Also by Joseph Valentinetti:
- I Am Diving: A Play In Three Acts
- Photography & Video: Thinking About Light
- Kill Me Tender
- Glint
- Naming The Moon
- I Am Diving
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Published: Aug. 25, 2011
Words: 46,853 (approximate)
Language: English
ISBN: 9781452442976
Short description
Tyler Palewhite: Soft Boiled Detective. Tyler Palewhite is a salesman who dreams of being a novelist. In fact he’s written a P.I. novel. He’s not having much luck getting it published until he hits on the idea of pretending to be a Private Investigator to impress potential publishers.Extended description
Tyler Palewhite: Soft Boiled Detective.Tyler Palewhite is a salesman who dreams of being a novelist. In fact he’s written a P.I. novel. He’s not having much luck getting it published until he hits on the idea of pretending to be a Private Investigator to impress potential publishers. He makes letterhead, prints business cards and adds it to his resume. As people find out they take it seriously and begin to ask for his help. He tries his hand at a couple of simple things and has some unexpected success. It works. He gets a publisher and things are going as according to plan.
Just when he thinks, What Could Possibly Go Wrong? things begin to spiral out of control and he finds himself embroiled in kidnapping and murder. What he does to try and fix things keep making matters worse. Follow Tyler as he tries to find a way to make things right.
Tags
kidnapping, detective, detective fiction, detective crime, valentinetti, soft boiled detective, computer salesman, joseph valentinetti author, joseph valentinetti interviewer, joseph valentinettiAvailable ebook reading formats
Single purchase gains access to all formats. How to download ebooks to e-reading devices and apps.| Format | Full Book | Sample First 20% |
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| Epub (Apple iPad/iBooks, Nook, Sony Reader, Kobo, and most e-reading apps including Stanza, Aldiko, Adobe Digital Editions, others) | Buy | Download sample |
| PDF (good for reading on PC, or for home printing) | Buy | No sample available |
| RTF (readable on most word processors) | Buy | No sample available |
| LRF (Use only for older model Sony Readers that don't support .epub) | Buy | Download sample |
| Palm Doc (PDB) (for Palm reading devices) | Buy | Download sample |
| Plain Text (download) (flexible, but lacks much formatting) | Buy | No sample available |
| Plain Text (view) (viewable as web page) | Buy | No sample available |
Videos
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Review by:
Quentin Stewart
on Jan. 16, 2012 :
Tyler is truly a "soft boiled detective". I hate to compare him to Barney Fife but he comes mighty close. As a struggling writer Tyler decides that he needs to improve his biographical sketch that appears in his book. So he becomes a detective. It seems easy enough and it does add to his aura as an author.
At a book signing he is approached by a lady who needs his services. He accepts the case of returning her daughter who has not been returned from a visit with her father. Tyler and the friends he enlists to help him come up with an elaborate plan to kidnap the child back only to find out that the client has been lying to Tyler and he must work to undo what he has done.
It is an interesting read and gives one the idea that one needs to be careful with what he claims to be. A little detective work into the background of the client would have sufficed to save everyone a lot of trouble. Very good.
(reviewed long after purchase)
Review by:
Bill Thibadeau
on Dec. 31, 2011 :
I found this long novella to be a fun read. As others have stated, the storyline flow is confusing due to abrupt scene changes between paragraphs. The story would have flowed much better if these changes were defined by some sort of physical break like starting a new chapter.
It is true that the characters could have been developed more but that was not important to me. I cared only about Tyler and Angel as I see their relationship as a "to be continued" basis for more stories.
I give this a rating of 3.5 stars for significant formatting problems. I enjoyed the story and hope there are more to come.
(reviewed long after purchase)
Review by:
rhonda laney
on Dec. 30, 2011 :
Friday, December 30, 2011Review: Tyler Palewhite: Soft-Boiled Detective by Joseph valentinetti
4 STARS
I liked it but is not a book I will reread again. The characters took awhile for me to care about them.
Tyler is a salesman who is always toward the bottom in sales. Tyler is always making excuses why that is. Plus he is always asking his friend to cover for him. Tyler wants to be a writer in fact he wrote one detective book and sent it off to lots of publishers. No short stories or articles just the one novel. It keeps on comming back rejected.
Tyler gets the idea to fake being a real detective to help sell his book. He then uses sales training to sell himself. He makes business cards,stationary and advertises. He starts getting a few cases that he does find the people by using computers. Then he gets cases that he bumbles through and with his friends gets over his head in trouble.
The ending was okay but I wanted a little bit more from it.
I was given this book from the author in exchange of honest review from librarythings.
(reviewed long after purchase)
Review by:
Valerie Gillen
on Dec. 05, 2011 :
Just finished reading Tyler Palewhite, softboiled detective.
