Книги автора Halliday Brett

To learn why a civilian was shot down by an Army sentry, Mike Shayne began digging into garbage cans.

In their heyday, the true-crime pulp magazines spawned many of the masters of American detective fiction. These early gems have been unearthed and collected here for the first time.

What are the ingredients of a hard-boiled detective story? “Savagery, style, sophistication, sleuthing, and sex,” said Ellery Queen. Often a desperate blond, a jealous husband, and, of course, a tough-but-tender P.I. the likes of Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe. Perhaps Raymond Chandler summed it up best in his description of Dashiell Hammett’s style: “Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it... He put these people down on paper as they were, and he made them talk and think in the language they customarily used for these purposes.” Hard-Boiled: An Anthology of American Crime Stories is the largest and most comprehensive collection of its kind, with over half of the stories never published before in book form. Included are thirty-six sublimely suspenseful stories that chronicle the evolution of this quintessentially American art form, from its earliest beginnings during the golden age of the legendary pulp magazine Black Mask in the 1920s, to the arrival of the tough digest Manhunt in the 1950s, and finally leading up to present-day hard-boiled stories by such writers as James Ellroy. Here are eight decades worth of the best writing about betrayal, murder, and mayhem: from Hammett’s 1925 tour de force “The Scorched Face,” in which the disappearance of two sisters leads Hammett’s never-named detective, the Continental Op, straight into a web of sexual blackmail amidst the West Coast elite, to Ed Gorman’s 1992 “The Long Silence After,” a gripping and powerful rendezvous involving a middle class insurance executive, a Chicago streetwalker, and a loaded .38. Other delectable contributions include “Brush Fire” by James M. Cain, author of The Postman Always Rings Twice, Raymond Chandler’s “I’ll Be Waiting,” where, for once, the femme fatale is not blond but a redhead, a Ross Macdonald mystery starring Macdonald’s most famous creator, the cryptic Lew Archer, and “The Screen Test of Mike Hammer” by the one and only Mickey Spillane. The hard-boiled cult has more in common with the legendary lawmen of the Wild West than with the gentleman and lady sleuths of traditional drawing room mysteries, and this direct line of descent is on brilliant display in two of the most subtle and tautly written stories in the collection, Elmore Leonard’s “3:10 to Yuma” and John D. MacDonald’s “Nor Iron Bars.” Other contributors include Evan Hunter (better known as Ed McBain), Jim Thompson, Helen Nielsen, Margaret Maron, Andrew Vachss, Faye Kellerman, and Lawrence Block. Compellingly and compulsively readable, Hard-Boiled: An Anthology of American Crime Stories is a page-turner no mystery lover will want to be without. Containing many notable rarities, it celebrates a genre that has profoundly shaped not only American literature and film, but how we see our heroes and ourselves.

She was a full blown brunette in a bandanna halter that just covered the essentials. The non-essentials were very impressive too. This was just the kind of case Shayne could enjoy. Keeping an eye on a dish like this and getting paid for it to boot.

The woman screamed as he touched her...

“Good God, you’re not Ralph.”

Of course, he wasn’t Ralph. He was private eye Mike Shayne, trying to catch a little sleep in his own apartment-until a gorgeous doll slipped through the door, made herself delightfully at home, and then crawled into bed with him.

Who was she? How had she known the layout of Shayne’s apartment in the dark? How had she gotten a key? And who, of all people, was Ralph?

Shayne got the answer to the last question in a hurry. Ralph was the woman’s husband. He was in the apartment directly overhead — and he was dead...

It was murder, and sleepy or not, Shayne was in up to his neck...

Suddenly there was an electrifying fanfare from the orchestra, and bright blue moonlight flared out from the semi-circle of spots on the floor.

Dorinda leaped from nowhere. The clean, taut lines of her slim, nude body were breathtakingly beautiful. Abandon and wild desire were in every movement of her lovely, supple form.

Just a sweet little college girl from a nice family taking some extra curricular courses in exotic dancing at a joint called La Roma.

No one could dance like Dorinda. Shayne had to admit she was dynamite, but her explosive act was about to be broken up by murder.