Steve Geng is an ex-thief, ex-junkie, ex-jailbird and ex-actor (who specialized in playing thieves, junkies and jailbirds during his hot streak on TV’s "Miami Vice"). Now 64, and lucky to be alive after decades of methodical self-destruction, he has chronicled his scarifying odyssey in "Thick as Thieves."
Geng isn't, of course, the first author to recount his descent into drugs, petty crime and pointedly bohemian dissolution. Born in 1943, Geng was just old enough to catch the tail end of the Beat era and lucky enough to live in Paris (as a teenage military brat) during the height of its postwar funkiness. The heroin-ravaged Chet Baker was his idol, and there’s a definite whiff of Beat-like hedonism wafting from the book’s pages.
No, what makes "Thick as Thieves" memorable is that it’s a double portrait. The author’s sister was Veronica Geng [shown here with Pulitzer Prize winner, Philip Roth], a brilliant contributor to the New Yorker and the quirky dark lady of Manhattan’s literary scene, celebrated for her deadpan essays and revolving-door sex life. . . . The intermittent portraiture of his sister, who died of a brain tumor in 1997, displays a lovely mixture of tenderness and vexation, and Geng . . . navigates his way through the demimonde with real flair.
— James Marcus, Los Angeles Times, Sunday Book Review
