A Rough Edges Rerun Review: The Wounded and the Slain - David Goodis

Some critics have said that David Goodis’s novels read like book-length suicide notes. That’s certainly an apt description of THE WOUNDED AND THE SLAIN, originally published by Gold Medal in 1955 and recently reprinted by Hard Case Crime [in 2007]. This one even opens with the protagonist, James Bevan, contemplating doing away with himself, even though he’s on vacation at a luxurious Jamaican resort with his beautiful young wife. Bevan’s wife is his problem, though, since their marriage is one of the most corrosive you’re likely to encounter in fiction. Like other Goodis characters, Bevan seeks refuge from that unhappiness in booze, which leads him into an encounter with violence and death.

Then, yep, you guessed it, Things Get Worse.

THE WOUNDED AND THE SLAIN is somewhat unusual among Goodis’s novels, in that it takes place in Jamaica rather than Philadelphia or some other large American city. It veers away from the noir stereotype in another way as well, with many of the scenes taking place in hot, bright sunshine rather than dark alleyways. The interior of James Bevan’s mind is plenty dark on its own, though, and ultimately the streets of Kingston, Jamaica, are just as mean as those of Philadelphia or New York. The motivations of some of the characters may seem a little clichéd today, but Goodis’s writing still makes them ring true. The headlong pace carries the reader along to a very satisfying conclusion. All in all, and not surprisingly, this is an excellent novel and comes with a high recommendation from me.

(This post originally appeared on June 20, 2007. The Hard Case Crime reprint mentioned above is out of print, and you can actually find copies of the original Gold Medal edition for about half the price of the HCC edition. Either way, this book is well worth reading. Goodis, however, remains one of those authors I like a lot and want to read more of, but I don't seem to get around to it.)

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Home is the Sailor - Day Keene

HOME IS THE SAILOR is perhaps the quintessential Gold Medal novel. It has all the elements: the tough, somewhat dim hero who stays drunk for much of the story; the beautiful girl who may or may not be what she seems; the dead body that has to be disposed of; and finally the hero on the lam from the cops, charged with something that he didn’t do. Just when poor Swede Nelson thinks his situation can’t get worse, Things Get Really Bad. It all adds up to a fast-paced, maybe not entirely believable novel that’s a heck of a lot of fun to read. If anybody was ever to ask you, “What were those old Gold Medals like, anyway?”, you could do a lot worse than handing them a copy of HOME IS THE SAILOR.

(This post originally appeared in a somewhat different form on March 26, 2005, making it one of the earliest reviews that I've rerun. As you can see, my reviews were shorter and punchier back in those days! When I posted it, the Hard Case Crime reprint of HOME IS THE SAILOR had been published recently, and that was the edition I read, not the classic Gold Medal pictured above with the great blurb: "And Swede's troubles began." Now, as far as I can tell, the Hard Case Crime edition is also out of print, but copies of both versions can still be found for sale on-line for fairly reasonable prices. This is one of my favorite Day Keene novels, so if you haven't read it before, I think it's well worth your time.)

The Big Bundle - Max Allan Collins

Max Allan Collins’ Nathan Heller series began in 1983 with TRUE DETECTIVE. (Almost 40 years ago? How is that possible?) TRUE DETECTIVE is one of the best private detective novels I’ve ever read. Through 18 more novels and story collections since then, Collins has maintained an incredibly lofty standard on this series and kept it alive through several different publishers, a pretty impressive feat in itself.

The Heller series moves to Hard Case Crime, a match that seems well-nigh perfect to me, with THE BIG BUNDLE. The Heller novels always involve real-life crimes, and in this one, it’s a high-profile kidnapping in Kansas City in which the six-year-old son of a wealthy Cadillac distributor is abducted. The kidnappers want $600,000 in ransom money. There’s something off about the whole deal, however, and Heller is called in to try to help recover the boy before it’s too late.

A lot of twists and turns and violence and tragedy ensue. The kidnappers are caught, but only half of the ransom money is recovered. What happened to the other half? That’s the question that brings Heller back to Missouri five years later, in a high-stakes mystery involving not only many low-level criminals but also Bobby Kennedy and Jimmy Hoffa.

As always, the research is thorough and meticulous, the background is fascinating, and the pace is great. Collins had me staying up later than usual and flipping the pages to find out what was going to happen. And of course, Nathan Heller is a great protagonist, smart, stubborn, plenty tough when he needs to be. THE BIG BUNDLE is classic private-eye fiction, just like the rest of the Heller series. I had a great time reading it and give it a high recommendation. It’s available in e-book and audio editions now, and a hardcover is on the way.

The Hot Beat - Robert Silverberg

A lot of Robert Silverberg’s pen-name books have been reprinted over the past ten or fifteen years, which is a good thing. Most of them, even the so-called sleaze books, usually had some sort of crime or noir element to them, and I think he does an excellent job with them. The latest such early effort is THE HOT BEAT, originally published by Magnet Books in 1960 under the pseudonym Stan Vincent and recently reprinted under Silverberg’s name by Hard Case Crime.

