Razorcake
December 2nd, 2025
In Charles Willeford’s classic New Hope for the Dead, detective Hoke Mosley sits at a bar as the song “London Calling” by The Clash plays. The ever-frustrated Hoke struggles with the lyrics to the song and finds it completely unenjoyable. “The whole song made no sense to him,” Willeford writes as Hoke slams the rest of his beer and makes a quick exit. In contrast, the protagonist of author and high school special education teacher Kyle Decker’s latest book This Rancid Mill: An Alex Damage Novel is a hard-boiled punk rock private investigator (“of sorts”) whose latest gig (unraveling the mystery around the sketchy death of Jerry Rash of the band Bad Chemicals) tests his street smarts and toughness, and leads him through a dynamic abyss of gruesome L.A. characters and unsavory situations.
Where Willeford’s Mosley frequently bemoans his appearance and hates the way his dentures make him look, Decker’s Alex Damage is young, confident, and always prowling for his next conquest. The “cool punk rocker” factor is something I could never really relate to (I’m more of a Hoke Mosley guy), but in This Rancid Mill Decker manages to keep it all fun and in good spirits, and it comes across along the lines of Otto Maddox in Repo Man. As Damage takes on cops, nazis, corrupt politicos, and an endless variety of sleazy scumbags, he becomes more lovable. A little bit of redemption also comes into play before it all ends.
Since the book begins at a punk club (the Starwood, where Alex Damage left his leather jacket), the plot twists a whole lot to end up where it ends up. This is where The Rancid Mill really stands out. As the reader follows Damage from turn to turn, the book accelerates and increases intensity. Before long, our hero is offing a couple of armed Mafioso goons in the woods and wiping the blood off his leather jacket. “It was them or me,” Damage repeats to himself, in a sort of shell-shocked desperation. Damage goes through a lot of suffering here—at the hands of the police, by the love interest, Zii, and by his own doing—and this adds an endearing quality.
Although it begins a little slow, the payoff is worth it, and by the end, I was hooked. While there are some aspects of the classic crime novel here, the grittiness intensifies from cover to cover, breaking this book out of that mold. Kyle Decker’s latest book This Rancid Mill: An Alex Damage Novel moves along quickly and aggressively like a good rock’n’roll song. I bet Wattie from The Exploited would really enjoy this book—it’s an easy read and a whole lot of gnarly punk rock fun.
