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A lot of people would be dismissive of pulp crime fiction, considering it sensationalised, but I'd contend that they are actually very important social documents of their time, breaking taboos about what was acceptable for publication in decent literature. As well as being very creative, adventurous and exciting story telling. I've seen that in previous Hard Case Crime books that republish classic noir from the past, from Max Allan Collins's Quarry whose lack of morals about killing come from his time spent in Vietnam to the counter culture of Lawrence Block's A Diet of Treacle . But not everyone needs to be an assassin for hire or a small time drug dealer turned to murder and Seed on the Wind has another unusual and daring angle that takes another look at changing attitudes in society. First published in 1930 before he became famous for his creation of Nero Wolfe, Rex Stout takes on an uncommon and very controversial subject in Seed on the Wind . A woman with a womb...

When a representative from an insurance firm appears at the offices of Cool and Lam, it sounds like just the kind of case they need, or specifically, the kind of case that is music to the ears of Bertha Cool. An insurance company is offering a large fee for investigating a traffic accident. It looks like a nice, quiet and respectable job, unlike the other sordid cases that her detective Donald Lam usually manages to unearth. An easy case is fine with Donald Lam as well, although he suspects there might be more to this investigation that looking into a potentially fraudulent whiplash claim that could easily be dealt with by the firm's own detectives. So why do they need Cool and Lam? Well, there is clearly an element of unspecified danger, but it also seems that they want Lam for more than just his investigative talents. There is an attractive woman involved and they need someone with the charm to get in close to her, and Donald Lam is just the man for the job. I'm guessing that...

Famous for his Perry Mason series, Erle Stanley Gardner also wrote the entertaining Cool and Lam Private Investigation team series under the name A.A. Fair. I say PI team, but essentially most of the work is done by 'pint size' Private Detective Donald Lam, while the business side of the arrangement is taken care of in the rather larger shape of Bertha Cool. Bertha has a tendency to explosive outbursts at the unconventional way Lam operates and is always trying to improve the reputation and class of clientele of the agency, but although it's an arrangement that generally works surprisingly well, this familiar/repetitive operation is certainly put to the test in The Count of 9 . Bertha has landed a nice little engagement with a wealthy socialite and is making the most of the promotion and status such a commission will bring. Dean Crockett the Second has hired Cool and Lam to look over the guests invited to the party at his penthouse apartment to make sure nothing gets stole...

Having got out of the business of being a professional hitman in the first thriller Quarry and clearing up some loose ends in Quarry's List (that's two novels worth of plotting, killing and screwing summed up in a few words), Quarry has a few ideas for a new career in Quarry's Deal . Unsurprisingly, it involves more killing and screwing. A lot more. Admittedly, there aren't too many career path options for a Vietnam veteran and professional killer. You can put a lot of distance and money between your past and future, but if you have the list of contacts - as Quarry does - you can take over as the new Broker and run the business. Quarry however has found another interesting new angle to pursue. He's planning to use the list to find out who the hitmen are, find out who they are going to hit, and get the potential targets to pay him to protect them from the killers who are now working for new brokers. His first job takes him to a Florida beach resort filled with weal...

Quarry's List was originally published in 1976 as The Broker's Wife, as a follow up to Quarry . It was never intended to be a series, but at least Max Allan Collins didn't kill him off like Nolan ( Two for the Money ) and then have to rewrite the ending to continue the series. He still had a problem though, as Quarry had more or less retired as a professional hit man in the first standalone book, or to be more accurate, he has "retired" his agent the Broker. When asked by his publisher to follow up, Collins was faced with the question of what is Quarry going to do next? Quarry, as we know for being introduced to him in first book, can be ruthless in his methods, in killing as much as in taking care of his own security. Despite the arrangement with his Broker as a killer for hire coming to an unfortunate end, and despite taking every precaution to leave the professional hitman business behind him, he know he needs to still be careful. He expects that eventually so...

Malniveau Prison , the first in a trilogy of books that come under the title of The Twenty-Year Death, is a curious book. It's not one of the hard-boiled noir classics that Hard Case Crime do a wonderful service in reviving, but one of their more modern publications supposedly in the classic style. While some of the newer models can definitely still evoke the greats - and Ariel S Winter has received praise in some quarters for his writing - it doesn't really cut it for me, lacking any of the real literary or underlying social commentary that can often be found even in pulp fiction, lacking even any real character of its own. Even as a crime thriller, I found Malniveau Prison curiously unengaging in its style and in its plot. Even though it involves a relative small cast of characters, it's all over the place, not really sure of where it wants to take you. It starts out on one direction, leaves matters curiously uninvestigated and then moves on to relate other bizarre event...

The signs of what is to come are all there in Lawrence Block's A Diet of Treacle , although it ought to already be obvious from the suitably lurid cover on the Hard Case Crime paperback with the tagline 'She Went Looking For Thrills - AND FOUND MURDER'. To be fair, you don't even need to look beyond the author's name to know what to expect, but Block's 1961 crime thriller has plenty of lowlife pulp and seediness in the opening chapters to alert you to the nature of the trouble ahead. It's the counter-culture alternative living, hip drug taking community of Greenwich Village that houses characters like Joe Milani and his friend Shank. Right from the start Block describes them as being blissfully high in the middle of the day in a bar, neither of them with anything better to do but ponder their next move, or rather their next bout of inactivity. This day, Joe decides his confidence is running high enough to pick up a square chick who has come into the bar, but...

