Hard Rain Falling - Penguin Classics by Don Carpenter

Jack Levitt – teenaged orphan and small-time criminal – lives off his wits, dividing his time between the pool halls, bars and brothels of Portland, Oregon. Billy Lancing is a young black runaway and pool hustler who falls into Jack’s orbit. After a messed-up heist lands Jack at reform school, he re-enters a world where Billy has struggled to find peace in a new middle-class life with marriage, fatherhood and a steady job. But neither man can outrun trouble for long, and they soon meet again in St Quentin Prison, trying to make sense of the hand life has dealt them. Only one will make it out of St Quentin – but what is the use of freedom, if all of life is in chains?

A Dostoevskyian noir in the hard-boiled tradition, Hard Rain Falling is also a shocking, tender novel about looking for meaning somewhere between the seedy and the sublime.