Johnny Strike

Born Gary John Bassett, Johnny Strike (1948-2018) was an American writer influenced by hardboiled fiction of the 1950s. Crime digest magazines, like Manhunt and Justice, and film noir appealed to his fiction writing sensibilities. Though he wrote several noirish novels and short stories, he was known to music fans as a songwriter, guitarist and singer for the proto-punk band Crime, based in San Francisco.

The Exploding Memoir recounts the adventures of a proto-punk, mod-turning-glam in post-hippie San Francisco with an underground band. Like much of his work, the story is equal parts biography and fiction, but it's never easy to tell where they blend. San Francisco and Tangier were frequent locales in his work — especially in Name of the Stranger, his homage to the atmospheric works of Patricia Highsmith.