Monday, March 26, 2012

New This Week



As I mentioned, last week was unusual. This week I have only three new books to talk about . . . but they look like good ones.

Paul Cain – THE COMPLETE SLAYERS. This is a beautiful limited edition from Centipede Press that reprints Cain's novel FAST ONE (in its original form as published in BLACK MASK) and all of his shorter fiction. It includes a lengthy biographical introduction by editors Lynn F. Myers Jr. and Max Allan Collins that reveals quite a bit of new information about the mysterious Paul Cain, including his real name. The book is signed by Myers, Collins, and artist Ron Lesser, who provided the great cover and several interior illustrations.


Max Allan Collins (again) – DICK TRACY: THE COLLINS CASEFILES, VOLUME 1. This handsome trade paperback reprints the first three storylines by Collins when he took over the writing duties on the Dick Tracy comic strip in 1977. Tracy is a longtime favorite of mine, but I haven't read these stories yet and I'm looking forward to them.


Matthew P. Mayo – WRONG TOWN. This is a new e-book edition of a Western novel originally published a few years ago in England by Robert Hale as part of the Black Horse Western line. My review of it will be coming up in a few days.

2 comments:

Jerry House said...

Sounds like you had a great week, James!

The Cain collection sounds fantastic, but a bit pricey for me. (In my mind I conflate Centipede Press with Fantastic But Pricey Press.) *Sigh* I had been waiting for this one (sans the novel) since it was announced several years ago under the title FOURTEEN SLAYERS from Crippen & Landrau.

Collins had a fantastic run on DICK TRACY. While remaining true to Gould's vision, he managed to make the character fresh and up-to-date while getting rid of some of the silliness that crept in during the end of Gould's career. THE COLLINS CASEFILES ran to at least three volumes. I had heard that at least one more had been published but have never been able to find it.

The Mayo sounds interesting. Western fiction had been a large hole in my genre reading until several years ago. Now I'm discovering how much good stuff I've missed.

James Reasoner said...

The Cain collection is expensive, but Amazon has it marked down considerably from list price and I had some gift card money that helped some, too. But I still had to debate quite a bit with myself before I bought it.