Rex Weiner has had a long and varied career, with his most public work being as a writer on Miami Vice. When he wasn’t engaged in this he was writing the on-going adventures of a Rock and Roll detective.

Out of print for some time, now The Adventures of Ford Fairlane is available to download as an E-book.

For a very reasonable sum you get two short stories featuring Fairlane, one set in New York, the other in LA. Both are based around crimes committed within the music industry and told from Fairlane’s point of view, talking like a hip Humphrey Bogart, as he skirts along the bottom of the eighties music scene. The stories are known for using the names of real bands and people, but to be honest unless you lived in either city you are unlikely to have heard of many of the bars and bands.

The first story sees Fairlane being hired to retrieve a stolen guitar, only to discover that all the guitars in New York have either been bought or stolen by a Nazi group with a desire to dominate through electronic music. The second see him moving to Los Angeles and quickly taking a job protecting a singer, a job he spectacularly fails at. Finding himself accused of murder, he has to hunt down across the city in an effort to clear his name.

Structurally the stories are made up of relatively short chapters and like Dickens, who also originally produced his works as serialised stories, each chapter ends in a cliff hanger. It makes for a snappy and eventful read, if a little odd, but then I feel the same way about Dickens.

Weiner's stories were impressive enough to be turned into a film, which lost all the noir feel, and access to recording artists worth watching, turning it into an embarrassingly cheesy movie, which wasn’t even so bad it was good.

Full of witty banter, the book also comes with an eight page introduction, detailing how the stories eventually made it as a film. Weiner has promised that if there is enough interest he may go back and write some more stories, but please no more films.

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Charles Packer