Showing posts with label Marcia Muller. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Marcia Muller. Show all posts

Wednesday, November 19, 2025

Short Story Wednesday: book received: THE LOST COAST AND OTHER SHARON McCONE STORIES by Marcia Muller (Stark House Press, January 2026)


In Wednesday's mail is a book I hope I don't have to persuade you to snap up, or at least take a look at--Marcia Muller's selections of what she considers her best stories about her most popular series character, detective McCone, who is featured in a long string of novels, beginning with Edwin of the Iron Shoes in 1977, and, as Muller notes, had her short-fiction debut about a decade later. After an impressive string of retrospective collections from her husband and frequent collaborator Bill Pronzini, the McCone stories selection is also more than welcome. 

Muller's McCone is one of the earliest pragmatic female private investigator series, notably preceding in publication the first Sara Paretsky's V. I. Warshawski and Sara Grafton's Kinsey Milhone volumes, and loses nothing by not including much that is stereotypical or fanciful, as opposed to McCone using her wits and courage to get through the hardest parts of her job, working with a cooperative private detection agency, All Souls (and a number of times working with the "Nameless Detective", the most populous series of  'tec' fiction from Pronzini; they also have collaborated on a historical PI mystery series, the Carpenter and Quincannon stories, while also writing stories about their respective PIs on their own).

I started reading the McCone novels with the rather brilliant Trophies and Dead Things (1990), in part a farewell to the late '60s in largely youthful progressive and radical political subcultures, and those who were hangers-on, and a look at those still or newly working for the better aspects of society, and dealing with those who would exploit their "marks" in those interacting communities. 

I've read some of the stories collected here, and others are new to me...I will be digging in here, along with the delayed reads of the recent Pronzini retrospectives.

Greg Shepard's Stark House is doing very good work with these. Muller's preface is a very welcome account of how she fleshed out McCone's life and experience, many other times hewing closely to some of the other most remarkable events in San Francisco and its environs (and the larger world).  More thorough review coming when I get a chance to get it down on screen...

The Lost Coast and Other Sharon McCone Stories by Marcia Muller (Stark House, 2026, 260 pp, $15.95 trade paperback: ISBN 979-8-88601-176-0)

7 * Preface * Marcia Muller (all stories by Muller)

10 * Deceptions * from A Matter of Crime #1 (HBJ 1981)

28 * All the Lonely People * Sisters in Crime (1989)

40 * The Land that Time Forgot * Sisters in Crime #2 (1990)

54 * Somewhere in the City * The Armchair Detective * 1990

69 * Silent Night * Mistletoe Mysteries (1990)

82 * Benny's Space * A Woman's Eye (1992)

98 * The Lost Coast * Deadly Allies (1992)

117 * The Holes in the System * Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine  June 1996

136  * "Knives at Midnight" * Guilty as Charged (1996)

155 * Up at the Riverside * Irreconcilable Differences (1999)

 170 * Irrefutable Evidence * Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine November 2005

185 * Telegraphing * Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine June 2009

196 * Tell Me Who I Am * (a short e-book) Grand Central Publishing (2016)

212 * April 13 * Deadly Anniversaries (2020)

227 * Scamming the Scammer * Shamus & Anthony Commit Capers (2024)

239 * The McCone Files * The McCone Files (as "The Last Open File" and "File Closed") (1995)

258 * Marcia Muller Bibliography (apparently by Muller) (2026)

[More to come]

Bowling Green State University's Browne Popular Culture Library finding guide for Muller's papers.

TM

See Patti Abbott's blog for more Short Story Wednesday (more complete!) reviews for this week.

Posted by at 2 comments:
Labels: , , ,

Wednesday, December 18, 2024

Short Story Wednesday: Barry N. Malzberg and Bill Pronzini: FINAL WAR AND OTHER FANTASIES (Ace 1969) and IN THE POCKET AND OTHER SCIENCE FICTION STORIES (Ace 1971) by Barry N. Malzberg: newly offered together; THE HANGING MAN AND OTHER WESTERN STORIES by Bill Pronzini, including one in collaboration with Marcia Muller; Stark House 2024

Barry N. Malzberg,  July 24, 1939-December 19, 2024.