This one is set in Los Angeles, and the plot concerns swing band leader and musician Bob McKay, who was a star before he hit the skids because of his drinking, which cost him his band and the beautiful starlet he was dating. Now he’s under arrest for the murder of a prostitute, and no one believes he’s innocent except his former girlfriend and a sympathetic newspaper columnist. They team up to try to find the evidence to clear McKay’s name and expose the real killer.

There’s a bit of a procedural feel to this one as Silverberg follows the unofficial murder investigation step by step. The story moves along nicely with an occasional twist, and the solution to the mystery is well put together and satisfying. There are a few mild sex scenes. Overall, this novel is a little on the lightweight side but very well-written and entertaining.

The Hard Case Crime edition is rounded out by three short stories Silverberg wrote for the late Fifties crime digests TRAPPED DETECTIVE STORY MAGAZINE and GUILTY DETECTIVE STORY MAGAZINE. These were published by the same company that published Magnet Books. “Jailbait Girl” appeared under the pseudonym Ed Chase in the September 1959 issue of GUILTY. It’s a con game story, and there’s no actual jailbait girl, as there very well could have been in that era. “Drunken Sailor” appeared under the name Eric Rodman in the October 1958 issue of TRAPPED and is about a sailor on leave in New York City who runs into a dame—and trouble. “Naked in the Lake” was first published in the February 1958 issue of TRAPPED under the name Ray McKensie. It’s about an ambitious guy married to a beautiful heiress, with a pregnant girlfriend on the side. That’s a set-up ripe for murder, of course. All three of these stories are predictable, but they’re fun to read and excellent examples of Silverberg’s ability to produce worthwhile and saleable fiction for whatever market he set his sights on.

Overall, I had a great time reading THE HOT BEAT, which is available in both trade paperback and e-book editions, with a nice cover by Claudia Caranfa. It’s an evocative reminder of the era in which these stories were first published, and it only whets my appetite for more of Silverberg’s crime fiction. He mentions in his introduction that he wrote several more noir novels. I hope we’ll see those reprinted in the future.

Five Decembers - James Kestrel

FIVE DECEMBERS is an epic, ambitious novel that combines several genres and does so with impressive skill. First and foremost, it’s a hardboiled mystery yarn, and one of the best that I’ve read in years. Protagonist Tom McGrady is a Honolulu police detective who catches a gruesome double murder case in late November, 1941. A young man and woman have been killed, and one of them has a connection to a high-ranking naval officer, so the pressure is on McGrady to solve the case and catch the murderer. That investigation takes him west from Hawaii, to Wake Island and on to Hong Kong, on the trail of a clever, absolutely ruthless killer.

But yeah, I’m sure you noticed the date up there. December 7, 1941 is not a good time to be in the Far East chasing a murderer. And at that point in the story, FIVE DECEMBERS becomes a war novel, depicting with intensity and power the early days of World War II as Tom McGrady is swept up in the chaos. As time passes, however, FIVE DECEMBERS evolves into a love story, as well, and it’s a poignant and effective one.

There’s still a murder to be solved, however, and a killer to be caught, and Tom McGrady never loses sight of that as he’s determined to finish the job, whatever it may cost him. So for its final third, this novel turns back into a hardboiled thriller, with great action scenes, plot twist after plot twist, and a very satisfactory climax.

James Kestrel is a pseudonym for an author who has written several other critically acclaimed mystery novels. In FIVE DECEMBERS, he’s produced a potential classic. It’s the best book I’ve read this year and one of the best I’ve read in a long time. Great writing, characters, and plot. I give it my highest recommendation.

The Robert Bloch Centennial: Shooting Star/Spiderweb

(The material in this post originally appeared in somewhat different form on April 24, 2008 and May 27, 2008.)

I love the old Ace Doubles. The Westerns and the science fiction doubles were fairly common in this area when I was a kid, and I read a bunch of them. But for some reason I never saw any of the mystery doubles until 1981, when I came across a couple of shelves of them in a junk store. Needless to say, I grabbed them all.

There have been efforts to revive the Ace double novel format over the years, but the Hard Case Crime release of Robert Bloch’s SHOOTING STAR and SPIDERWEB may be the most successful yet. Of course, both of these novels were actually first published as Ace Doubles, although not back to back with each other.

The narrator of SHOOTING STAR is Mark Clayburn, a Hollywood literary agent/private eye. I don’t think I’ve ever come across that particular combination before, and it makes Clayburn different from other private eyes who specialize in cases involving the movie industry, such as W.T. Ballard’s Bill Lennox and Robert Leslie Bellem’s Dan Turner. Bloch’s familiarity with the pulp magazine markets gives this element of the novel a welcome touch of realism. There’s also a little tuckerizing going on, for example an undertaker named Hamilton Brackett. And the whole thing is told in an appealingly breezy, fast-moving style.

Unfortunately the plot, which involves Clayburn trying to find out who murdered a cowboy movie star so that the producer who hires him can sell the dead star’s old movies to television (shades of Hopalong Cassidy), never develops into anything more than a very generic private eye plot. I kept waiting for Bloch to come up with a twist on a par with making his hero a literary agent as well as a detective, but that never happens. The writing is smooth and Mark Clayburn is a likable character, but the other characters never came alive for me. SHOOTING STAR isn’t a bad book, and I enjoyed reading it, but it’s certainly a minor entry among Bloch’s novels.

