San Francisco’s Big Boy Pete, aka Peter Miller, sent in his crime novel for review with a brief note mentioning that a male might be a most appropriate critic, considering the book’s decidedly pre-#Me Too movement themes and setting.
Indeed, “Cause of Death: Rock and Roll” (Stark House Press, 220 pages, May 2026), about the adventures of bad boy English rocker Duke DeLuxe who gets a gig opening for the Rolling Stones on their 1965 American tour, may not appeal to young 21st century audiences not familiar with or interested in the heady days of the British Invasion.
But those who want to reminisce, learn about, or get a taste of that pivotal period of pop music may get a real kick out of this story.
Miller, an English rocker himself (and recording studio engineer living in the Bay Area since the 1970s) truly captures the spirit of touring life on the road. Plentiful scenes detailing the day-to-day showtime activities of the bottom-billed Duke and his band (bassist Boomer and drummer Clump), and solo singer Donna Skeets, also in the lineup, are the book’s best.
Speaking to Miller’s concern about possible sexism, here’s just one less-loaded example, describing the men’s reaction when they first see Donna, descending a spiral staircase, “shimmering like a desert island in the prairie sun.” He writes, “All eyes were on the feast. Eddie’s legumes were stirring. Boomer’s grits were whirring and Clump’s gumbo was concurring.”
Note: There’s no real dirt on the actual headlining band, which is led by a character called “The Star.”
Less interesting is the intrigue surrounding the book’s very complicated plot. Just why did the ever-mysterious road manager Eddie hire Duke? And what exactly is Eddie’s involvement in international drug dealing operations, assassination attempts, and deaths of road crew members? Keeping up with the nefarious action, and the story’s myriad locations (including days-off excursions to Mexico filled with gunfire and a burgeoning love affair) can be tricky.
Still, the descriptions of the various tour stops are right on. For example: “Fat and sassy, bold and brassy, that was Detroit in ’65. A bright eyed city. The center of it all. The United Auto Workers were king” and appropriate references to Motown, the Supremes, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, Woodward Avenue and Canada being “a hopscotch across the Detroit River.”
Here’s a great scene at an Omaha show: Clad in a gold lame suit, Duke, after being greeted with “a smattering of limp applause and catcalls,” broke into “Jambalaya” and “White Lightning,” which were “always winners at redneck jamborees and hayrides.” Soon after, during the act, when speaker tower collapses dangerously trapping concertgoers, Duke settles the crowd by reciting Jack Kerouac’s poem “Courage.”
The book is jam-packed with numerous fun references to period music, from the 1956 movie “Rock, Rock, Rock!” with disc jockey Alan Freed (Duke took his stage name came from DeLuxe, the theater where he saw it) to the story’s final, violent climactic Carnegie Hall gig, a “resounding success” in which “The Star threw in a Woody Guthrie gripe and a Lead Belly grievance—illuminating the darker cavities of the American dream.”
Miller writes, “Duke played on, harder now, feeding off the energy of what had just gone down. The truth was in the music —always had been.”
Delightful, telling passages like that, however, contrast with others in which the author might be accused of heavy handedness. For example, in this scene, Duke, having taken acid before a concert at the Farm Show Arena in Pennsylvania, scat-sang his numbers before “embellishing Donna’s introduction with an extravagant cluster of colorful accolades. … While she was doing her set, Duke kept his eye on Eddie. His abs were really rocking tonight—saluting and rarin’ to go. It conjured lyrics for a song: ‘Like corn husks on a moss bed of sluice, hardening like nuts in the midnight sun, just waiting for the right bolt to screw themselves upon.'”
Or this account of the end of one encounter between Donna and her paramour Pedro: “They smiled their goodbyes. Tears in their eyes morphed mythos into fable, soaring high and away from their cradle like an orphan balloon.”
“Cause of Death” is the second of Big Boy Pete’s crime novels, at least in part based on Big Boy’s real-life experiences. “The Ice Cream Man,” published in 2023 and set between 1969-72 amid the Vietnam War, follows Duke DeLuxe’s mysterious adventures on tour in Southeast Asia, visiting places from small Thai villages to the back streets of Saigon.
For more about Big Boy Pete, visit http://www.bigboypete.com/welcome.html.