Monday, April 30, 2012

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.)

7 comments:

James Reasoner said...

And of course after I wrote and scheduled this, I picked up a bunch of e-books yesterday in Prologue Books' big 99 cent sale. Orrie Hitt, Frank Kane, Henry Kane, Fletcher Flora, Wade Miller . . . great stuff.

Anonymous said...

I can vouch for the Cardigan collection, I'm about half way through it now (it was a New Arrivals on my site a couple of weeks ago). Really fun stuff, though I find I can't read one after the other after the other without a break for something else, in this case an autobiography of Mike Wallace and a mystery by Margaret Millar. Several of the others look good too! Nice haul.

James Reasoner said...

I always break up the stories in single-author collections. Right now I'm going back and forth between DEAD MAN'S BRAND by Norbert Davis and HORSE MONEY by Richard Wormser, a couple from Black Dog Books.

Cullen Gallagher said...

That's quite a haul!

Adventuresfantastic said...

I've read all but the most recent Scudder novel, and Block's Matt Scudder is one of my favorite PIs.

Walker Martin said...

I gave a rave review of THE COMPLETE CASEBOOK OF CARDIGAN on the MYSTERY FILE blog. You can see the review and comments on http://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=16157

This is an excellent collection of hardboiled novelets from DIME DETECTIVE and another great book from Altus Press.

Rittster said...

It's too bad Nebel had such a low opinion of his pulp work and considered it dated and not worthy of reprinting. Makes me think of a John D. MacDonald quote: "Pulp fiction was not some sort of whoredom. What you do, as a craftsman, is recognize the stipulations and the limits and the requirements of a specific market, and then, within those limits, you write just as damn well good as you can."