SPIDERWEB is the other half of the Robert Bloch double from Hard Case Crime. I enjoyed SHOOTING STAR, but SPIDERWEB is a darker, better book, I think.

The narrator is Eddie Haines, a radio announcer from the Midwest who heads to Hollywood in the early Fifties with the intention of being a success as a TV show producer, or an announcer if he can’t sell his pitch for a TV series. Of course, neither of those goals works out, and he’s on the verge of killing himself in despair when he meets Professor Otto Hermann, a “psychological consultant” to the movie community who’s actually a swindler and conman. Hermann recruits Eddie to join his group of henchmen and gives him a new identity as the author of a successful self-help book. Eddie realizes that the professor is a crook and that he’s turning into a crook himself, but everything still goes along fine until the professor decides to target a state senator for blackmail and use the senator’s niece as part of the plot. It just so happens that Eddie has fallen in love with the niece . . .

In noirish fashion, things get worse from there, as Eddie tries to do the right thing but it won’t quite seem to work out. Bloch keeps the story perking right along, but under the smooth prose and snappy patter is a pretty bleak look at Southern California and gullible humanity itself. SPIDERWEB is a fine novel, and Hard Case Crime has done a good thing by bringing it back into print.

Forgotten Books: The Knife Slipped - A.A. Fair (Erle Stanley Gardner)

Well, fry me for an oyster. I didn't expect to ever see a new Donald Lam and Bertha Cool paperback with a cover by Robert McGinnis again. But that's what we have in THE KNIFE SLIPPED. Granted, it's not actually new, although it's never been published until now. It's the second Cool & Lam novel Erle Stanley Gardner wrote, but it was rejected by the publisher. Also, it's a trade paperback from Hard Case Crime instead of a small-sized Pocket Books edition. And the McGinnis cover is okay, but I'm not fond of model Dita Von Teese, so it's not in the top rank of covers as far as I'm concerned. Still, it's Bertha and Donald, and man, do I love this series.

In this one they're working on a divorce case, with Donald trailing a suspected cheating husband who turns out to have not one but two apparent love nests hidden from his wife. Only it's not hanky-panky going on (although there's a little of that, too) but rather something more sinister, and before you know it, the guy Donald's been shadowing winds up dead and either he or the switchboard girl he's fallen for is on the hook for the murder. Corruption, crooked cops and politicians, an empty shell casing switched from one gun to another, Donald being taken for a ride by gangsters, Bertha pinching every penny she can, lots of smoking and drinking . . . Gardner just keeps things rocketing along in very entertaining fashion. The plot is complicated (did you ever read an ESG book where it wasn't?), but Gardner pulls a nice double-reverse in the last chapter and it all makes sense in the end.

There are a few differences. The characterizations aren't quite what we're used to from the other books in the series. They're very close, of course, but Russell Atwood explores some of the differences in an insightful afterword. And although the title fits the book, it doesn't seem to have quite the same ring as the other titles in the series. Or maybe that's just me.

I don't recall for sure which of the Cool & Lam books I read first. I think it may have been SHILLS CAN'T CASH CHIPS. I know for sure, though, that I checked it out from the bookmobile, which means it was around 1964. I've read a bunch of them since, although not all of them. I sort of ration them out and read one now and then. I'm glad THE KNIFE SLIPPED is available at last. I grew up on stuff like this, and I had a great time reading it.

Sinner Man - Lawrence Block

Donald Barshter is an insurance salesman in Danbury, Connecticut, just an average guy who one day accidentally kills his wife in the course of an argument. Instead of facing what he has coming to him for that crime, he decides to leave town and establish a new identity for himself elsewhere. That turns out to be Buffalo, New York, and the new identity is that of Nat Crowley, an up-and-coming mobster. And son of a gun, wouldn't you know that Nat has a real talent for organized crime, so he soon finds himself rising in the ranks of the local mob. Of course, he has to kill some more to do it . . .

SINNER MAN is the first actual crime novel Lawrence Block wrote, although not the first published, and for decades it was considered a lost novel before the discovery that it was published in 1967 by Softcover Library (the same publisher that was known earlier as Beacon Books) under the title SAVAGE LOVER and the pseudonym Sheldon Lord. The story behind that is told in Block's excellent afterword to the new Hard Case Crime edition of SINNER MAN, published for the first time under Block's name and with its original title.

It's an excellent book, too, much too good to have been lost for decades. But we can be glad that it's been found and reprinted. Some of the plot is a little far-fetched, but Block is very good at making such things seem not only plausible but very possible. It's a good portrait of the era in which it was written, as well. Block admits to doing some slight revisions, but he left the period references alone, which is always good as far as I'm concerned. I also noted that this very early novel shares some thematic elements with his recent novella RESUME SPEED, which I also read not that long ago. It's interesting to compare the two tales written more than fifty years apart. RESUME SPEED doesn't fit quite as neatly into the crime fiction genre, but its protagonist is certainly a spiritual cousin to Donald Barsthter/Nat Crowley. I've already given RESUME SPEED a high recommendation on this blog. Now I do the same for SINNER MAN. It's a very good novel.

