Kirk Alex books

Chance “Cash” Register Working Stiff Reading Order

Eddie “Doc” Holiday Reading Order

L.A. Cab Exploits

Love, Lust & Murder Reading Order

Lustmord: Anatomy of a Serial Butcher Reading Order

PI Choo-Choo Buschitski Reading Order

Short Stories/Novellas

Short Story Collections

Standalone Novels

Kirk Alex has been writing hard-boiled crime fiction and dark literary fiction for over two decades, publishing through his own Tucumcari Press imprint. His work sits in a tradition alongside writers like Charles Bukowski and Derek Raymond, favoring raw street-level prose over polish. He counts Bukowski, Sylvia Plath, Tom Kromer, and Eli Wiesel among his influences, and that mix of working-class fury and existential weight runs through everything he writes.

His bibliography covers a lot of ground. The Chance “Cash” Register Working Stiff series follows a broke, reclusive writer scrounging for work in the Arizona heat. The Eddie “Doc” Holiday books feature a Los Angeles private eye whose veins, as one reviewer put it, pump pulp. The PI Choo-Choo Buschitski novels drop a low-rent L.A. gumshoe into case after case of boudoir noir. And Lustmord: Anatomy of a Serial Butcher, his two-volume horror novel, was a finalist in the 2014 Kindle Book Review’s Best Book Awards.

Alex also draws heavily on his years driving cabs in Los Angeles, producing story collections like Blood, Sweat and Chump Change and Working the Hard Side of the Street. Dan Fante, author of Mooch, said that after reading Blood, Sweat and Chump Change “you understand why the American Dream needs liposuction.” That quote sums up Alex’s worldview pretty well: blunt, dark-humored, and unsparing.