A prequel to the now infamous Roadkill reveals how Kinky Friedman, the sleazy country music singer, became Kinky Friedman, sleazy detective extraordinaire, plus other secrets including where the Village Irregulars came from. 60,000 first printing. Tour. Kinky's back, and Abbie Hoffman's got him. Or he's got Abbie. Or a mysterious man with dirty blonde hair and a faded camouflage jacket has them both in his gunsights. It's always hard to tell who the bad guys are, because the country-western singer turned author draws an almost invisible line between his real life and his fictional adventures. That, of course, is where the fun comes in. In Blast from the Past , the Kinkster serves up an appetizer for his myriad fans--a prequel to such novels as Roadkill and The Love Song of J. Edgar Hoover . The book explains how Kinky got into the detecting game and met up with the Greenwich Village irregulars who populate this popular series--Ratso, Rambam, McGovern, and the luscious Stephanie DuPont. The action takes place in the post-Watergate 1970s, when Abbie's hiding out in upstate New York, sex and drugs are de riguer, and nobody's ever heard of political correctness. The mystery is pretty simple--you can see the ending coming long before Kinky can--but that's never been the point of these bawdy, irreverent tales. To quote Friedman himself, "Being a private dick is pretty simple. Once you run out of cocaine, crazy ideas, and self-pitying bullshit, you're eventually left with the truth." --Jane Adams This prequel to Roadkill explains how the Kinkster became a sleazy detective. Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. Other than its opening line, "Call me Kinky," Friedman's latest bears little resemblance to Melville's greatest novel, unless obsession with dick size constitutes a literary allusion. Rather, Friedman fancies himself a contemporary Sherlock Holmes, complete with his own substance-abuse problems (Kinky calls his fix "Peruvian marching powder") and a quest for his very own Watson. This time, a blow to the head sends the "canny, crepuscular, cat-loving crime-solver" into a flashback of his disco days, when he crashed on his pal Ratso's couch on Prince Street in SoHo and had a weekly gig with his band the Shalom Retirement Village People. His trip back to the '70s enables him to recall his first case and retell how some of his merry associates, now known as the Village Irregulars, gained that status. It also allows him to present Abbie Hoffman in a cameo and to break into the law offices of William Kunstler. Kinky's usual, curmudgeonly commentary also enlivens this surprisingly sentimental, though not very inspired, nostalgia trip. Benjamin Segedin After ten inimitably ribald adventures, it's about time that rocker/raconteur Friedman served up an account of how he became a shamus in the first place, and so his magic carpet takes us back to 1979. Kinky, crashing with his friend Ratso Sloman, is quietly trying to consummate his relationship with new friend Judy on Ratso's couch when some comments from a couple of passersby alert him to the attractions of becoming a private dick. In no time at all, the Kinkster's got himself two cases: the mystery of Judy's old lover Tom, shot down over Vietnam, buried with full military honors, and now turned up again, she insists, in the Village; and the question of why somebody is trying to shoot aging radical Abbie Hoffman, the man who invented the '60s. It's clear from this backward glance that Kinky was always a natural. As he goes through the motions of meeting such Vandam Street familiars as reporter Mike McGovern, rabbinical student Steve Rambam, and Mort Cooperman, NYPD, he floats through the introductions, and through the mystery itself, in the same Zen-like stupor you'd swear he'd taken years to perfect. En route to solving the case via his trademark method, breaking and entering (Abbie's lawyer, William Kunstler, is the target this time), Kinky proves once again that no joke is too old, too low, or too irrelevant to work in somehow. By the time he pulls the whole train into the station, the '60s are definitely over. Fully the equal of Road Kill (1997), though, as usual with Kinky, the hardest thing to detect is the plot. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. The Washington Post Book World Nothing is sacred in a Kinky Friedman book....Therein lies his charm. -- Review Kinky Friedman lives in a little green trailer in a little green valley deep in the heart of Texas. There are about ten million imaginary horses in the valley and quite often they gallop around Kinky's trailer, encircling the author in a terrible, ever-tightening carousel of death. Even as the hooves are pounding around him in the darkest night, one can hear, almost in counterpoint, the frail, consumptive, ascetic novelist tip-tip-tapping away on the last typewriter in Texas. In such fashion he has turned out eleven novels, including Roadkill, The Love Song of J