Catch and Release - Lawrence Block

Lawrence Block's new collection, CATCH AND RELEASE, features 17 stories, a newspaper essay, a one-act play, and the usual fascinating story notes about each item. Several of the stories have to do with sports—golf, tennis, and fishing—while many of them feature serial killers and hitmen. And not surprisingly, there's some overlap between the categories. What they all have in common is that they're some of the best written stories you'll find anywhere.

Among the highlights are the novellas "Clean Slate", which became part of Block's novel GETTING OFF, and "Speaking of Greed" and "Speaking of Lust", which were the lead stories in a couple of anthologies that used that title. I love the framing device in the latter two stories, which consists of a policeman, a soldier, a doctor, and a priest sitting around playing cards and swapping yarns, while a fifth character, an unnamed old man, sits next to the fireplace and passes gas. "Speaking of Greed" has a very funny section in it about a literary agent and a young writer, but I'm sure that any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, is, as they say, entirely coincidental.

Several of the stories I'd read before, including two from the Matt Scudder collection THE NIGHT AND THE MUSIC. One of them, "One Last Night at Grogan's", is my second-favorite Block story. For what it's worth, "The Night and the Music" from that same Scudder collection is my favorite Block story and one of my favorite short stories, period, right up there with Irwin Shaw and John O'Hara. The thing about rereading Block is that you start to skim the story, thinking that you've already read it, and then before you know it you've slowed down and read the whole thing again. The prose just draws you in.

CATCH AND RELEASE is available in several formats, whatever your preference, and it's one of the best books I've read this year. Highly recommended.

News From Hard Case Crime

New Stephen King Novel Coming

from Hard Case Crime

JOYLAND to be published in June 2013

New York, NY; London, UK (May 30, 2012) – Hard Case Crime, the award-winning line of pulp-styled crime novels published by Titan Books, today announced it will publish JOYLAND, a new novel by Stephen King, in June 2013.  Set in a small-town North Carolina amusement park in 1973, JOYLAND tells the story of the summer in which college student Devin Jones comes to work as a carny and confronts the legacy of a vicious murder, the fate of a dying child, and the ways both will change his life forever.  JOYLAND is a brand-new book and has never previously been published.  One of the most beloved storytellers of all time, Stephen King is the world’s best-selling novelist, with more than 300 million books in print.

Called “the best new American publisher to appear in the last decade” by Neal Pollack in The Stranger, Hard Case Crime revives the storytelling and visual style of the pulp paperbacks of the 1940s, 50s, and 60s.  The line features an exciting mix of lost pulp masterpieces from some of the most acclaimed crime writers of all time and gripping new novels from the next generation of great hardboiled authors, all with new painted covers in the grand pulp style.  Authors range from modern-day bestsellers such as Pete Hamill, Donald E. Westlake, Lawrence Block and Ed McBain to Golden Age stars like Mickey Spillane (creator of “Mike Hammer”), Erle Stanley Gardner (creator of “Perry Mason”), Wade Miller (author of Touch of Evil), and Cornell Woolrich (author of Rear Window). 

Stephen King commented, “I love crime, I love mysteries, and I love ghosts. That combo made Hard Case Crime the perfect venue for this book, which is one of my favorites. I also loved the paperbacks I grew up with as a kid, and for that reason, we’re going to hold off on e-publishing this one for the time being. Joyland will be coming out in paperback, and folks who want to read it will have to buy the actual book.” 

King’s previous Hard Case Crime novel, The Colorado Kid, became a national bestseller and inspired the television series “Haven,” now going into its third season on SyFy.

“Joyland is a breathtaking, beautiful, heartbreaking book,” said Charles Ardai, Edgar- and Shamus Award-winning editor of Hard Case Crime.  “It’s a whodunit, it’s a carny novel, it’s a story about growing up and growing old, and about those who don’t get to do either because death comes for them before their time.  Even the most hardboiled readers will find themselves moved. When I finished it, I sent a note saying, ‘Goddamn it, Steve, you made me cry.’ ”

Nick Landau, Titan Publisher, added: “Stephen King is one of the fiction greats, and I am tremendously proud and excited to be publishing a brand-new book of his under the Hard Case Crime imprint.”

JOYLAND will feature new painted cover art by the legendary Robert McGinnis, the artist behind the posters for the original Sean Connery James Bond movies and “Breakfast At Tiffany’s,” and by Glen Orbik, the painter of more than a dozen of Hard Case Crime’s most popular covers, including the cover for The Colorado Kid.

Since its debut in 2004, Hard Case Crime has been the subject of enthusiastic coverage by a wide range of publications including The New York Times, USA Today, Time, Playboy, U.S. News & World Report, BusinessWeek, The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Sun-Times, The Houston Chronicle, New York magazine, the New York Post and Daily News, Salon, Reader’s Digest, Parade and USA Weekend, as well as numerous other magazines, newspapers, and online media outlets.  The Chicago Sun-Times wrote, “Hard Case Crime is doing a wonderful job publishing both classic and contemporary ‘pulp’ novels in a crisp new format with beautiful, period-style covers.  These modern ‘penny dreadfuls’ are worth every dime.”  Playboy praised Hard Case Crime’s “lost masterpieces,” writing “They put to shame the work of modern mystery writers whose plots rely on cell phones and terrorists.”  And the Philadelphia City Paper wrote, “Tired of overblown, doorstop-sized thrillers…?  You’ve come to the right place.  Hard Case novels are as spare and as honest as a sock in the jaw.”