Two sorts of retrospective, the kind of fine work Stark House continues to do...from two writers whose work I've been reading for nearly my whole literate life, Malzberg because my father had anthologies including his work when I was very young (and I would eventually inherit them), Pronzini whose work I would discover only a bit later via Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine and the essentially unrelated (except by paying license fees) Alfred Hitchcock Presents: volumes edited by Harold Q. Masur for Random House (reprinted in Dell paperbacks) in the '70s. As we face our Final Wars and try to avoid joining  the Hanging Man in his fate, this is a propitious time to take in these books, for me those stories I have read are usually decades ago, and those I haven't deserve to have my neglect remedied. 

Barry has also contributed to this blog, and very graciously indeed. Bill Pronzini and Marcia Muller have helped with a few projects of mine (and in her case, a very badly-handled project of one of my bookstore colleagues decades ago). I am glad to have been able to make the acquaintance of both.

Barry N. Malzberg's own writing on this blog:

Quoting Barry Malzberg

Guest FFB: Barry Malzberg and Charles Ardai on the last published Cornell Woolrich novel, as completed by Lawrence Block: INTO THE NIGHT

Cele Goldsmith Lalli, interviewed by Barry Malzberg


guest essay by Barry Malzberg: NEW AMERICAN REVIEW (later AMERICAN REVIEW), edited by Theodore Solotaroff: the best American literary magazine  (for some reason, Blogger has tagged this as featuring sensitive content...I'd say yes, but  not the way they mean it.)

Barry Malzberg's first two collections of his short fantastica stories were published as halves of Ace Doubles (and under his fantastic-fiction pseudonym "K. M. O'Donnell"--a tribute to writers, and married couple, Henry Kuttner and Catherine L. Moore, who among their collaborations signed some of their best as Lawrence O'Donnell), in 1969 paired with a John Rackham novel, and in 1971 with his own novella Gather in the Hall of the Planets. "Final War" has reminded at least two Richards, the late Richard Geis (of Science Fiction Review fame) and Rich Horton (of  Locus, his anthologies and his blog) strongly of Joseph Heller's  Catch-22, and was probably the most widely-admired of Malzberg's early fantastica stories, coming a close second in the balloting for the Nebula Award  in its contest. When asked what he'd like to be remembered for, he told his interlocutor that the latter might note just how funny he could be (since his work is shot through with wit, even at its most anguished). Particularly in the vignettes in these collections, he demonstrates this frequently.

Novella cover illustration by Jack Gaughan;
second cover by Karel Thole

Here are the two tables of contents (from ISFDB):  

[2] Final War and Other Fantasies (frontispiece) • interior artwork by Gray Morrow

In the Pocket and Other S-F Stories • (1971) • collection by Barry N. Malzberg [as by K. M. O'Donnell]
The Stark House edition has only one (new) cover, and Barry has decided to write a single new brief introduction, as he looks back less than fondly at either collection's original introduction; a decent bibliography of his books rounds out the book.
 
Malzberg cover by Jeff Jordan

Pronzini cover by Mark Shepard

The Hanging Man and Other Western Stories by Bill Pronzini
Stark House, December 2024, 204 pp.

Indexed by TM using links from the FictionMags Index.

7 * Preface * Bill Pronzini * in
11 * The Hanging Man, (ss) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine August 12 1981
22 * Markers, (ss) Roundup ed. Stephen Overholser, Doubleday, 1982
28 * Hero, (ss) Small Felonies by Bill Pronzini, St. Martin's, 1988
33 * McIntosh’s Chute, (ss) New Frontiers, Volume I ed. Martin H. Greenberg & Bill Pronzini, Tor, 1990, as by Jack Foxx
43 * Decision, (ss) The Arizonans ed. Bill Pronzini & Martin H. Greenberg, Fawcett Gold Medal, 1989; originally published as 
“I’ll See to Your Horse”, (ss) Zane Grey Western Magazine February 1972; rewritten as the opening of The Gallows Land (Walker and Co., 1983; Berkley pb 1983); this is a composite of both.
49 * All the Long Years, (ss) Westeryear ed. Ed Gorman, M. Evans, 1988
57 * Burglarproof, (ss) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine February 2010
71 * The Gunny, (ss) The Gunfighters ed. Bill Pronzini & Martin H. Greenberg, Fawcett Gold Medal, 1988
76 * Fyfe and the Drummers, (ss) New Frontiers, Volume II ed. Martin H. Greenberg & Bill Pronzini, Tor, 1990
82 * Wooden Indian, (ss) Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine March 1989
93 * The Gambler, (ss) New Frontiers, Volume I ed. Martin H. Greenberg & Bill Pronzini, Tor, 1990
101 * Fear, (ss) Louis L’Amour Western Magazine March 1995
109 * The Cruel and Deadly Winter, (ss) (2024 original publication in this volume)
113 * "Give-a-Damn” Jones, (ss) The First Five Star Western Series Corral ed. Vicki Piekarski, Five Star US, 2000
126 * Righteous Guns, (ss) The Best Western Stories of Bill Pronzini, Swallow Press, 1990
130 * Doc Christmas, Painless Dentist, (ss) Louis L’Amour Western Magazine May 1994
141 *Not a Lick of Sense, (ss) The Fatal Frontier ed. Ed Gorman & Martin H. Greenberg, Carroll & Graf, 1997
147 * "Crucifixion River" by Marcia Muller and Bill Pronzini; apparently first published in the collection Crucifixion River: Western Stories  (Five Star, 2007; ISBN-13: 978-1594145568)  by Muller and Pronzini (this story won the WWA Spur Award)
202 * Pronzini Bibliography * bi





