The Good Know Nothing ― A California Century Mystery

During summer of 1936, in the midst of the Great Depression, destitute farmers from the Dust Bowl swarm into California, Hitler beautifies Berlin on the eve of his Nazi Olympics, and an old friend brings L.A. police detective Tom Hickey a book manuscript, a clue to the mystery of his father's disappearance.
When Tom chooses to risk losing his job and family to follow the lead, even his oldest friend and police mentor Leo Weiss opposes his decision, with a passion Tom finds suspiciously unwarranted.
Tom lures the novelist B. Traven to a meeting and accuses him of manuscript-theft and homicide. Still, on the author's assurance that the Sundance Kid, having escaped from his reputed death in Bolivia, killed Charlie Hickey, Tom crosses the desert to Tucson, tracking the person or ghost of the legendary outlaw.
In the infernal desert Tom meets a young Dust Bowl refugee intent on avenging the enslavement of his sister by an L.A. cop on temporary border duty in Yuma. Tom frees the sister, delivers the boy's revenge, and becomes a fugitive, wanted for felony assault by the L.A.P.D., his now former employer.
What he learns in Tucson sends Tom on an apparent suicide mission against tycoon William Randolph Hearst. He stops in Los Angeles hoping to enlist the assistance of Leo Weiss. Rather than help, Leo hands him evidence that Tom's father was a criminal, hardly worth avenging.
But Tom and his kid sister, refusing to believe the evidence, steal her employer's car and race north to settle with the publisher who wields more political clout than anyone in America.

Ken Kuhlken’s stories have appeared in Esquire and dozens of other magazines and anthologies, been honorably mentioned in Best American Short Stories, and earned National Endowment for the Arts Writing Fellowship.

His novels have been chosen as an Ernest Hemingway Best First Fiction Book, a Private Eye Writers of America Best First Novel, and a Shamus Awards Best Novel.

The novels are Midheaven and the Tom Hickey California Crime series: (in historical order) The Biggest Liar in Los Angeles, 1926; The Good Know Nothing, 1936; The Venus Deal, 1942; The Loud Adios, 1943; The Angel Gang, 1950; The Do-Re-Mi, 1971; and The Vagabond Virgins, 1979.