Other upcoming Hard Case Crime titles include The Cocktail Waitress, a never-before-published novel by James M. Cain, author of The Postman Always Rings Twice, Mildred Pierce, and Double Indemnity, and an epic first novel called The Twenty-Year Death by Ariel S. Winter that has won advance raves from authors such as Peter Straub, James Frey, Alice Sebold, John Banville, David Morrell and Stephen King.

For information about these and other forthcoming titles, visit www.HardCaseCrime.com.

About Hard Case Crime

Founded in 2004 by award-winning novelists Charles Ardai and Max Phillips, Hard Case Crime has been nominated for or won numerous honors since its inception including the Edgar, the Shamus, the Anthony, the Barry, and the Spinetingler Award.  The series’ books have been adapted for television and film, with two features currently in development at Universal Pictures and the TV series “Haven” going into its third season this fall on SyFy.  Hard Case Crime is published through a collaboration between Winterfall LLC and Titan Publishing Group.

About Titan Publishing Group

Titan Publishing Group is an independently owned publishing company, established in 1981, comprising three divisions: Titan Books, Titan Magazines/Comics and Titan Merchandise.  Titan Books, recently nominated as Independent Publisher of the Year 2011, has a rapidly growing fiction list encompassing original fiction and reissues, primarily in the areas of science fiction, fantasy, horror, steampunk and crime. Recent crime and thriller acquisitions include Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins’ all-new Mike Hammer novels, the Matt Helm series by Donald Hamilton and the entire backlist of the Queen of Spy Writers, Helen MacInnes.  Titan Books also has an extensive line of media and pop culture-related non-fiction, graphic novels, art and music books. The company is based at offices in London, but operates worldwide, with sales and distribution in the US and Canada being handled by Random House. www.titanbooks.com

The Cover for the Lost James M. Cain Novel

Here's the cover for the Hard Case Crime edition of THE COCKTAIL WAITRESS, James M. Cain's final novel that will be published later this year. I haven't read a lot of Cain's work yet, but I've liked everything I've read and I'll definitely read this one. That's a mighty nice cover, too.

Blood on the Mink - Robert Silverberg

Charles Ardai and Hard Case Crime have given us another nearly lost treasure in BLOOD ON THE MINK, the only hardboiled crime novel by science fiction legend Robert Silverberg (unless there are more like this still hidden in the pages of the crime digests of the late Fifties and early Sixties, and we can only hope that's the case). This one was written for a magazine that went defunct before it could be published, but Silverberg sold it a couple of years later to one of his other markets, TRAPPED, where it appeared in the November 1962 issue under the pseudonym Ray McKensie. As Silverberg explains in his afterword to the novel, it turns out that was the final issue of TRAPPED, which is a shame because this novel could well have been the first of a series.

The narrator is a federal agent named Nick whose specialty is undercover work. In BLOOD ON THE MINK, he takes the place of a Los Angeles hood who comes to Philadelphia to make a West Coast distribution deal with a counterfeiting ring. Nick's real objective is to find the engraver who's responsible for the printing plates being used to turn out nearly perfect counterfeit bills. In order to do this he has to maintain his dangerous charade while several different factions vie to come to an agreement with the head of the counterfeiters.

Naturally, there are a couple of beautiful women involved, the mistress of the boss counterfeiter and the daughter of the engraver, and both dames wind up putting Nick in even more peril before the assignment is over. Fistfights, shootouts, and explosions punctuate the narrative, and Silverberg delivers it all in terse, fast-moving prose with a firm hand on the various strands of the plot.

Quite a few of Silverberg's erotic novels are crime yarns in disguise, but he's in full hardboiled mode in BLOOD ON THE MINK and I thought it was great. Like I said above, I wish there were more of these books

The Hard Case Crime edition sports a fine cover, as well as including a couple of Silverberg's equally excellent short stories from the crime digests, "Dangerous Doll", another story bylined Ray McKensie, from the March 1960 issue of GUILTY, and "One Night of Violence", originally published as by Dan Malcolm in the March 1959 issue of GUILTY. With a lot of Silverberg's early SF and some of his erotica back in print, it's time for some enterprising publisher to bring out a massive collection of his crime stories as well. I'd certainly buy it.

And speaking of buying, BLOOD ON THE MINK will be available in early April, but you can pre-order it now. If you like top-notch hardboiled crime novels as much as I do, I highly recommend you do so.

The Comedy is Finished - Donald E. Westlake

I tend to think of Donald E. Westlake's books as either caper comedies or ultra-hardboiled crime novels, but THE COMEDY IS FINISHED, soon to be published by Hard Case Crime (you can pre-order it!), is a prime example of just how wrong that is. Sure, it has "Comedy" in the title, and it's definitely a caper, and it's really funny in places. But it's also pretty dark and bleak at times, too.

