**San Francisco is on the verge of collapse in this gritty, grimy noir set in a near-future that gets closer every second.Former San Francisco Literary Laureate Peter Plate who taught himself to write fiction during eight years squatting in abandoned buildings, delivers a fast-paced dystopian and speculative novel — the latest in a hardboiled writing career that spans the era of out-of-control gentrification in the Bay Area.**California is on fire. Everyone has the virus. S...

Welcome to San Francisco: the first fully gentrified city in America.May Jones is a bail bondswoman, someone who makes her living by putting people back onto the streets. Her most recent client, a young black woman, is on trial for the murder of her boyfriend, a police informant in the Fillmore District, also known as the "Harlem of the West," the neighborhood that the powers-that-be of San Francisco would like more than anything to see disappear. May becomes a target of the police,...

The narrator of Police and Thieves, Doojie, is a small-time dealer who lives in a garage behind a laundromat with his two partners in crime. They sell dope of questionable quality at reasonable prices. But when one night Doojie sees a renegade cop shoot an unarmed Mexican, he knows that things are about to change. Soon he and his buddies are running for their lives. Fast, ferocious, gritty, and bleak, Police and Thieves is contemporary noir at its best, and one of the most ambitious entrie...

It’s Christmastime in the Southland in this near-future vision of 21st century California. Our narrators, an ex-con turned pistol-carrying priest, and Sugar Child, a halfway house resident, have just met. The priest is a donations solicitor for Blessed World, the church and charity, and works downtown, “where I bang a tambourine and beg for money in the mellifluous, singsong voice beloved by children worldwide: Help the needy, give to the poor, amen.” But nothing is going right. Hassled by...

Ricky Bellamy is shot in the head by a vigilante at the corner of Geneva and Mission in San Francisco. He’s declared brain-dead and hooked up to life support, but ten months later he emerges from his coma. The bullet stays lodged in his head—inoperable, the doctors say—but with it comes what Ricky calls “visions, a third eye.”Dirty in Cashmere follows Ricky through the recent past of San Francisco, a city dealing with the fall-out from the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Jap...

It seems like everyone in California is going to prison these days. And as another hot Christmas approaches in San Francisco, Robert Grogan and Slatts Calhoun are about to make the street after a stretch in San Quentin. On the inside Robert and Slatts were inmates and lovers, but Robert has a young wife and a daughter on the outside and they’re probably not going to be thrilled about sharing him with Slatts. Trouble waits for them in the whitened winter sunlight of the city.Bleak an...

One foggy day in San Francisco brings together bloody ghosts, a dandyish thug, capricious cops, a suicidal punk rocker, a hyperliterate slumlord, and a sweet old lady sent by God to hand out cash from a hijacked armored car. In Fogtown, Peter Plate uses a loving hand to carve his characters out of hallucination, perversity, and tenacity. Plate's noir sensibility gives him special fluency with the weary souls of urban America's down and out; Fogtown describes a new age unmistakably built on...

The time is 1996. Our narrator, Coddy, a policeman, is underpaid, sleep-deprived, and overweight. Coddy’s partner, Bellamy, is homeless, living out of their shared squad car, littering the back seat with his dirty underwear and empty cigarette packs. Free Box and Barbie are squatters who rob Rainbow Health Foods at gunpoint for something to eat. From the junkies openly shooting up on stoops to the homeless men with their fleets of shopping carts piled high with garbage, Peter Plate’s Missi...

A cop is gunned down and unless Ricky Durrutti, a petty criminal with a short biography and a long rap sheet, can figure out who the real shooter is, he's a dead man. From Hunt's Donuts, opposite where the killing took place, to his room in the El Capitán Hotel, from the blue grass and steel Federal Building off Golden Gate Avenue to the Ritmo Latino record store, and from the Roxie Cinema on 16th Street to the Ramshackle Victorian homes of Treat Street where Lonely Boy lives--the chase is...

Amid a background of bank robberies and fatal gunshot wounds, the real drama here is bureaucratic and human. In her response to the adversity all around her, Peter Plate’s Charlene Hassler, a social worker at the huge, anthill-like Department of Social Services complex on San Francisco’s Otis Street, is a literary tour de force. Straight out of Dante’s Inferno, Plate’s DSS is an eternal holding pen of unfulfilled needs and desires. Charlene is under investigation, and snitches are everywhe...

A fiftieth-anniversary edition of the cult classic of gonzo journalism, hailed as “the best book on the dope decade” (The New York Times Book Review), featuring Ralph Steadman’s original drawings and an introduction by Caity WeaverThe inspiration for the major motion picture directed by Terry Gilliam, starring Johnny Depp and Benicio del Toro“A scorching epochal sensation!”—Tom WolfeFirst published in R...

Now a major motion picture starring Ryan Gosling, this noir novel, "is full of sly humor, poetic details and plenty of rude violence . . . A terrific ride" ( Los Angeles Times).I drive. That's what I do. All I do.The gritty back streets of Los Angeles are the backdrop for what the New York Times calls "a perfect piece of noir fiction" in which the Driver is double-crossed in a burglary gone horribly wrong.This beautiful new edition i...