Dark tale of bad luck a good read

Scoundrel Jimmy Luntz considers himself a lucky guy, a lucky guy who is many things to many people: To his debt-collector, he’s a dead man. To his lover, he’s an irresistibly no-good loser. To the readers of Denis Johnson’s crude, fun crime novel, “Nobody Move,” Jimmy Luntz is all of the above, and anything but an ordinary criminal.

Set in the Wild West of modern-day Bakersfield, Calif., the vices and cravings of the lowlifes who surround and rope in Jimmy crash together in this dark tale. After racking up an impressive gambling debt, Jimmy is abducted by a Cadillac-driving thug named Gambol, who promises torture and threatens death if Jimmy fails to settle up his gambling dues with head brute, Juarez.

Speeding down the desert highway, Jimmy seizes his chance, grabs Gambol’s gun and shoots him in the leg, leaving him near-bled dry at a roadside rest stop. Newly endowed with a gleaming car and a wallet thick with stolen cash, Jimmy rides this lucky streak until he meets Anita Desilvera, a newly divorced bombshell with a penchant for booze and big money.

As the new lovers prepare for a $2.3 million heist, Gambol’s wrath mounts, Juarez’s taste for revenge heightens and Jimmy’s luck unravels faster than he can bet.

With sadistic humor and sharp, barebones dialogue, Johnson evokes the feral grittiness of the old West, the lustful obsessions of the new, and the addictive thrills and untamed reality that define both.

In “Nobody Move,” he has created characters and crimes that will leave you gripping, if only in your imagination, the creamy white leather seat of a speeding, stolen Caddy.