New This Week

I have some new books to talk about this week, not just the usual collection of old ones:

A STAB IN THE DARK, A WALK AMONG THE TOMBSTONES, and A LONG LINE OF DEAD MEN – Lawrence Block. These are the new trade paperbacks of three Matt Scudder novels self-published by Bloc, and I gotta tell you, they look great. I never paid much attention to cover design, book layout, fonts, and things like that until Livia and I started publishing our own books. Now I really appreciate a top-notch job, and that certainly describes these books, which are in the same basic format as the Scudder collection THE NIGHT AND THE MUSIC. Maybe someday the whole series will be in a uniform set like this. That wouldn't be a bad thing to have. In the meantime, I've read one of these before (A STAB IN THE DARK) but haven't read the other two. You can bet I will before too much longer.

THE COMPLETE CASEBOOK OF CARDIGAN, VOLUME 1 and FLYERS OF FORTUNE – Frederick Nebel. The Cardigan book is the first in a series of four from Altus Press that will reprint the entire series of stories about tough private eye Jack Cardigan from the pulp DIME DETECTIVE. I've read scattered entries in the series here and there, and like everything else I've read by Nebel, they're really, really good. A lot of people rank Nebel's work just below that of Dashiell Hammett's, and I can go along with that. FLYERS OF FORTUNE, published by Pulpville Press, is a collection of Nebel's aviation adventures originally published in AIR STORIES and WINGS.

HELL HAWKS: THE UNTOLD STORY OF THE AMERICAN FLIERS WHO SAVAGED HITLER'S WEHRMACHT – Robert F. Dorr and Thomas D. Jones. More World War II non-fiction. I've been trading emails with author and military historian Bob Dorr, who got his start in the men's adventure magazines, and I wanted to try some of his work. Other than what I had to research for my World War II novels (dive bombers in the Pacific), my knowledge of aviation during that war is pretty sketchy. (Shameless plug: all three of my WWII novels are still available as both print and e-books, by the way.)