(WBBM NEWSRADIO) – A Chicago cabbie’s 1990s-era crime novel is getting new mileage from an endorsement by acclaimed film director Quentin Tarantino.
Jack Clark self-published “Nobody’s Angel” three decades ago and sold the mystery-noir to passengers in his cab. More than a decade ago, the book was picked up by mystery imprint Hard Case Crime and received rave reviews.
Then it was more or less radio silence for “Nobody’s Angel” -- until last year, when e-book versions began selling briskly. This was a mystery in to Clark, a West Side native whose professional life has included journalism and furniture moving.
It turns out that Tarantino, the auteur director and pop-culture authority, told Amazon that “Nobody’s Angel” was the best novel he’d read in 2022. He called it “a terrific story and character study of a cabbie in Chicago during a time when a serial killer is robbing and murdering cabbies.”
Now, Hard Case has reissued Clark’s book in a trade paperback, leveraging the “Pulp Fiction” director’s blurb.
Clark agrees the book is character-driven and less racy than the pulpy cover (a hallmark of the Hard Case book line) would suggest, with anecdotes that reflect his experience driving a cab on the weekends.
“The book is a lot of the night-life stuff because that’s what I knew as a cab driver,” he tells WBBM Newsradio. “I did other things, too, through the years, but mostly it was that Friday-Saturday night thing where everybody’s out on the town.”
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