Cover

Title Page

DOLORES HITCHENS

FOOLS’ GOLD

WITH A FOREWORD BY
DUANE SWIERCZYNSKI

LIBRARY OF AMERICA E-BOOK CLASSICS

Copyright

Copyright © 2020 by Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., New York, N.Y.

Published in the United States by Library of America.

Fools’ Gold was published by Doubleday & Company, Inc. in Garden City, New York, on March 20, 1958, as a selection of the Crime Club. An English edition was published the same year by T.V. Boardman as part of the American Bloodhound Mystery series. The text printed here is that of the first American edition.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Distributed to the trade in the United States by Penguin Random House Inc. and in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Ltd.

Cover design by Donna G. Brown

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019952175

eISBN 978-1-59853-459-7

Contents

CONTENTS

Foreword

FOREWORD

Early in the pilot episode of Better Call Saul, bottom-feeding attorney Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk) is stuck defending three young men charged with a truly heinous crime. “Oh to be nineteen again!” he bellows to the jury. “Ladies and gentlemen, do you remember nineteen? Me personally? If I were to be held accountable for some of the stupid decisions I made when I was nineteen, oh boy wow . . . Which brings us to these three.” He points at the defense table. “These three knuckleheads—and I’m sorry, boys, that’s what you are—they did a dumb thing.”

Now I don’t know what Dolores Hitchens’s family life was like. But one thing is certain: Hitchens knew nineteen-year-olds could be complete knuckleheads, and could be counted on to do dumb things. Take Skip and Eddie, the young protagonists of Fools’ Gold, Hitchens’ 1958 caper-gone-way-way-wrong thriller. Bitter that life has handed him a raw deal, Skip comes up with a plot to steal a fat stack of cash from a high-rolling boarding house guest in Pasadena. Skip’s lifelong pal (and self-described “follower”) Eddie thinks this plot has more than a few cracks in it—but doesn’t want to disappoint Skip, who’s already spending the cash in his imagination. The caper hinges on Karen Miller, a shy orphan girl who lives in the same boarding house with Mrs. Havermann, the widow owner who has raised her since she was ten. Karen, who’s enrolled in a secretarial course, is flattered by the attention from Skip and would do pretty much anything to make him happy.