With us celebrating Stark Houses twenty years this month, we decided to draw attention to the three books they all have coming out in August. All have the stamp of fifties hard boiled crime and noir told with style and raw emotion. Take on any of these three if your tough enough.
Stool Pigeon by Louis Malloy
An angsty, gritty tale of a Little Italy cop obsessed with nailing the the gangster he grew up with. His quest risks both his life and morality. Louis blends the story’s dense emotions and New York street life into an entertaining cop tale. How this didn’t get turned into a film with Rod Stieger, Lee J. Cobb, or Brando, I don’t know.
Tall Dark And Dead by Kermit Jaedecker/ The Savage Chase by Frederick Lorenz/ Run The Wild River by D.L. Champion
Three books from Lion Books, right next to gold medal when it came to producing great fifties crime fiction. Whether the New York private eye yarn, a funny take on a missing gambler and the hustlers on the look out to use him, or the rise and fall of a border vice lord, these stories move fast and take no prisoners, embracing their quirks. Reading all three is like getting into a fiction propelled time machine.
Death Is A Private Eye: The Uncollected Stories Of Gil Brewer edited by David Rachels
Gil Brewer delivered believable menace with a muscular yet lean prose style that followed lower middle class types driven by lust or greed, and often both to their dark fates. Here Rachels unearths a treasure of his writing, mainly from the seventies, seeing light for the first time.
