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Home > Desert Oracle Radio > Author and acclaimed screenwriter Daniel Pyne relaunches his 2010 neo-noir novel Twentynine Palms this Saturday at Desert General
Podcast: Desert Oracle Radio
Episode:

Author and acclaimed screenwriter Daniel Pyne relaunches his 2010 neo-noir novel Twentynine Palms this Saturday at Desert General
Category: Society & Culture
Duration: 00:00:00
Publish Date: 2025-08-09 15:10:00
Description:

Author Daniel Pyne will be celebrating the re-release of his cult-classic neo-noir novel Twentynine Palms this evening at Desert General in Twentynine Palms from 5:00-7:00 p.m. 

Originally released in 2010 by Counterpoint Press, Daniel Pyne said his debut novel Twentynine Palms took a decade to write, prompted by a friend’s desperate hi-desert adventure in the late-80s. Pyne, who is also the acclaimed screenwriter of The Manchurian Candidate, said the novel started as a short story, then a screenplay his agent put on ice, before realizing there was a larger story to be told.

“What happens to Jack in the desert–– he has a quick relationship with a woman and then thinks it’s gonna go nowhere and once he tries to leave, he gets sucked back in, in a kind of classic thriller mode. They think the girl is dead and they think that Jack did it and then rather than trying to solve the crime, he tries to run away and through running away he sort of finds himself.”

While Twentynine Palms falls into the crime-fiction genre, Pyne says he considers himself a Western writer and has often returned to the desert landscape in his work.

“I’ve always loved the landscape of the southwest and the desert. I did a movie a couple years set in in New Mexico. I just always like to write about the West, about the kind of stripped down landscape and the stripped people that inhabit it.”

Daniel Pyne

Pyne says the novel’s initial release had a good response, but then “just sort of languished” until Brian Townsley of Starlight Pulp approached him for a re-release when they met at the first Twentynine Palms Book Fest two years ago.

“We were looking at the bookshelf (at the book festival) and there were a few copies of Twentynine Palms there, and I pointed to him and I said, ‘Daniel, I still love that book,’ and he said, ‘Well they had to search really hard for those because it’s pretty much out of print.’ And I was like, ‘Whaaaaat?’ One of the nice parts about owning your own press is you can remedy those kind of situations so we figured we’d give it a shot,” said Townsley.

Starlite Pulp’s launch for Daniel Pyne’s novel Twentynine Palms is at Desert General (located at 6427 Mesquite Avenue in Twentynine Palms) this Saturday, August 9 from 5:00-7:00 p.m. With Q & A, signing, and reading by the author. Free admission. 
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