Meet Edwin Bishop: a multi-millionaire entrepreneur who has founded and taken public several very successful software game companies. Highly intelligent, arrogant, yet unschooled in social graces, Bishop lives an eccentric life in his Silicon Valley mansion with several paid female "companions."

Bishop has developed a software program to play chess against human opponents that he claims is the most advanced ever written, but before it is released, he finds that the software has been stolen when he stumbles across a vendor demonstrating the game at a trade show.

Enter August Riordan: a jazz bass-playing private eye who is cynical, irreverent and given to speaking his mind with unreconstructed candor. Although Bishop wants to hire a discreet private detective with a strong sense of professional ethics, as Riordan says, "It was his tough luck he happened to pick me."

Riordan careens through the very modern milieu of Silicon Valley in his quest for the chess program, enmeshing himself in more than just high technology. Jazz music, the underground world of S&M and an unlikely partnership with Chris Duckworth, a smart aleck gay man whom he meets at a bar called The Stigmata, are all part of the intriguing adventure.

Full of well-drawn, idiosyncratic characters, fast dialogue and compelling and realistic portrayals of many San Francisco Bay Area locales, The Immortal Game is a very fresh and entertaining mystery in the tradition of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.

This special edition from Poltroon Press is illustrated with 30 photographs and incorporates many of the design elements of the famous Borzoi Books first edition of The Big Sleep published by Knopf in 1939.

REVIEW

"The appearance of an excellent book by an unknown author from a tiny press is a treasured publishing dream that every so often happens.

THE IMMORTAL GAME (Poltroon; 312 pages; $25), San Francisco writer Mark Coggins' mystery debut, is smart, stylish, sexy and amusingly insouciant. It's a true find, a well-written and sophisticated addition to the heralded San Francisco private-detective story.

Coggins' private eye is August Riordan, a smart-ass with a kinky streak who is as comfortable in Woodside as he is in the Tenderloin. As the book opens, Riordan has a new client: pasty computer entrepreneur Edwin J. Bishop, who wants Riordan to find out who has stolen his innovative chess program and why. Riordan accepts the assignment, and the chase is on.

Part of the pleasure of Coggins' book is that it's well-grounded in the San Francisco familiar to those who know the city, and not in the fog-shrouded landscape of tourist brochures. Riordan's excursions take him from S&M clubs to East Palo Alto and back, with stops in some mansions and some single-room-occupancy hotels along the way.

THE IMMORTAL GAME is a panoramic tour de force conducted by the enjoyably jaded Riordan, a detective both deadpan and boyish, a strangely San Francisco combination. And thanks to Coggins' tight pacing and well- thought-out plot, the book never loses its white-knuckled grip on reality, even as it bottom-trolls through parts of town that definitely aren't on the official site list. It's difficult to imagine why this book wasn't snatched up by a larger house, but perhaps that's a fate that awaits the delicious Mr. Riordan next time. One can only hope." -- Ellen McGarrahan, San Francisco Chronicle