As the acute scanner might note, there is an overlap with, though not complete duplication of, The Best Western Stories of Bill Pronzini, Swallow Press, 1990...I picked that one up when it was new--at first thought, hard to realize it's been almost 35 years:

The FictionMags Index (FMI) listing:

For more of today's short stories, please see Patti Abbott's blog.






Posted by at 4 comments:
Labels: , , , ,

Wednesday, November 11, 2020

SHORT STORY WEDNESDAY: CHILD'S PLOY edited by Marcia Muller and Bill Pronzini (Macmillan, 1984)


1 * Introduction * Marcia Muller and Bill Pronzini (in)
5 * The Rocking-Horse Winner * D.H. Lawrence (ss)  Harper’s Bazar Jul 1926
23 * How Pearl Button was Kidnapped * "Katherine Mansfield" (Kathleen Murray) (ss) Rhythm Sep 12 1912, as by Lili Heron
29 * The Beautiful White Horse * William Saroyan (ss)  Esquire Jun 1938; also as “The Summer of the Beautiful White Horse” in My Name is Aram
38 * Paul's Case * Willa Cather (nv)   McClure’s May 1905
61 * Little Boy Lost * Q. Patrick (Richard Webb and Hugh Wheeler) (ss) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Oct 1947
90 * Too Early Spring * Stephen Vincent Benét  (ss) The Delineator Jun 1933
105 * The Threatening Three * William Campbell Gault (as "The Threatening Trio"), (ss) 10-Story Detective Magazine Oct 1948
123 * The End of the Party * Graham Greene  (ss) The London Mercury Jan 1932
134 * The Landscape of Dreams * John Lutz  (ss) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Mar 24 1982
143 * Fire Escape * Cornell Woolrich (na)  Mystery Book Magazine Mar 1947, as by William Irish (source story for The Window and its remake, The Boy Cried Murder)
191 * Ludmila * Jean L. Backus (as by "David Montross") first appeared in Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Stories to be Read with the Lights On, edited by Harold Q. Masur, Random House 1973
198 * Day for a Picnic * Edward D. Hoch (ss) The Saint Mystery Magazine (UK) Mar 1963, as by Pat McMahon
212 * Carnival Day * Nedra Tyre (ss) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Jul 1958
225 * Good Man, Bad Man * Jerome Weidman   (ss) The Saturday Evening Post Jul 1 1967
243 * Looie Follows Me * John D. MacDonald    (ss) Collier’s Aug 27 1949
258 * Here Lies Another Blackmailer * Bill Pronzini (ss) Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine Jun 1974
266 * Morning Song * Betty Ren Wright (vi)  Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine Nov 1982
271 * The Hedge Between * Charlotte Armstrong  (nv) Conflict: Stories of Suspense Fll 1953, as “Meredith’s Murder”
300 * Uncle Max * Edward D. Hoch (ss) The Saint Mystery Magazine (UK) Mar 1965 as by Pat McMahon

