Warren Roberts

Warren Roberts was born in New Zealand and has travelled to more than 70 countries, and has worked and lived worldwide with careers in banking, international trade and finance, television and publishing. He is the author of Kill City USA, the Bell of Girardius and The Whore of Babylon.

Warren lives in London with his fedora.

Published by Mean Streets Press, Warren's Joe Milo thrillers are tastily-tangled crimes noir. They feature a laconic and appealingly self deprecating British private investigator, Joe Milo, his enigmatic Jamaican sidekick Jonah, plus a Technicolor cast of villains, lovers, killers, liars, cheats, bloodsuckers, and miscreant clowns, with morality and political correctness as a fool's distraction. The novels combine page-turning intrigue, character conflict and suspense with lively, crisp and cutting dialogue and dark humour, while paying respect to literary noir (without deferring to excessive pastiche). They will appeal to readers who like their private dicks to be hip, tough, politically incorrect, street-smart, casually efficient, literate, and to have moral complexity.

Milo, their protagonist, believes that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue. He has an agile wit, a remorseless put-down of the second-rate in people, yet a soupçon of compassion hidden beneath a sardonically flip exterior. He likes booze and women, both to excess. His conscience is personal, rather than social, and he uses a sardonic wisecrack as effectively as a left hook. His verbal mots justes are used not for triumphalism, but rather to promote action and reaction. At heart he is a loner and a sceptic. Hypocrisy, officialdom, and prevarication he suffers badly, and he continues the tradition of the American literary and cinematic-noir PI, in British settings. Milo's cryptic, street-wise and taciturn (he thinks Harpo Marx talked too much) sidekick, Jonah, has a day job running a testosterone-fuelled gym in London's Earls Court, and he would have represented Great Britain as an Olympic boxer, but for 'a slight misunderstanding about a urine sample.'