Koo Davis is one of America's most beloved comedians, star of radio, movies, and TV, but perhaps best known for all the tours he did overseas with USO shows to entertain American troops in various war zones. Yes, Bob Hope is the obvious template for Koo Davis, but Westlake fleshes out the character and gives him a history and personality of his own.

Written and set in the late 1970s, THE COMEDY IS FINISHED is the story of how Koo is kidnapped by the few remaining members of a violent protest group, hangers-on from the Sixties, who want to use him to force the government to release some so-called political prisoners. Westlake cuts back and forth between Koo, the increasingly desperate kidnappers, and the dogged FBI agent who gets the job of finding and rescuing the beloved comedian.

Not surprisingly, Westlake throws in a number of plot twists and complications, and some of the characters turn out to be much different than they seemed at first. The book is expertly paced and very well written, and the last chapters really had me flipping the pages to find out what was going to happen.

For reasons that editor Charles Ardai explains in a short introduction, this novel was never published until now, and that it exists at all is thanks to Max Allan Collins, who hung on to a copy of the manuscript that Westlake sent to him thirty years ago.  Westlake fans, and anybody who loves good fiction, can be very grateful for that. THE COMEDY IS FINISHED is a fine, compelling novel, as well as a poignant conclusion to Westlake's career. Highly recommended.

Update From Hard Case Crime

We just added a new book to the Hard Case Crime Web site (www.hardcasecrime.com), a first novel by a young Baltimore-based writer named Ariel S. Winter that we’ll be publishing next summer.  It’s not the sort of book that generally attracts a lot of coverage merely as a result of being announced – obviously no one knows the author’s name yet, since he hasn’t published any books before. The main thing it does have going for it is that it’s an amazing, amazing book – one that really knocked my socks off – but that’s something no one else will appreciate until they actually get to read it, which is months away.

However –

There is another story here, which is the book’s very unusual structure. The book is called THE TWENTY-YEAR DEATH, and it’s the story of a husband and wife whose lives collapse as violence intrudes – not an unusual premise for a noir novel.  But the form Winter chose for it is very unusual: he decided to tell the story of these two doomed characters in the form of three separate old-fashioned crime novels, each set in a different decade and written in the style of one of the iconic mystery writers of that time.  It feels a little like opening a Christmas package and finding new novels by three of your favorite pulp-era crime writers.  The first is set in 1931 and features a French police inspector investigating the death of a convict in a rain gutter 20 miles away from the prison where he was supposed to be serving a 40-year jail sentence.  The second is set in 1941 and features a hardboiled private eye in Hollywood who is hired by one of the big movie studios to watch over one of their leading ladies, who either is showing signs of paranoid dementia or is actually being stalked by a mysterious man on the set of her new picture.  And the third is set in 1951 and puts us deep inside the dark and troubled mind of a desperate man, a drunken writer who has lost almost everything he had and is about to tip over the edge separating ‘troubled’ from ‘dangerous.’

What’s more, these aren’t just pastiches – what's wonderful is that each book works not only as a tribute to a great mystery writer of the past but also as a standalone novel with substance and emotional heft, and as part of the combined larger whole.  It’s fascinating, for instance, to watch a background character in the first book become a more central figure in the second and then the first-person narrator in the third.  I don’t know any other book that’s ever done anything like it. 

In any event…I fell in love with the book, and bought it even though it’s three times the length of our usual books (by far the longest book we’ve ever published – 180,000 words), and even though you’re always told, as a publisher, that first novels don’t sell.  I did it because it’s a stunning performance and just left me grinning the widest grin I’ve had on my face for a long, long time.

New Glen Orbik Cover for Hard Case Crime

This book won't be out for a while, but Hard Case Crime has released the cover by the great Glen Orbik, and it's up to his usual fantastic standards. This would have been right at home on a Gold Medal novel and really makes me want to read the book . . . which, of course, was the goal. There's more info here. Check it out.

Big News From Hard Case Crime

Hard Case Crime Discovers Lost Novel by

Author of Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce,
and The Postman Always Rings Twice

James M. Cain’s Final, Unpublished Crime Novel,
THE COCKTAIL WAITRESS, Scheduled for 2012 Release

New York, NY; London, UK (September 19, 2011) – Hard Case Crime, the award-winning line of mystery novels published by Titan Books, today announced the discovery of a lost crime novel written by James M. Cain, author of such classics as Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce, and The Postman Always Rings Twice.  The new novel, The Cocktail Waitress, has never before been published.  Hard Case Crime will bring the book out in Fall 2012.

The Cocktail Waitress was the final book written by Cain, who died in 1977.  He was working on revisions to the novel until close to the end of his life; handwritten notes and edits appear in the margins of numerous pages.  Charles Ardai, founder and editor of Hard Case Crime, first learned of the book’s existence from Max Allan Collins, author of Road to Perdition, and has spent more than nine years tracking down the author’s original manuscript and arranging to get the rights to publish the book.  

