West on 66: A Mystery (Paperback)

After discovering how much distances is between them, Los Angeles County Deputy Sheriff Kevin Pulaski takes leave of his brother's home in Chicago and at the famous McLean Truck Stop ends up with a young woman on the lam from her stepfather, a vicious mobster.

While on their way to his car, Kevin and the young woman are accosted by thugs, and Pulaski smoothly gets the pair out of trouble, only to have them on his tail from then on.

Ever since The Illiad, we've seen this story. Yet Cobb blends the mytholgy of U.S. Route 66 with a credible mystery yarn to deliver a marvelous hard-boiled novel where Route 66 becomes as much a part of the story as the living characters. Recommended!

Maybe the book will whet your appetite for touring on "Old" or "Historic" 66 instead of Interstate 55 or 40. A lot of the old "Mother Road" is still there. So is Dixie Trucker's Home and other "attractions." Modern society has a "need for speed," but sometimes it's nice to slow down and look around.

Along the way, the author makes poignant sociological and economic points: "... the aging two-lane bridge over the wash west of Peerless (which the author notes is `the only truly `made up' locale in West on 66 ... and even it is a composite of the numerous bypassed and abandoned road communities that can be found along the western interstates.') was taken out by a flash flood. This was bad enough, but then some bright young engineer in the State Highway Department noticed that if a replacement span and a bypass were built just a few miles downstream, a meandering northern loop could be cut out of Route 66. The driving time from Winslow to Flagstaff could be reduced by a good fifteen minutes. No doubt feeling proud of himself, he reached down and drew a little line on the map. He couldn't have destroyed Peerless any more thoroughly if he'd called a bombing mission. The traffic on the highway had become the lifeblood of the town. Deprived of that bloodflow, gangrene set in rapidly. No one came to eat Mary's hot beef sandwiches. No one pawed through the beads and trinkets in the Tom Tom Trading Post. No one stayed at the Grand Canyon Auto Court even after they put in real air conditioning."

And later on, towards the conclusion of this 1957 journey:

"From Pasedena we took the Arroyo Seco Parkway downtown. Lately, Ike's had a real bug in his ear about building a whole lot more of these freeways, as they're calling them. They're planning on running them all over the country, and it's supposed to be quite a deal. I wonder. I can't help thinking about Peerless and about all the other little towns strung out along old 66 and the other two-lanes. What happens to them when the superslabs cut them off and their mother roads die? If the Russians were to destroy a couple of hundred American communities, we'd call it an act of war. If we do it to ourselves, we call it progress."