The following, except for the two cop novels, are chiefly collections of his Fred on Everything columns with some magazine pieces thrown in for ballast. In them he savages the pretensions of the pretentious, lambasts poltroons right and left, and makes suggestions for improving the world, such as by buying a codpiece for Hillary. He also remembers with affection a Southern boyhood in another America, the years of hitchhiking the big roads out west, hopping freight trains, and hobnobbing with the bargirls of Bangkok, whom he rather liked. He believes that God put him on earth for two reasons, to trash the frauds and scoundrels who blight the earth, and to buy a fully loaded mid-engine Corvette. The trashing goes well. The ‘Vette remains problematic. Anyway, he regards readers as coconspirators in the trashing, and invites them to come along.

Killer Kink

Hardboiled is back! Gritty crime fiction by longtime police reporter for the Washington Times, who knows the police from nine years of riding with them. Guaranteed free of white wine and cheese, sensitivity, or social justice. Not recommended for Democrats, has been linked to apoplexy in feminists. What the critics are saying: Psychology Today: “Fred deserves his own entry in the DSM-V.� Ms. Magazine “Aaaaaaagh!�

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A Grand Adventure: Wisdom’s Price

Amazon review: “More outrage and sedition from the internet’s leading curmudgeon. Sardonic, funny, savagely irreverent, Fred trounces everything and everybody except children, drunks, and bar girls, for whom he has a soft spot. He also likes dogs. This is the man who described Oprah Winfrey as looking like “five hundred pounds of bear liver in a plastic bag.” A former Marine and war correspondent, he loathes war, the Pentagon, and the military budget, and thinks the Marines can do the world a favor by staying home.â€�

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Nekkid in Austin

Amazon review: “Essays on America, life, politics, and just about everything. The author chronicles among other adventures an aging stripper in Austin, dressed in a paper-mache horse, who had with her a cobra and a tarantula like a yak-hair pillow with legs and alternately charmed and terrified a room full of cowboys sucking down Bud and…. Fred was an apostle of the long-haul thumb during the Sixties and saw…many things. He tells of standing by the big roads across the desert, rockin in the wind blast of the heavy rigs roaring by and the whine of tires and dropping into an arroyo at night with a bottle of cheap red and watching the stars and perhaps smoking things not approved by the government. He tells of..well, that’s what the book is for. Join him.â€�

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A Brass Pole in Bangkok: A Thing I Aspire to Be�

Amazon review: “Another collection of Fred’s Fred on Everything columns, seditious, outrageous, inflammatory, evilly funny. Fred dislikes everything he is supposed to like, and likes everything he is supposed to dislike. He likes downscale bars, thinks bar girls are decent human beings, approves of dogs, motorcycles, and really loud blues. He detests wars, which he has seen several of, loathes ugly feminists with politically significant hairy armpits, believes that congressmen would serve well as skeet, and proposes to tie everyone on Wall Street to an anvil and drop it in a river. Obviously he is a benefactor of humanity, like Gandhi.â€�

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The Great Possum Squashing and Beer Storm of 1962

Amazon review: “Fred’s reflections on America as it was and isn’t. In the title essay he tells of his rural Southern boyhood, driving a 1953 Chevy the color of two-tone dirt, an aging wreck serving as heraldic emblem, codpiece, bar and, far less frequently than he would have liked or admitted, love nest. It usually started but remembered compression as an aging gigolo recalls the ardors of youth and on the night of the possum-squashing, with Bobby on the roof and Itchy in the trunk and a great many empty beer cans…. Well, you get the idea. It was another country, says Fred, and he would like it back. Never happen.â€�

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Curmudgeing Through Paradise

Amazon review: “More essays from the author’s website, Fred on Everything; acid, hilarious, philosophical, or all three at once. He chronicles the decline of everything as America, he says, marches bravely into the Fifth Century. Literacy dies, civility withers, common sense utters its death rattle. Music decays into urban grunting and the young dress to mimic the contents of a dumpster. College graduates count on their fingers. The future is “darker than an anchorman’s mind, ” he says with deep contentment. Curmudgeons, he asserts, are happiest with rot and decline, and the present is their golden age. Read Curmudgeing Through Paradise and enjoy the collapse. It’s going to happen anyway.â€�

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Triple Tap

Robert Dawson, a free-lance police reporter in Washington, DC, ex-Marine, ashen-souled cynic after seeing how the world actually works, finds himself and his girlfriend, Attila the Liberal, who works for one of the three-letter spook agencies, involved in a weird web of genius dweeb Carol Oslieber, plus a couple of ex-Special Forces nut-jobs, and various drug dealers, who want to…well, that’s the story. Written by a veteran police reporter who has actually been there, this is hard-boiled police fiction, not the wine-and-cheese unisex variety common now. If you liked Raymond Chandler, you will like Triple Tap. If you want niceness and political correctness, find another book.