An introduction by Ice T warns: "The dialogue will sound like another language from another planet." Don't let this or the controversy over the words' origins put you off. The style leans heavily on colourful modifiers arranged and stretched into cadences as rich as any in Ellroy's White Jazz, but far more accessible, especially to anyone who's listened to the likes of James Brown or Otis Redding. Slim has the advantage that the music he evokes came with lyrics. The lingo is pure American-ease, hot off the streets.

Enjoy:
"Freddie, his mulatto opponent, scalpels a red rill across Joe's nose with a left hook. Then he pops a right cross against Joe's jaw that blinks his eyes. The crowd explodes bedlam to see the underdog pretty boy let the monster's blood."

Round one from the bottom of page one, the story beginning ringside as stragglers make dramatic entrances into their seats. Iceberg Slim is not merely a stylist, though he presents action in a way that makes scene-setting superfluous. This book begins when Joe's story begins, not a moment before.

And it ends on the moment Joe ends, a full lifetime in 240 pages. The young boxer tastes other women as distractions, but he's obsessed with the "ravishing sloe-eyed beauty" Reba, and he's not the only one. The precocious teenaged preacher who grows up to take over the community church doesn't let its principles divert him from his lust for Reba. In contrast, the son of a wealthy family begins a slow descent into self-indulgence and abuse when he gives up Reba's love to assure his inheritance.

Iceberg humanizes the hustlers, pimps, junkies, whores, gamblers and preachers who scratch survival from the hardest city concrete. He shows how hard it is to win, and what it means to lose. Iceberg's ghetto is the stunted world that Moseley's Easy Rawlins hoped and struggled to avoid. Still, Iceberg shows that its people, written off by lesser writers as "various low-lifes" are real people. There's the gambler who loses his final stake, out-cheated by friends and neighbours. That's Reba's father, whom Iceberg follows from desperation through loss of face and status and into a bitter, destructive old age. And it is the interaction of these people with Reba in a tight but complex plot that eventually brings Joe to his doom.

Joe's story plays out against a background of violence, lawlessness, addiction and despair. Iceberg Slim is a master, whose characters skitter like bugs on the dramatic, surface tension of noir.