Three Crime Novels by Anthony Bourdain: Bone in the Throat, Gone Bamboo, and The Bobby Gold Stories
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Before Kitchen Confidential made him a household name, Anthony Bourdain published three crime novels that weren't much read at the time and that have since become artifacts of a particular moment: the writer before the fame, working out his voice on borrowed genre scaffolding.
Bone in the Throat, Gone Bamboo, and The Bobby Gold Stories are the books collected here. The first follows a young chef pulled into a mob entanglement at a Little Italy red-sauce joint; the second tracks an assassin trying to disappear in St. Martin after a job goes wrong; the third finds a club employee falling for a cook who complicates his life. The sharp, fast-talking register that would later define Kitchen Confidential runs through all three.
These are not timeless contributions to crime fiction. The pleasures are genre pleasures, and these are best consumed as popcorn. What they do offer, and what makes this collection worth having for the right reader, is the texture of a specific voice before it had a platform—the same eye that would later animate Get Jiro already at work, if not yet fully formed.
Paperback. 598 pages.
Will be published on July 28, 2026
