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When a potential client walks into your office with a unique first edition copy of Edgar Allan Poe's The Murders in the Rue Morgue with a letter inside full of disorienting notes, you start asking questions. When this client mentions that his personal secretary has disappeared on his way to find you and then writes an obscenely large check, you have to wonder what the hell is going on. When you ask your new client what exactly he wants you to do and he replies, "Let your conscience be your guide," you know there's going to be trouble....

Scott Porter owns a Florida...

"Rick Ollerman's detailed critical essays, written about both modern and classic crime writers, have an electric-charged verve so brilliant the modern reader is compelled to develop a new understanding, a new appreciation, even a new witnessing of the writers and their most important and influential works. The context is always truthful to the era of creation, but it is fully developed with a modern understanding that brings new revelation to seemingly old topics. Which is a hard way of saying, Mr. Ollerman writes about crime fiction and its crafters brilliantly."--Benjamin Boulden,...

Spouses & Other Crime

In this wittily titled, career-spanning collection, Andrew Coburn uncovers and lays bare the compromises and motivations that push us, stumbling, through the mire of daily life, whether in the backwaters of hometowns or out there in a wider world. We open with a story of small town back in the 1960s, a disturbing story, transportable to any decade, anywhere. The viewpoint of a 12-year-old boy melds, seamlessly, into that of the boy now become a man, struck with the realization that the past is coming back to threaten a terrible disruption. The...

TURNABOUT

Former cop Frankie O'Neil's best friend has just taken a high dive out of a plane-without a chute. He'd been working with a couple of cops, Hill and Fetterman, to figure out a complicated scheme involving a shady business at a financial services company. Using a computer system to hide what's been going on, the police needed help to figure out their scheme. With O'Neil's friend gone, they turn to him as a replacement. The trouble is, O'Neil doesn't trust anybody except his young protEgE, and together they set out to find out who was really responsible for what...

FALSE STARTS

"It seemed clear to me I had always known I was going to jail. When I had bolted Redding to try to join the Navy, I had known. When I had told Percy, "We'll be back," I had known. When I had followed George into the all-night diner, I had known. I had served more time for a handful of inept burglaries than most men would have served for killing a police officer, and the prison was only my chosen instrument in the willful destruction of my own life."

Malcolm Braly spent the better part of his life behind bars. Arrested for a botched...

NOTHING IN HER WAY

When Michael Belen runs into the cherubic con man named Wolford Charles in New Orleans, he has no idea he had just opened the door to his ex-wife Cathy. She and Charles and Judd Bolton are working a con on a man named Goodwin, who had been a partner with a contractor named Lachlan down in South America. Lachlan had worked a swindle which had wiped out Cathy and Michael's parents, and now as far as Cathy is concerned, it's payback time. From Goodwin to Lachlan, Belen commits himself to Cathy and her scheme. When a drug-addled gangster named Donnelly starts...

THE CUT OF THE WHIP

Daniel Port is driving through Texas when the other car appears out of nowhere. When Port eventually wakes up, he finds a ministering angel named Jane and her father, Carl Heering, the richest man in town. Heering admits that it was his son, Robert, that ran into Port and that the kid has run off with important business papers. He offers Port an easy grand to bring his son and the papers back. But when Port tracks the kid down, all is not as it seems. The business papers are love letters, the Heering heir is kidnapped, and Port finds he must solve the...

LITTLE MEN, BIG WORLD

Ben Reisman, veteran columnist for the Journal, is bored. So when he stumbles across a reference to a character known as "De Ark," an underworld person who seems to operate without anyone knowing about him, he is intrigued. "De Ark" is in fact, Mr. Orral Wanty, Arky to his friends, the right hand man of the Mover, the man who really runs the city. Arky's control is so tight, even Commissioner Stark, the zealous law-and-order crusader, has never heard of him. But Arky's hand is everywhere. He's the man Leon Sollas, front for the syndicate,...

Midnight Road

"Old Trails was ugly of frame, face and temper. For the life of me, I couldn't understand how he could have sired Samal. Not that Sam didn't have a temper, too. She had a short fuse and could cuss a blue streak. Her tantrum storms were short-lived, usually, but they were entertaining while they lasted. The only thing wrong with her that I could see was that she turned into a creature of soft curves...."

So begins the story of 15-year-old Jeff Carr as he begins to grow up one Texas summer, and face some of the harsh truths around him. Everyone...

HE WON'T NEED IT NOW

Bill Duffy is a tough newsman but he finally pushes too hard and is canned. That's when he decides to take a photo job for a rich fat man named Morgan who wants Duffy to get some pictures of his ex-wife. Blackmail is involved, and Morgan wants the guy caught with the goods. But the set-up isn't what it seems, and someone sticks a gun in Duffy's back and makes off with the camera. Nor is the ex-wife who she appears to be. She's Annabel English, a slumming society dame. And pretty soon Duffy is helping her get rid of the body of the dead blackmailer. Now...

NORTH BEACH GIRL

Erin is tired of being an artist's model. She's tired of working. Jobs are such a drag. The night she quits her latest modeling gig, she goes back to her pad she shares with her girlfriend, Bruno, and their roommates, Lilly and Marian, and starts drinking. They all live in San Francisco's North Beach, where nights are filled with bar hopping and Beat poetry. Hanging out. This night she meets Riley. He's looking for a nude model but Erin turns him down. He follows her home anyway. Bruno takes an immediate dislike to Erin's new drinking friend, and threatens...

The Autumn Dead

Jack Dwyer used to be a cop. Now he's a rent-a-cop and part-time actor. Dwyer isn't complaining--not much anyway--he's got a great girlfriend; he's older, a little heavier, but what the hell, that's life. Then the woman who drove him crazy during his teenage years, Karen Lane, re-appears; still beautiful, still bewitching. She wants him to locate a missing suitcase. But Dwyer knows there's more to this than an elusive bag. And soon enough, he becomes enmeshed in the past, tracking down old secrets, secrets that someone wants very much to remain buried--even...

PAPERBACK CONFIDENTIAL: Crime Writers of the Paperback Era by Brian Ritt

These are the authors who turned out the dark noirs and hardboiled thrillers, private detective puzzles and psychological suspense, police procedurals and backwood melodramas, stories of passion... and cold-blooded murder. 132 profiles of the men and women who wrote the books that became the backbone of the Pulp and Paperback Era from the 1930s through the 1960s.

Here you will find information on the acknowledged masters like Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James M....