All Backs Were Turned
"Spokesman for those who were angry and beat . . . turbulent, temperamental, and tortured."—The New York Times
In this novel of breathtaking tension and sweltering love, two desperate friends on the edge of the law—one of them tough and gutsy, the other small and scared—travel to the southern Israeli city of Eilat to find work. There, Dov Ben Dov, the handsome native Israeli with a reputation for causing trouble, and Israel, his sidekick, stay with Ben Dov's recently married younger brother, Little Dov, who has enough trouble of his own. Local toughs are encroaching on Little Dov's business, and he enlists his older brother to drive them away. It doesn't help that a beautiful German widow named Ursula is rooming next door. What follows is a story of passion, deception, violence, and betrayal, all conveyed in hardboiled prose reminiscent of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, with a cinematic style that would make Humphrey Bogart and Marlon Brando green with envy.
Marek Hlasko, known as the Polish James Dean, was born 1933. He was known for his brutal prose style and unflinching eye. Persecuted by the Polish government, Hlasko spent the last decade of his life in exile, and died in 1969 of an overdose of sleeping pills and alcohol in Wiesbaden, West Germany.
Tomasz Mirkowicz, translator of American and British fiction, was born in Warsaw in 1953. He translated into Polish the works of Ken Kesey, George Orwell, Jerzy Kosinski, Harry Matthews, Robert Coover, Alan Sillitoe and Charles Bukowski. Mirkowicz, also a fiction writer and critic, died in 2003.
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