One of the only four? volumes of the Macmillan Midnight Library, all? anthologies by Muller and Pronzini from 1984/85 mixing with aplomb mystery, suspense, horror, fantasy, contemporary mimetic and other stories, despite the subtitle "An anthology of mystery and suspense stories", much in the manner of some of Pronzini's earlier selections, such as Midnight Specials, or the "Alfred Hitchcock"-branded anthologies for Random House Robert Arthur, Harold Q. Masur (one of whose volumes was the original source for the Jean Backus story--before today I was aware of only one original story in an AHP: anthology, Thomas Disch's "Casablanca" in the Arthur-edited volume he assisted the ailing Arthur with), and a few others had been assembling in both adult-targeted and YA-slanted series. I might have copies of all four...this one was recently unboxed in my effort to get my books back into some sort of order. All of them appear to have less than superb, but neither terrible nor conventional, cover designs and illustrations by Mary Mietzenfeid...and story headnotes from the editors. The packaging might've helped suppress sales; perhaps also the tendency for the books to turn up underappreciated (and some widely anthologized) stories from several decades previously.

My listing here seems as if it's the first online to include page numbers, and I've now added the first publication sites (contents and first publication data from WorldCat, the FictionMags Index and ISFDB). Much as I will reread the book in its entirety...but this doesn't stop me from commenting on some of my old favorites and stories I still remember well from this volume and previous encounters...at times in such similar volumes devoted to sf and fantasy stories about kids (Children of Wonder edited by Philip "William Tenn" Klass) or horror, suspense and fantasy stories likewise focused (The Little Monsters edited by Roger Elwood and Vic Ghidalia and sequels and similar efforts) and the like.

For example, the lead-off story is a mildly supernatural bit of a chestnut, the morose "The Rocking Horse Winner" by D. H. Lawrence, in which a boy takes on the burden of keeping his household financially afloat, in the wake of the collapse of his parents' marriage, by furiously riding his hobby-horse and gaining while doing so accurate prognostication of the winning horses at the local track. Graham Greene's nearly as famous "The End of the Party" is also a bit more outré than suspense fiction is usually accorded, involving twin brothers who have a rather bad time with a party game, and the unfortunate consequences that an empathy that tips over into telepathy between twins can have (even as Greene dismisses the term "telepathy" in a line in the story).

On the other end of the spectrum, "The Beautiful White Horse" is, as the editors note, a tale of nearly the most mild sort of horse-theft, or -borrowing, two young Armenian-American cousins in the early decades of the last century can get up to...it's the often-excerpted first chapter of William Saroyan's largely autobiographical and most popular book for young readers, My Name is Aram, but is by no means painfully naive reading for adults. While Stephen Vincent Benet's "Too Early Spring" is, as the editors suggest in that story's headnote, not a story of conventional crime at all...rather than one of too-conventional (and mean-spirited) outlook leading the parents of a community to blithely insist their suspicions of a sort of infraction on the part of their early-adolescent children must be true, and punished accordingly. The crime, as Muller and Pronzini suggest, is one against the kids--too often the case in human affairs...or even beyond, among other species (for we are also animals). 

Much of the rest of the book is indeed crime fiction as we usually understand it, and doesn't suffer for that. Further reportage on these stories soon!

The other three Muller/Pronzini Macmillan Midnight Library items I'm aware of are Witches' Brew (1984)--horror and supernatural fiction by women, and the 1985 duo Kill or Cure (medical crime fiction) and Dark Lessons (campus crime fiction).

For more items rounded up for SSW, please see Patti Abbott's blog.


The other three Macmillan Midnight Library anthologies edited by Muller and Pronzini:

Witches' Brew: Horror and Supernatural Stories by Women (1984)

Kill or Cure: Suspense Stories About the World of Medicine
(1985)

The resident patient / Sir Arthur Conan Doyle --
The superfluous finger / Jacques Futrelle --
The Cyprian bees / Anthony Wynne --
Easter devil / Mignon Eberhart --
But the patient died / Lawrence G. Blochman --
The problem of the covered bridge / Edward D. Hoch --
Hurting much? / Cornell Woolrich --
The memorial hour / Wade Miller --
Guilty witness / Morris Hershman --
The doctor takes a case / George Harmon Coxe --
Miracle of the fifteen murderers / Ben Hecht --
Doctor's orders / John F. Suter --
The splinter / Mary Roberts Rinehart --
Sound alibi / Jack Ritchie --
Paint doctor / Joe L. Hensley --
The other side of the curtain / Helen McCloy.



















