If you like your crime fiction hard-boiled and Texas tough, pick up one of my gritty and relentless Ed Earl Burch thrillers. They’re classic stories of revenge and redemption, featuring a battered but dogged Dallas PI who is nobody’s hero, but nobody’s fool.

I’ve always thought of hard-boiled detective fiction as an American art form. At their finest, these crime stories are far more than a lone figure trying to crack a case — they’re commentaries on politics, culture, music, the uneasy relationship between men and women and the bottomless depravity and cruelty of human nature.

They also create a sense of time and place so keen it becomes a character unto itself, one that adds depth and complexity to the story and the people living therein. Think Philip Marlowe prowling the streets of Los Angeles and how much the city defines him. Now try to picture Marlowe any place other than L.A.

Too many authors fail to provide this essential, opting for a one-dimensional backdrop as lifeless as a canvas flat in an off-Broadway play, missing an opportunity to show who their characters are as they master or struggle against that place.

Another vital element of the hard-boiled school: a main character who relies on brains, brawn and a threadbare code in grim pursuit of answers that may not lead to anything resembling lawbook justice. And that’s okay because success or failure is defined by that internal code. Sometimes, the result is mere survival.

This is the kind of story I set out to tell in my Ed Earl Burch crime thrillers. And I wanted Burch to be a deeply flawed character — tough, profane, reckless and just smart enough, but angst-driven and battered by life. A guy who sometimes forgets the code he lives by until the chips are down.

He isn’t super sharp like Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe — he’s dogged rather than brilliant. And he isn’t super cool like Frank Bullitt. He’s Columbo without the caricature — and he makes people pay for underestimating him.

Get to know Ed Earl Burch. Pick up one of my books at: https://www.amazon.com/author/jimnesbitt