Wow, the ending was pretty intense! I liked this book, I felt Tyler was a sympathetic character who grew throughout the story, and would be interested in reading his further adventures. As an author myself, I could sympathize with Tyler's efforts to get his novel published and the falsehood he resorted to, to get what he knew to be a good novel out of the slush pile. The rocky transitions could be easily solved by double spacing between scene changes
(reviewed within a month of purchase)
Review by:
CynDaVaz
on Dec. 03, 2011 :
3.5 STARS - I won this book on Library Thing, along with the author's other short (short) story, Naming the Moon. This story was a big improvement over Naming the Moon in terms of style and substance. I took a half star off because I think the characters could have been developed so much more, the story fleshed out a little better, and also because the e-book formatting was a little off-kilter sometimes (no breaks in the writing for scene changes can be a bit disorienting when you're in the flow of reading and there's an abrupt shift). But this was still a good read - the author has talent that I expect he will be able to develop more fully in the years to come.
(reviewed long after purchase)
Review by:
Jody Darden
on Dec. 02, 2011 :
(no rating)
This was a quick and fun read, however there were several problems. Perhaps it was the e-book formatting but is was quite jolting to jump from scene to scene with no text breaks.
The character of Tyler had potential but seemed to have immediate pity parties when his own inexperience and incompetence failed him. Only then would he proceed.
The fate of some characters was left hanging and altogether the story did not flow well. And is it just me or are any other readers tired of reading about writers as characters in books?
(reviewed long after purchase)
Review by:
Natasha Inconnue
on Nov. 27, 2011 :
(no rating)
I didn't finish this book. I had been expecting something along the lines of a tongue-in-cheek mockery of a noir detective story. Instead to me the story resembled (the book version of) one of those artsy films about the minutiae of some poor sad bloke's daily life. Unfortunately, books and films like that aren't really to my taste so this story will have to be enjoyed by someone else.
(reviewed long after purchase)
Review by:
Nicole Earls
on Nov. 17, 2011 :
(no rating)
I had a lot of trouble with this one. The story seemed rather thrown together and not all that well plotted out. There was no transition from section to section. One second the characters are in a bar talking then in the next sentence the main character is leaning over a cubicle wall at work? That makes it very confusing to set your mind’s eye to what’s going on in the story. I’m a very visual person so I like to imagine what everything looks like as the story goes on and that is very difficult to do with this book. Not to mention that the story itself is rather boring, I feel like I’ve read or seen this same story a hundred times.
This book is centered on a computer salesman that wishes desperately to become an author. He has written a book about a P.I. and when he realizes that no publishers want it, he decides to become a P.I. himself to help sell the book as if it’s based on actual stories from his job. (The thought that you can just jump into being a P.I. is a bit ridiculous, let alone the fact that he reads books about it and feels he knows what he’s doing? If he really did then he would know there’s licensing and actual detective work to do, and wouldn’t have ended up in the mess he was in.) Anyways, the story proceeds by him meeting a woman and trying to help her get her daughter back, when everything goes wrong.
I was glad this book was short and I really had to struggle through it. The ending didn’t really complete the story but left it off as if there should be another chapter.
(reviewed within a month of purchase)
Review by:
Diane Johnston
on Nov. 01, 2011 :
this was a book from Member Giveaway. I have to say, this was not, for me, a great book. It was short at least but probably should have been a little longer. It sometimes changed focus from one scene to a different location or group of people between one paragraph and the next without a word or notice to say that it had so i'd be confused at first thinking what just happened and where am I and who are these people and where did they come from before i realized we're now in a new place, sometimes even a new day.
It's about a salesman who isn't all that good at his job. He wants to be a writer and has penned a book about a Private Investigator but can't seem to get anyone to publish it until he pretends to be a detective in real life. He decides to take on a case so he can at least pretend and, flushed with the success of that case though only solved by his somewhat bumbling methods, he takes on another when asked by a beautiful woman with whom he instantly falls in love. She's not what she seems and her story isn't either. You can tell that straight away but he can't. He gets in over his head quickly and is snarled in a murder and kidnapping debacle.
I found the plot predictable, the writing too. The shift in focus was sometimes abrupt and distracting. There were chapter breaks, why not do it for those focus shifts, too?
I later realized that it was sort of like watching something on tv or in a movie but there, you have the visual and you can tell that you've changed a scene. On screen, things don't feel as rushed or abrupt but when you are reading it, it doesn't work very well. You need something to indicate the shift in focus, whether a short sentence, a new chapter or even little dots or graphics between those two paragraphs that give you more of a sense of separation.
The other thing that felt out of place were two sex scenes. The scenes themselves probably weren't out of place, but I don't think they needed to be quite so graphic. They didn't seem to match the tone of rest of the book so stumbling into these almost felt gratuitous.
The book has potential and probably would work well as a screenplay since it's written sort of like that but without the direction notes. The characters are a bit stereotype, the bumbling writer/salesman/detective, the faithful coworker who secretly loves him, the beautiful villain, her violent yet sometimes gentle co-hort, (a bit inconsistent, that). I think this was supposed to be a comic farce but the drawbacks took away from that element. It wasn't bad, but it could have been better.
(reviewed within a week of purchase)