Dark Lessons: Crime and Detection on Campus  (1985)

William Wilson / Edgar Allan Poe --
Murder at Pentecost / Dorothy L. Sayers --
Murder at Mother's Knee / Cornell Woolrich --
The lethal logic / Norbert Davis --
To break the wall / Evan Hunter --
When Greek meets Greek / Graham Greene --
Charles / Shirley Jackson --
The ten o'clock scholar / Harry Kemelman --
The problem of the little red schoolhouse / Edward D. Hoch --
The disappearance of Maggie / Talmage Powell --
A matter of scholarship / Anthony Boucher --
Final exam / Bill Pronzini and Barry N. Malzberg --
Broken pattern / George C. Chesbro --
Dead week / L.P. Carpenter --
Van Der Valk and the high school riot / Nicholas Freeling --
Robert / Stanley Ellin --
The turncoat journal of Marc / Milton Stearns, Barry N. Malzberg.

Posted by at 2 comments:
Labels: , , , , , , ,

Friday, December 16, 2016

CRIMINAL INTENT 1: Novellas by Marcia Muller, Ed Gorman and Bill Pronzini (Dark Harvest 1993): FFB Muller/Pronzini Week

The first (and last) volume in an attempt to replicate in crime fiction what publisher Dark Harvest had done so successfully in horror (and borderline suspense) fiction: original anthologies divided into thirds, each featuring new work from three notable writers in the fields, as Night Visions (in nine anthologies so fondly remembered that Subterranean Press briefly revived it for three more volumes a decade later). The uninspired jacket (illustration by Nikita Tkachuk, design uncredited) on this one might not've helped sales, but otherwise it's hard to see why such a good start didn't lead to more volumes in the series. No editor credited, but Ed Gorman does thank Muller and Pronzini for copy-editing and suggestions on his novella. Unlike most of the Night Visions volumes, no paperback edition was offered. More's the pity.

Marcia Muller: "The Wall"
Ed Gorman: "Moonchasers"
Bill Pronzini:  "Kinsmen"

 Executive summary: 
You will not be sorry to have spent the time reading any of these three novellas, and they all involve young people being messed over by utterly corrupt elders, occasionally with the help of other young people but mostly through the abuse of the authority the primary villains have managed to be granted. All three involve beleaguered mothers, single or in one case would be better off single. Peripheral culture/counter-culture figures into each story, as does tough economic times and how that afflicts particularly suburban and exurban/small-town California and Iowa (a certain married couple of writers are Californians, and a certain third writer called Iowa his home). The men are particularly keen to give credit to their influences in their stories, particularly Ed's (where he slyly names a character after busy actor Ray Danton); "Moonchasers" manages to make its protagonist even more autobiographical than "Nameless Detective" Bill, the protagonist of Pronzini's story and much of his work, and Rae Kelleher, the assistant to the also heavily autobiographically-flavored Sharon McCone of Marcia Muller's best-known and most voluminous series of stories. 

 Publication since this volume: 
Muller's McCone and Friends (Crippen & Landru 1999)
Gorman's Moonchasers and Other Stories (Forge Books 2000)
Pronzini's 2013 Cemetery Dance Books volume Kinsmen, though how the 70-page novella is offered at 180pp I'm not sure, unless the 1996 novel reworked from the novella, Sentinels, is somehow also involved in the later volume. 
All three are available as eBooks, the Muller in the collection (which also has an audiobook). 

 The Muller is apparently the first story told from the point of view of the young (latter 20s), newly-fledged field investigator/private eye Rae Kelleher, the mentee of Sharon McCone, the veteran of a long and impressive series of novels; as noted above, a collection gathering stories written from the perspectives of other members of the All Souls Legal Cooperative, where McCone is based in the earlier novels, includes this novella. Kelleher does her best to apply what's she's learned from McCone and her other colleagues at All Souls, as well as some of her experience in private security work before that, and she finds she needs to summon her inner resources more thoroughly than she expected, as McCone is busy or distracted a fair amount of the time during the several days over which the story occurs. Kelleher is engaged to find a missing teenaged girl, who has vanished leaving no real clue as to how or why, aside from the titular wall, which bears images and mementos of rather recondite nature...it's up in her bedroom as apparently a sort of therapy. Her shady boyfriend, her single mother and fraternal aunt, and at least two sorts of work-bosses play roles in what has happened to her and those around her...Kelleher sometimes says things in her internal monolog that I find less than convincing, but only rarely (I think I see where Muller is fleshing out her character as she goes along, as opposed to the more fully-realized McCone of the novels and stories I've read); Rae also learns some hard lessons in the nature of law vs. justice by the story's end. Muller has a way with the flatly declarative observation from her characters that can be slyly double-bottomed, and usually by the character's intent. It's also notable that both McCone and Kelleher, with some of the limitations societal brainwashing and physical facts impose, have a strong sense of agency that sometimes surprises the male characters they have to deal with, and that some (not all) the women they meet lack...or feel that they do. 