Before he became a successful bestselling writer of fiction and blockbuster film and TV series ( Westworld , Jurassic Park , ER ), Michael Crichton cut his teeth writing a series of pulp suspense novels under the pseudonym of John Lange. Written in 1967 while still a medical student, his second Lange book  Scratch One meets the remit of that sensationalist style well. It's an espionage thriller based around a case of mistaken identity that provides action and excitement glamour and perhaps a bit of tongue-in-cheek or knowing humorous play with the genre. There is a serious political deal that is taking place however that underlies the intrigue, an arms deal and shipment of Norwegian surplus weaponry that is being shipped to Israel. A middle Eastern terrorist group, known as The Associates, having got wind that Israel are building a nuclear reactor, want to prevent the deal taking place and have employed a number of assassins to target those agents who are setting it up. When one o...

Hard Case Crime collect Max Allan Collins's first two Nolan crime thriller series here as a well-named Two for the Money . In fact this was never meant to be a series, but, as you can tell from the first book Bait Money , the character and the situations were too good to leave at that point. Collins even killed Nolan off at the end of the first book, but was encouraged to rewrite the ending. It was a good move, as the second book Blood Money is just as tense, thrilling and visceral as the first. Considering the time it was written in the early 70s, it has to be said that the attitudes can appear to be incredibly sexist and misogynist by today's standards, but this was a book pushing the boundaries of what was acceptable, even then in the genre of pulp crime fiction. Nolan, for example, is not a good guy, or if he appears to be, it's only in relation to how ruthless and unprincipled the others are that he comes into contact with in his line of work. That work is putting tog...

Created in 1976, Max Allan Collins's Quarry is a man and a product of the times, a character who would take the genre of crime fiction in a new and daringly amoral direction. A Vietnam vet, Quarry gets in some marital trouble when return home, has killed a man and got something of a taste for it. Finding he has a need to live a little more on the edge, he recognises that working for a living as a hitman is amoral, but in Nam he has learned to accept life and death as meaningless. He has however also learned the importance of survival. Which means Quarry is not too impressed that his agent, Broker, has put him a risk when he sends him to kill a man who is carrying something valuable and it turns out to be heroin, so he puts a little of the product aside as future down-payment. Quarry's concerns about Broker's arrangements increase on his next assignment to take out an innocuous man in a small town in Iowa. Things don't seem right and sure enough after carrying out the hi...

Lester Dent - creator of Doc Savage - has a little bit of a different spin on the hard boiled pulp crime genre. The characters are indeed all greedy, grasping, violent and double-crossing, but the difference here is the nature and scale of the operation being planned. This one involving a syndicate plotting the overthrow - or at least the continued embezzlement through impersonation - of the president of a South American nation. There is a small time crook involved. Walter Harsh is a grifter making a living taking photographs involving whatever kind of scam he can come up with, but when he cheats a photographic supplier out of a large amount of stock, his luck finally runs out. He finds himself pursued in a car chase that puts him in hospital, where his blood group is noticed and picked up by an investigator with a proposition for him. Not only is the blood group right but Harsh even looks like El Presidente. Except he doesn't have a scar, but that can be easily fixed. Lured by the...

James M Cain's was still working through drafts of his final novel The Cocktail Waitress when he died in 1977. The book remained unpublished until Hard Case Crime went looking for this lost book. It was well worth the effort, as the book has a lot of the classic characteristics and features of Cain's greatest works, The Postman Always Rings Twice  and  Double Indemnity , featuring a femme fatale who is married to a man she doesn't love, who takes up with a younger lover. Joan Medford in The Cocktail Waitress in fact seems to be particularly careless when it comes to husbands and that's something that relentless police are aware of and won't let it go. Joan’s husband has recently been killed in a road accident after a drunken episode at home. She seems to be incapable also of looking after her 3 year old son Tad, who is left in the care of her sister-in-law. Se is intent on keeping the child for herself and attempts to blacken Jean's reputation with suspicions t...

Written in 1958, Ed McBain's The Gutter and the Grave is a classic PI crime drama from this period. Matt Cordell is as seedy as they come. He's at a particularly low end; a drunk, his reputation shattered and licence revoked, he still hasn't gotten over his wife leaving him. He's a bum, unshaven and living in a slum in the Bowery in New York, but a friend comes there looking for him. Jonny Bridges, a tailor, is concerned that someone has been dipping into the till, and he since he only has one full time employee Dom Archese, he doesn't really need a PI to work it out. Reluctantly however, Cordell is persuaded to look into the matter, but he no sooner turns up at the shop than they find Archese shot dead but not apparently before he was able to chalk the initials JB on the wall beside him. Despite his misgivings about the timing of this, Cordell knows he can't afford to let himself get involved with the police, so he lets Bridges handle the inevitable charge alo...

Erle Stanley Gardner, author of the Perry Mason series, also wrote a series of around thirty private eye Cool and Lam detective books under the pseudonym as AA Fair, of which Top of the Heap is the thirteenth in the series. Donald Lam is a Los Angeles detective who is used to getting results, only it all seems to come a little too easily when John Carver Billings the Second calls in looking for a couple of girls. The wealthy client, son of a banker, wants to find Sylvia and Millie as he picked them up and spent the night at a motel with them. It's important to find the women as it appears to be connected to a police looking for a missing woman, the moll of a notorious gangster who Billings had foolishly tried to pick up earlier that evening. Lam is more than a little suspicious with the ease of his own investigation and the clues that seem to have been left for him to find. The not terribly elusive Sylvia even provides the necessary corroborating information makes it sound convenie...