Books by Erskine Carter

Heads Win, Tails Lose

A less than traditional "road story", with elements of rights of passage. The 21 year-old narrator journeys through the Autumn of 1969, visiting exotic locations, often in a drug-filled stupor. Known to us only as "Ratso" as Duncan, his equally disfunctional companion, calls him, he presents this adventure in the oral tradition and shades of Kerouac, Salinger, Burgess and even Dickens, come to mind.

Heads Win, Tales Lose is a first person narrative set in North America, North Africa and England during a ten week period. While the story of the adventure and the friendship between the two main characters is the controlling force in the book, there is also much reflection by the narrator on the worlds within and around him, making the novel one of psychological and social exploration as well. His voice is ironic at times, quite thoughtful, but his youthfulness betrays the worldliness he thinks he possesses, and so the irony is dramatic sometimes, apparent to the reader but not to him.

The travels of the two main characters see them being stopped, searched and harassed by law enforcement agencies in England, the United States, and Canada. They were betrayed in Morocco, Interpol knows they left with hashish, but they don’t know where it is. Finally, they arrive in Montreal, and the narrator flies to visit the girl he loves and has his heart broken once again, returning to hook up with Dunc. They decide to split up for the time being, Dunc going to the east coast to await a "package" and the book ends with Ratso back in his native Toronto but his Morroccan adventure has changed him and his ways- or has it?

WHAT IS BEING SAID ABOUT THIS BOOK:

"Erskine Carter’s first novel, Heads Win, Tails Lose, blew me away. The narration is graceful, literary and sophisticated, establishing a voice that is oddly compelling as he recounts arrests, fights, drug trips, propositions, fake friendships and broken romance. Although Ratso lives in that shabby world, he keeps enough distance to comment ironically on the wide range of people, places and situations that present themselves to a cocky 21-year-old in 1969. Readers will care more about this brash character than he cares about himself, and so we read on with a horrified fascination as he becomes in the course of a year one of the “miserable junkies” he pities at the novel’s beginning." Dorothy Beck

ABOUT ERSKINE CARTER

Erskine Carter is an English Professor at Black Hawk College in Moline, IL where he has taught for the past 18 years.A Canadian citizen born in England in 1948, Erskine went to Canada in 1949 and lived in Saint John, New Brunswick until he was was six, at which time he moved to Toronto where he grew up. In 1974 he moved to the United States and attended Trinity College in Hartford, Ct, earning a B.A. in English and History. He did graduate work at the University of Connecticut before moving to Illinois and taking up his current position. He is currently working on a follow-up to Heads Win, Tails Lose.