 Ed Gorman's story involves two kids, Tom and Barney, who might (particularly Tom) remind various people of the young Ed Gorman, stuck in a small town in Iowa, not bad teen boys but capable of mischief in the past, not much appreciated outside their families for their intelligence or sensitivity, though also as insensitive as any adolescent (and too many adults) are likely to be at times. They love their fiction magazines, Gold Medal paperbacks, Robert Mitchum's films, and similar work that allows them to see beyond their small town and its limited ability to engage or reward them, even as they try and fail to get dates and otherwise move toward manhood. Their greatest antagonist is an erratic arrested-development case who is on the local police force; at story's beginning they and he are at an uncomfortable standoff, as the bully mocks them whenever he sees them but dares not do much more; things get more serious, taking a number of turns. Gorman dedicates the story to Mark Twain, Booth Tarkington, William Goldman, Earl Hamner, Jr. (he of The Homecoming and Spencer's Mountain and The Waltons, among much else including Twilight Zone episodes), the scripters of American Graffiti, Stephen King and Robert McCammon...which I think leaves out at least two important antecedents in Theodore Sturgeon and Ray Bradbury. As much as this story owes to Tom and Huck and Jim, Penrod and Sam, and Boys and Girls Together (a few years earlier in their lives)  it owes no little to the kids in such stories as "The Black Ferris" and even more to the family dynamics and characters of Sturgeon's "It"...and like the Sturgeon, has an immediacy and brilliance of detail that puts it ahead of Bradbury or King's similar work, or the film; for example, a vignette, later called back to, involving a dying hawk the boys try to help will get under your skin in a way King often reaches for without quite achieving, because Gorman was a better reporter of just how that would go. Perhaps the best of the three novellas, in a good trio...it might just dig the deepest.
Pronzini's Nameless has another missing daughter to find, this one a young adult college student, on a road trip with her new boyfriend, and they seem to have disappeared in or shortly after visiting a small town in the far northeastern part of California, near the corner bordering Oregon to the north and Nevada to the east...the kind of insular small town in the mountains which isn't too unlike similar enclaves in the Appalachians and the Ozarks, or around (if somewhat less makeshift than those near) the Salton Sea...the kind of people who inspired We Always Lie to Strangers and similar studies and compilations. The conversations tend to be a bit more clipped here than in the Muller or the Gorman, a bit more in the hardboiled tradition but not cartoonishly so by any means; the portrayals of the cast of too often cagy witnesses and other characters is also quite believable. This 1993 work does touch on the Christian Identity militias and similar expressions of racism and similar chauvinism already making themselves felt in the Far West as well as Mountain and Central Time Zones, and in their East Coast enclaves as well, though two years before the most destructive single example of their terrorism, bombing the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City--somehow still not The Day That Changed America that 9/11/01 was, thanks to the self-importance of some people. (After all, "only' one tenth as many people were slaughtered, if more young children than in NYC or Arlington or rural Penna...and They Weren't As Important!) Or, put another way, the soil of Trumpism has been accumulating for a very long time...

 A deft trio, a procedural, a Bildungsroman, and a fair-play detection...in fact, a certain amount of all three in all three. It really is hard to believe that this book didn't do well enough to encourage further volumes...perhaps also a lack of enthusiasm in the marketplace for novellas was at play, or Dark Harvest's relative lack of connection with the crime-fiction audience. But you really can do much worse indeed than this fine collection of original stories. 

 Please see other entries here for
Marcia Muller
Ed Gorman
Bill Pronzini

 and for the reset of this week's books, please see Patti Abbott's blog.
Posted by at 7 comments:
Labels: , , , , , , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)