Rough Edges

We’ve all encountered guys like Mitch Sutton in noir novels before, but there are some important differences in Mitch’s character, too. He d...

I’ve probably read more soft-core novels by Robert Silverberg than by any other author except Orrie Hitt, so I’m glad Stark House keeps repr...

Some critics have said that David Goodis’s novels read like book-length suicide notes. That’s certainly an apt description of THE WOUNDED AN...

QUEENPIN, Megan Abbott’s third novel, is the story of a young woman (whose real name we never learn, unless I just missed it somehow), who’s...

Lorenz Heller’s NIGHT NEVER ENDS uses the classic noir novel set-up: down on his luck photographer Luke Fogarty takes a job at a struggling ...

Before there was Richard Stark (Donald E. Westlake) and his famous protagonist Parker, there was Lionel White, the first real master of the ...

A couple of weeks ago when I reran my review of William P. McGivern’s novel ROGUE COP, my friend Jim Doherty suggested that I read McGivern’...

I had never heard of this novel or the author before reading it. There’s a political columnist by the name of Robert Novak, but I have my do...

John McPartland died young and wasn’t very prolific, only a dozen novels during the Fifties, a couple of them published posthumously. But hi...

Here are the opening paragraphs from this book: He slouched through the squalid gaudy Mexican Quarter. He could feel the bulge of the gun bu...

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...

In forty-plus years of reading and collecting books like this, I’d never heard of this novel or its authors, Erwin N. Nistler and Gerry P. B...

WILD is actually the first Gil Brewer novel I ever read, approximately 40 years ago. I had heard of Brewer but didn’t know anything about hi...

Several years ago my friend Keith Chapman published a pair of stories--a fantasy in the mold of Clark Ashton Smith and a sword and sorcery y...

As we all know, many of the soft-core sex novels published in the Fifties and Sixties were actually crime or mystery novels in disguise. Tha...

Last week after I reviewed Arnold Drake’s novel THE STEEL NOOSE , a friend reminded me that Drake also co-authored what is considered by som...

Last week I reviewed FREAKSHOW, the novel by Jacquin Sanders recently reprinted by Black Gat Books. As I sometimes do when I remember, I cop...

I like carny books, so I was predisposed to enjoy FREAKSHOW, a novel by Jacquin Sanders that was published in hardback in 1954 by Little, Br...

I’ve known Gary Lovisi for more years than I like to think about and have been a fan of his work, both fiction and non-fiction, for all that...

Our narrator Dick Ludwell is a small-time reporter in Lake City (obviously based on Chicago but not Chicago, as that city is mentioned as we...