The setting is Southern California, just post-Vietnam War. Bone is a drifter, a gigolo who makes his cash wooing older wealthy women. Between gigs, he crashes with Cutter and his woman Mo. Cutter is a disabled one-eyed double amputee vet. Bitter doesn't begin to describe his personality, but he is witty and original. His belligerence creates problems for him and Bone wherever he goes. Mo is depressed, an alcoholic and drug addict, and the mother of Cutter's baby. Cheery set-up, no?

Driving home late one night, Bone sees a man driving an expensive car stuff something resembling a set of golf clubs into the trash and then drive off. It turns out that the golf clubs were in fact the body of a young girl who has been murdered. When by chance Bone sees the picture of billionaire chicken magnate J. J. Wolfe in the paper, he thinks he recognizes Wolfe as the man who stuffed the body in the trash. When Cutter hears this he devises a scheme to blackmail the presumed murderer. What could go wrong?

The book perfectly evokes the milieu of California in the 70's, and the hardscrabble life of a Vietnam vet. The dialogue particularly stars in this book, and Cutter, despite his bitterness and meanness, is brilliantly witty. It was a very good read, but I'm not entirely sure why it made the 1001 list.

3 /12 stars

First line: It was not the first time Richard Bone had shaved with a Lady Remington, nor did he expect it to be the last."

I'm not including the last line because if I did, you would know what happens to Bone in the end.

There is apparently a very good movie of the same name that was made from this book, starring Jeff Bridges. ( )

3.9 stars.
This book seems so quintissentially 70's. Noir laced with dissolution and hopelessness of the Vietnam war and the aging hippies. Not an uplifting novel but so short and succinct that every page seems necessary. ( )

Basis of the 1981 film "Cutter's Way." Aimless Richard Bone--in his mid-thirties, a dropout from his life, sponging off women and crashing at the squalid Santa Barbara house of his friend, Vietnam veteran and multiple amputee, the cynical, ravaged, suicidal Alex Cutter--unwittingly witnesses the dumping of a body and finds he's drawn the attention of the police. Cutter and Bone hatch a sleazy blackmail scheme from Bone's vague notion that the person he saw that night was power broker J.J. Wolfe. The plot thickens, the obsession darkens into a spiral of mental deterioration and self-destruction.. Ambiguity is endemic till the end. (Quite different from the movie.)

"I'm out here, and I'm alone. And I don't think I can get back." ( )

Cutter and Bone by Newton Thornburg is a 1976 thriller about two men, one a dropout gigolo called Richard Bone and the other, Alex Cutter, a drunken, one-eyed, one-armed, one-legged Vietnam vet. They live together with Alex’s druggie girlfriend and mother of Alex’s baby, and hustle to bring in enough money for booze, drugs and food.

One night while driving home, Boone witnesses a murderer disposing of his victim's body, and although he really didn’t get a good look at the killer, when he sees a picture of a wealthy president of a corporation, J.J. Wolfe, he is pretty sure he is looking at the murderer. Cutter decides that they should blackmail J. J. Wolfe and make some big cash. But while Cutter goes about gathering information and causing havoc he is also exposing them to a killer’s scrutiny.

This was a fascinating read. Cutter is full of self-destructive impulses and could be very vicious in his treatment of others. Bone is trying to escape the idea of a mundane American Dream and craves freedom but can’t quite shake his ingrained sense of responsibility. Mo comes from a well-to-do family but has dropped out so far that she now lives her life in a pill and wine induced haze. I don’t believe I have read this book before but I am pretty sure I must have seen the 1981 film starring Jeff Bridges as John Bone as I felt an immediate sense of familiarity with these characters. The author has created a very good thriller but Cutter and Bone is also a book that uses dark humor, violence and a smidgen of sympathy to show the impact that the Vietnam war had on these particular lost souls. ( )

Cutter and Bone, like Thornburg's Dreamland, is a story that on its
surface is about murder and conspiracy, but is more about the twisted
characters in it than it about the crime story. Both this book and
Dreamland involve amateurs who are rootless drifters trying to solve a
mystery. But Cutter and Bone is the R-rated version, involving not just
rootless but decent characters trying to do good in a crazy world, but
essentially nihilistic worthless cancers on society's backside.

Cutter and Bone is Hunter S Thompson's Fear and Loathing meets
murder mystery. It's a long strange trip involving two cynical men with
no jobs, no real connections, and both half mad. One is an
unrepentant gigolo living off any woman he can hypnotize or crashing
in his buddy's pad. He once walked away from a middle management
job, a wife, and kids. The other survived Vietnam with one less eye
and one bloody stump of an arm.

Witnessing the dumping of a teenage gir's body is what changes their
worlds. They set out to blackmail the culprit together with the victim's
sister. Then, after drowning in the sea and more booze than twenty
bathtubs would contain, it's a trip to the Ozarks with a college co-ed
and not much of a plan.

Not your ordinary crime fiction, but a powerful study of despair,
rootlessness, and losing one's mind. No one writes this stuff like
Thornburg. No one.
( )