Dead Street

To be frank, I wouldn’t have even writen a review of Mickey Spillane’s Dead Street if I hadn’t liked the book. I have no desire to spit on the fairly recent grave of one of the most popular and influential mystery writers of all time.
Truth be told, I’d never read any Spillane before Dead Street. [...]

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Daybreak, Atlantic City. Secret Life, On A Honeymoon. Life Apart.

Don’t let the psuedo-Marilyn Monroe bombshell on the cover fool you, Fright is not any kind of particularly simmering or sexual story. I’m not sure I’d even go so far as to classify it as the same kind of noirish, hardboiled stuff that Hard Case Crime normally puts out. It is, however, a gripping, if [...]

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Songs Of Innocence

Charles Ardai, founder and editor of the absolutely wonderful Hard Case Crime book line, (and husband to fantasy author Naomi Novik, incidentally) has just about the most blatant pen-name in the history of ever: Richard Aleas. If you don’t understand why this is so, say the name out loud. It’s a fun little veneer of [...]

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“Standing There In The Blazing Sunlight I Suddenly Realized A Basic Fact…

… I’m against killing people.”
Ahh, I just finished the most recent Hard Case Crime offering. That’s always a good feeling.
George Axelrod, the author of The Seven Year Itch, Breakfast At Tiffany’s (the screenplay, clearly), and The Manchurian Candidate, brings the hardboiled, hard drinking conventions of pulp mystery to the publishing world in Blackmailer… the results [...]

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Home Is The Sailor

There is another literary (or perhaps “trashy” is the word, but who cares?) love of mine to which I am wholly devoted, and it pains me that I’ve gone this long without addressing it here. That love is the old fashioned hardboiled crime novel. Whether we’re talking about a heist, a detective piece, or just [...]

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