Killing Castro and True Crime

Hard Case has announced it's first title of 2009-Killing Castro by Lawrence Block. Yet another of Block's early pseudonymous efforts, they're billing it as his rarest book, written under a name he only used once.

And over in Brooklyn, Akashic has returned its city themed noir anthology series to Brooklyn for a third outing with a true crime twist.

Wednesday Paperback Cover

Hank Janson seems to have been England's Mickey Spillane.

Crimeculture

I was doing a little surfing, looking for something interesting for the Wednesday paperback cover, and I ran across Crimeculture, a site that features academic articles on crime fiction. It's been around a while, so it's probably old news to most of you, but I somehow managed to miss it entirely. It has articles on many topics, ranging from the cultural significance of paperback postwar American crime fiction to Paul Auster's New York trilogy. This promises to be interesting.

Noircon Podscasts

For those of you who, like me, could not make it to Noircon this year, you can listen to Shannon Clute and Richard Edwards podcast from the conference here. Hopefully, I will make it next year. This year, however, I will have to sit here and listen to the interviews.

Savage Night Trailer

Al Guthrie has a rather tasteful trailer for his upcoming Savage Night. Tasteful is a relative term, of course, and there is talk of arse cheek slicing. I received a copy in the mail quite unexpectedly a while ago, and it seems like Guthrie's up to his old tricks. There's a scene with a mentally ill woman with a full adult diaper and her husband that's more disturbing than anything in Hard Man, but I still have every intention of finishing the novel, which should tell you something.

Wednesday Paperback Cover

Ace wasn't the only publisher to do doubles.

Review of Empty Ever After

Reed Farrell Coleman’s Moe Prager series is unique because it features a private investigator whose role involves keeping secrets as much as it does exposing them. It is also unique in that Coleman has been carefully building a narrative arc throughout the duration of the series, which he clearly started with an end it mind. Empty Ever After (Bleak House Books, 2008) is that end, and what an end it is. It is the best book in the series that has already won it share of critical, if not popular, acclaim.

Coleman skips the decade of the 1990s, and starts Empty Ever After in 2000. The one thing Prager has always feared has come to pass. His wife Katy discovered the secret he has been hiding from her for decades; that he found her vanished brother Patrick years ago, and let him slip away. They have divorced, and Prager is trying to move on with his life, and deal with the fallout from what should be a closed chapter in his personal history. Someone however, wants to open old wounds, and Patrick’s grave is desecrated, as is that of his former boyfriend. Soon the fragile Katy is receiving calls from, and even seeing, her dead brother, and Prager is forced to go back into his past to search out the people who have reason to seek revenge against him.

The villain won’t come as a surprise to those who have read the series, but the resolution will. Coleman has always avoided pat endings, and this final bow for Prager has the least pat ending of all the novels in the series. There are no real answers, only more uncertainty, as the final curtain falls.

Those who have not read the series will likely be lost, as the story relies heavily on characters from earlier books, but this entire series is worth reading. The only book in the series that is out of print is The James Deans, which is easy enough to find second hand. The others are available thanks to Busted Flush Press and Bleak House. Anyone who seeks these books out will be well rewarded.

Your Double Wednesday Paperback Cover

In honor of Hard Case Crime's Robert Bloch double, I give you the original covers of both novels. It should be noted that the novels, while both originally published as doubles, were not published together.

Bleak House in PW

Ben LeRoy and Bleak House books get a nice write up in Publisher's Weekly.

An Interview with Glauser's translator

Detectives Beyond Borders has the first part of an interview with Mike Mitchell, who has translated Swiss author Friedrich Glauser's work into English for Bitter Lemon Press. Glauser is an interesting author, and there's very little information about him available in English, so it's worth a look if you're interested in the author, or the problems that arise in translating fiction.