Head Games - Softcover

Craig McDonald is an award-winning journalist and editor. His book Art In the Blood features interviews with 20 top crime and mystery writers including James Ellroy, Dennis Lehane, Ian Rankin, Michael Connelly and Walter Mosley.

It's 1957, and novelist Hec Lassiter—who followed Black Jack Pershing into Mexico to hunt Pancho Villa, befriended Hemingway, worked with Dashiell Hammett, bedded Marlene Dietrich, and helped Orson Welles script his films—is feeling his age. But when an old pal sets Villa's head on the table of a cantina in the Mexican desert, Hec is up for another adventure: delivering the head to Senator Prescott Bush (father of 41, grandfather of 43) so that it can be used in secret ceremonies at Yale's Skull and Bones Society. What follows is an exuberantly over-the-top romp conflating real events with legends and filled with murderous federales, murderous old Villistas, additional decapitations, mercenaries, unhinged Yale frat boys, CIA spooks (also Yalies), and enough gratuitous violence to fill several Steven Seagal films. There's even a cameo from a callow, foul-mouthed Skull and Bones initiate named "George W." Much of Head Games reads like a picaresque adventure, but McDonald's portraits of Welles, Dietrich, and Pancho Villa are beguiling and seem knowing. This one is simply great fun! Gaughan, Thomas