“Together with Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain is universally considered one of the three greatest writers of noir crime fiction who ever lived, “ said Ardai, “and for fans of the genre, The Cocktail Waitress is the Holy Grail.  It’s like finding a lost manuscript by Hemingway or a lost score by Gershwin – that’s how big a deal this is.”  

Combining themes from Mildred Pierce and The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Cocktail Waitress tells the story of a beautiful young widow, Joan Medford, whose husband died under suspicious circumstances.  Desperate to make ends meet after his death, she takes a job as a waitress in a cocktail lounge, where he meets two new men: a handsome young schemer she falls in love with, and a wealthy older man she marries.

“Why am I taping this?” Joan narrates.  “It’s in the hope of getting it printed to clear my name of the charges made against me…of being a femme fatale who knew ways of killing a husband so slick they couldn’t be proved. Unfortunately, they cannot be disproved either… All I know to do is to tell it and tell it all, including some things no woman would willingly tell…”

“At his best, Cain was an astonishingly strong writer, not just of great crime novels but of great novels, period,” Ardai said.  Cain’s work is taught in literature programs at numerous major universities and was also the basis of classic films such as Billy Wilder’s adaptation of Double Indemnity, which boasted a screenplay by Raymond Chandler and was nominated for seven Academy Awards including Best Picture.  The Postman Always Rings Twice was adapted as a 1946 film starring Lana Turner and then again in 1981 with Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange and a screenplay by David Mamet.  Mildred Pierce was adapted earlier this year into a critically acclaimed miniseries on HBO for which stars Kate Winslet and Guy Pearce both won Emmy Awards.

The Cocktail Waitress will be released initially in hardcover and e-book editions, with a paperback edition to follow in 2013.  Like all of Hard Case Crime’s titles, the book will feature a new cover painting in the classic pulp style.

About Hard Case Crime

Called “the best new American publisher to appear in the last decade” by Neal Pollack in The Stranger, Hard Case Crime has been nominated for or won numerous awards since its inception including the Edgar, the Shamus, the Anthony, the Barry, and the Spinetingler Award.  The series’ best-selling title of all time, The Colorado Kid by Stephen King, was the basis for the current SyFy television series Haven, while Max Allan Collins’ Hard Case Crime novel The Last Quarry inspired the feature film The Last Lullaby, starring Tom Sizemore. Universal Pictures has features in development based on two Hard Case Crime titles, Little Girl Lost and Songs of Innocence by Richard Aleas. 

Founded in 2004 by Edgar and Shamus Award-winning crime novelist Charles Ardai, Hard Case Crime is published through a collaboration between Ardai’s media company, Winterfall LLC, and Titan Publishing Group.

About Titan Publishing Group

Titan Publishing Group is an independently owned publishing company, established in 1981, comprising three divisions: Titan Books, Titan Magazines/Comics and Titan Merchandise.  Titan Books' rapidly growing fiction list encompasses original fiction and reissues, primarily in the areas of science fiction, fantasy, horror, steampunk and crime. 2012 crime fiction highlights will include Mickey Spillane & Max Allan Collins’ all-new Mike Hammer Novels, and books by Lawrence Block, Donald Westlake, Joseph Koenig, and more.  Titan Books also has an extensive line of media and pop culture-related non-fiction, graphic novels, art and music books. The company is based at offices in London, but operates worldwide, with sales and distribution in the US & Canada being handled by Random House.

Getting Off - Jill Emerson (Lawrence Block)

For the first time in a number of years, Lawrence Block returns to his Jill Emerson pseudonym (used first on a few soft-core sex novels and later on more mainstream novels) in GETTING OFF, a new novel coming out soon from Hard Case Crime. The book is subtitled "A Novel of Sex and Violence", and you should believe that, definitely. There's plenty of both in this book.


GETTING OFF follows a young woman originally named Kit Tolliver who uses a number of aliases during the course of the book. She changes her name because she moves around the country all the time, and she moves around because she doesn't want the law to catch up to her. Kit, you see, is a serial killer who has sex with men – lots of men – and then murders them in a number of different ways. During her life, only five men have managed to go to bed with her and survive, through a variety of unusual circumstances. Kit decides to track down all five of them and finish the job, and to do that she has to turn detective.


Block's usual smooth and highly readable prose makes this book a real page-turner, to use a cliché (and something of a misnomer, since I read it in an e-book edition . . . but you know what I mean). You can't say that Kit, as a mass murderer, is really a sympathetic character, but when she encounters people just as bad or worse than her during her quest, the reader can't help but root for her because Block has done such a masterful job of putting us inside her head. There are a few plot twists, a surprising amount of humor, and some inventive scenarios involving both the sex and violence angles.


GETTING OFF is a very well-written novel (no surprise there) with a compelling protagonist. It's a rare book that will get me to stay up late to finish it these days, but this one did. If you're already a Lawrence Block fan, you're probably going to read it anyway. If you're not, you should give it a try. Highly recommended.

Great News From Hard Case Crime

Here's an update from Charles Ardai:

We've got some big news to announce today: After a year's hiatus, Hard Case Crime will be returning to bookstores with new titles in 2011, thanks to a deal we just signed with UK-based Titan Publishing.


