impulsive and thoughtful, often all at the same time. Packard is also a puzzle to Norah Still, the beautiful lone survivor of a terrifying yacht hijacking, who is both aroused and repulsed by his violent and detached manner at the crime scene. Packard himself feels no such ambiguity. He is unequivocally drawn to Norah and perhaps to what has happened to her and an odd, volatile triangle takes shape, Packard pulling the other two relentlessly into deeper water, away from what is safe. With his trademark economy of style, Dexter brings these characters to life in their most reckless, vulnerable moments, stripping away words and manners until all that is left is the basic human pulse.

Spooner

Warren Spooner was born after a prolonged delivery in a makeshift delivery room in a doctor’s office in Milledgeville, Georgia, on the first Saturday of December, 1956. His father died shortly afterward, long before Spooner had even a memory of his face, and was replaced eventually by a once brilliant young naval officer, Calmer Ottosson, recently court martialed out of service. This is the story of the lifelong tie between the two men, poles apart, of Spooner‘s troubled childhood, troubled adolescence, violent and troubled adulthood and Calmer Ottosson’s inexhaustible patience, undertaking a life long struggle to salvage his step son, a man he will never understand.

Paper Trails

In the 1970s and 1980s, before he earned national acclaim for his award winning novels, Pete Dexter was a newspaper columnist. Every week, in a few hundred words, Dexter cut directly to the heart of the American character at a time of national turmoil and crucial change. With haunting urgency, his columns laid bare the violence, hypocrisy, and desperation he saw on the streets of Philadelphia and in the places he visited across the country. But he reveled, too, in the lighter side of his own life, sharing scenes with the indefatigable Mrs. Dexter, their young daughter, and a series of unforgettable creatures who strayed into their lives. No matter what caught Dexter’s eye, it was illuminated by his dark, brilliant humor. Collected here for the first time are eighty two of the best of those spellbinding, finely wrought pieces with a new introduction by the author assembled by Rob Fleder, editor of the bestselling Sports Illustrated 50th Anniversary Book. Paper Trails is searing, heart breaking, and irresistibly funny, sometimes all at once. As Pete Hamill says in his foreword, these essays ‘are as good as it ever gets.’

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