“Tomato Can Comeback” is yet another top-notch novel from the Fight Card series, penned by Hank Brown under the house name “Jack Tunney.” You can just about pick up any novel in this series and find some of the best action-packed writing ever found anywhere and this 2012 novel is certainly no exception to that rule. They are written in the tradition of the great boxing stories of the forties that Robert E. Howard penned about Steve Costigan.

What is a “Tomato Can” in fighing parlance? It’s a fighter that gets banged up, bloodied up, till he’s nothing more than a Tomato Can. It’s not a nickname any fighter looks for and certainly not one that Tom Garrick wanted, but it stuck to him even more so than “Long Tom” or “Soldier Garrick” did. It is “slang for a palooka who bled like a stuck pig; or got beat to a pulp.” On the night he got that nickname, “The blood specks all over our typewriters at ringside told the story of what a tremendous beating he suffered.”

This novel is told from the point of view of a sports reporter, Gil Schwartz of the Detroit Free Press, and his relationship with Tom Garrick, having written the most quoted story of his fall from fighting grace and now prepared to pen the story of Garrick’s comeback. Schwartz tells how his objectivity started to slide when he met Garrick and how there was something about Garrick that was “so decent, so innocent, that [he] couldn’t help but like him.” But Schwartz explains that you are never supposed to get attached to a pug, “because sooner or later they’ll disappoint or embarrass you.”

This book is, without question, a boxing story and the fight sequences will keep you mesmerized. Each fight is carefully choreographed. The story is filled with “a hook to the body drove Durban to the ropes” and “right crosses” and fighters barely standing, but getting up before the count ends. The fighters are all unique. For instance, there is Felix Gallegos who no one wanted to fight because he was a “vicious body puncher who fought dirty even when winning, with a left hook even more devastating than his elbows and head butts.” ( )