Titan is a publisher both of fiction and of gorgeous art books focusing on pop culture such as movie poster art, pin-ups, newspaper comic strips, and Golden Age comic books, and has worked with filmmakers such as J.J. Abrams, Joss Whedon, and George Lucas. Titan has been around for 30 years, has more than 200 employees, and in addition to publishing books also has a magazine division, a retail division (Titan owns the famous Forbidden Planet bookstore in London, and until recently co-owned the Murder One mystery bookstore with Maxim Jakubowski), and a merchandise division that produces items such as t-shirts, sculptures, and accessories. We look forward to exploring ways we might develop some cool Hard Case Crime products with them!


But first things first: books.


Hard Case Crime will relaunch in September/October 2011 with four new books, including CHOKE HOLD by Christa Faust (sequel to her Edgar Award-nominated MONEY SHOT), QUARRY'S EX by Max Allan Collins (the latest in the popular series of hit man novels by the author of "Road to Perdition"), and two never-before-published novels by MWA Grand Masters (names to be announced shortly).


Additionally, Titan Publishing plans to acquire all existing stock of Hard Case Crime's backlist from Dorchester Publishing and to resume shipping these titles to booksellers immediately.


New books will be published in paperback (possibly some in hardcover as well!); ebook editions will also be released across multiple platforms. Titan is distributed in the U.S. and Canada by Random House.


We're very excited about working with Titan (indeed, we had offers from five publishers and chose Titan over several that were much larger and better-known) -- they love pulp fiction as much as we do and appreciate that in books like ours the visual dimension is just as important as the storytelling. It's hard to imagine a better home for Hard Case Crime.

Charles adds that the Gabriel Hunt series will remain at Dorchester for now, with plans to reissue the series in trade paperback editions.

Hard Case Crime Update (with Mike Shayne News!)

MURDER IS MY BUSINESS
Brett Halliday
August 2010
ISBN: 0-8439-6328-X
Cover art by Robert McGinnis
Read A Sample Chapter

MURDER AT THE RIO GRANDE

Ten years ago, private eye Mike Shayne did a job for one of the richest men in El Paso, digging up dirt on a boy courting the tycoon’s daughter. Now the daughter’s back, all grown up and dangerous. And so’s Shayne—but this time it’s to investigate murder...

First publication in 20 years
One of the most popular detectives of all time, Mike Shayne starred in more than 70 novels, a dozen movies, a TV series, radio dramas, comic books, and the long-running Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine

Filmmaker SHANE BLACK,creator of Lethal Weapon and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang,on the Work of BRETT HALLIDAY

"In this age of private eyes with cats, funny neighbors, and relationship woes—here’s to 40’s thriller writer Brett Halliday, whose baffling, bullet-paced capers have come to light again.

"Halliday’s books were marvels of misdirection. Red herrings, skewed motives, mistaken identities—he did everything but come to your house and bang cymbals.

"Halliday’s plots are byzantine gems. This is back when mystery writers were so much smarter than you and me. Want an engrossing read? Pick this one up.

"Never heard of this book? No matter. It’s been waiting patiently, poised to dazzle you with raw, ingenious storytelling. Halliday is the king of the baffler novel. Pure pleasure.

"How long can Halliday’s best-selling books remain dormant, undiscovered...? The answer: not a minute longer, thanks to Hard Case Crime."

(And to add my own opinion to that of Shane Black, MURDER IS MY BUSINESS is one of my absolute favorite Shayne novels. I've read it a couple of times and look forward to reading it again in the Hard Case Crime edition.)

Killing Castro - Lawrence Block

This novel was originally published in 1961 by Monarch Books under the title FIDEL CASTRO ASSASSINATED and the pseudonym Lee Duncan, a name Lawrence Block used only the one time. I just got around to reading the Hard Case Crime reprint of it from earlier this year. For some reason, I didn’t expect to like it all that much. To be honest, I haven’t really cared for the last few books I’ve read by Block. But I was pleasantly surprised.

The plot’s not complicated at all: five Americans are hired by sneak into Cuba and kill Fidel Castro, who at that point had been in power only a year or two. Their employers are supposedly wealthy Cuban expatriates who fled when Castro took over the country, but Block is deliberately vague about whether or not any American interests are also involved. The would-be assassins are the variety of types you’d expect in a book like this: a former syndicate hitman who’s gone freelance; a tough guy on the run from the law for killing his prostitute girlfriend and her lover in a crime of passion; a muscleman who’s not too bright; a mild-looking former bank teller with a secret; and a college kid with reasons of his own for wanting Castro dead.

The book switches back and forth between the storyline of the five Americans slipping into Cuba and making their preparations for the assassination, and a concise history of Castro’s life and the revolution he carried out. Block does a good job on both elements, and the prose is smooth and fun to read, as it always is even when Block’s plots don’t really work for me. This time the plot works fine. A few things play out just about the way you’d expect, but many of them don’t. And the ending certainly surprised me.

KILLING CASTRO is so firmly grounded in its era that it reads almost like a historical novel now, which, of course, is not a bad thing. I really enjoyed it, and I’m glad Hard Case Crime rescued it from obscurity.