The Glass Heart - Marty Holland

Down on his luck Curt Blair is waiting out a rainstorm in a “ritzy hash joint” just outside of Hollywood, USA when he steals a fancy camel hair overcoat then flees intending to sell the coat. It’s how he makes his living these days – ripping off suckers' coats, rifling the pockets for treasures and cash, then selling the ransacked coat. But this time all hell breaks loose and he’s being chased. While hiding from his pursuers he ends up in the backyard of Virginia Block’s home. She mistakes him for the handyman she recently hired from an agency. Curt being the opportunist that he is wisely plays along and learns the job comes with a free room and kitchen privileges. So he accepts the job, gains a cheap salary of $20/week and a place to stay and eat.

Later the same day aspiring actress Lynn York shows up at the boarding house. She is paying $60/month for an upstairs room, but no kitchen privileges for her. Mrs. B is greedy and a miser we soon figure out. Within hours Curt and Lynn are hooking up and doing the dirty deed in the dirty basement where while putting the moves on Lynn Curt is bothered by the irritating sound of a dripping pipe. He vows to fix the leak though that task is not on the insanely long list of arduous work Mrs. Block expects of him.

While dealing with the plumbing problem Curt discovers a gruesome surprise and jumps to conclusions.  A bit of detective work supports his rash theory and he sees dollar signs. He schemes to blackmail his landlady and employer. Soon he finds his paltry salary increased to a cool $1000/week.

And if you haven’t already figured out that the tables will be turned then you don’t know your crime fiction.

Reading The Glass Heart is like travelling back in time to a 1950s movie palace watching a B movie programmer. It’s crammed full of action, double dealing, manipulation, greed, lust and crime. Everyone is out for himself or herself. James M Cain, who penned multiple densely packed novels about two timing lovers and how greed controls their lives admired the book so much he 1. wrote a praiseworthy blurb for the Julian Messner first edition dust cover and 2. wrote a screenplay adaptation that unfortunately was never produced.  Even he recognized the cinematic potential of this hard to resist story.

While it’s not hard to predict that Curt and lovely Lynn will hook up within hours of meeting I doubt many readers will be able to predict the unusual plot twists. Soon a handful of supporting characters descend upon Mrs. Block looking for handouts including Elise, Lynn's future roommate and a member of an evangelical church devoted to enlisting new members and coaxing money out of them to help build their new church.

The story is overloaded with plot and incident. It’s almost like reading two books in one at the same time. There’s almost no time in the action-filled pages to question the often outlandish turn of events. But I did! And frequently. Some of my nagging questions included: Why on earth is Mrs. B such a pushover? Why didn’t she just throw Curt out of her house rather than be bled dry? And why is Lynn so simple minded and easily manipulated? I guess there is no room for common sense in potboiler fiction. The book exists solely to explore crime and base motives (mostly dealing with lust and avarice) but offers no insight into any of the reasons the characters need so desperately what they long for. I wasn’t asking for heightened literary reasons just a few mundane ones.

Late in the book it all turns a bit ridiculous. Elise receives a telegram that her husband was killed in action overseas. She refuses to accept this and in her religious mania keeps praying that hubbie be returned to her. Like a true believers she’s asking for a miracle. One guess as to how that turns out. Because of course every absurd coincidence one can possibly imagine will be crammed into these 192 pages.

Why have one kook when you can have two? Mrs. B is later revealed to be a bit of a loon herself. Lynn spends much of her time eavesdropping throughout the book and hears her landlady talking to herself and singing in a little girl’s high pitched voice. She has conversations with her dead husband, very intimate and revealing conversations. It all leads to a confrontation between the two woman involving a revolver and a golf club that doesn’t end well at all.

Do you think anything will end well in a book of this sort? Think again!

It starts off as noir but some odd detours and intrusive subplots among the minor characters transform the book to a quasi romance. This schizoid state results in a near parody of noir by the time you get to the two climactic moments. Remarkably – almost unbelievably – for something so laden with doom, insanity and murder, both intentional and accidental, it all ends with a cop out finale that includes a wedding and happily ever after honeymoon in New Mexico! I gather that Holland opted for a hearts and flowers finale because she wants the real villain of the piece to be revealed as a vile monster who “deserved” to die. And she seemed to want to make her leads into decent people who were victims themselves. Really strange considering they were crooked and corrupt from the get-go. When the penultimate chapter exposes the villain’s wide ranging schemes of cheating, thievery and mean-spiritedness one wonders if Holland knew a similarly horrible person and this was a revenge piece.

Marty Holland (1919 - 1971)

And yet though I sound like I’m disparaging this book I found it all utterly addictive. The Glass Heart is, I confess, a guilty pleasure. I couldn’t stop reading and had to know where each ludicrous scene would lead and of course how it all would end. It truly is one of the best examples of a genuine B movie on paper. And no wonder – the author Marty Holland was a secretary at Republic Pictures, one of the leading producers of B movie programmers, for many years. She was writing pulp fiction in her spare time, wrote the book that became the classic noir thriller Fallen Angel, and a story treatment for another crime movie classic The File on Thelma Jordan. Typing all those scripts at Republic Pictures taught her well, I guess.

Stark House has reprinted all of Marty Holland’s crime novels over the past year and a half. The Glass Heart is the newest reprint added to that small pile of books. For decades this novel was unavailable to mere mortals like you and me because the few copies for sale were listed by booksellers at unaffordable collector’s prices. It’s wonderful to have Marty Holland’s books all available to the general public in Stark House’s usual handsomely produced editions. For lovers of noir, kooky melodrama and twisty plotting these books are a must have. Highly recommended – even with all the caveats listed above. The Glass Heart is genuine thrill ride that will leave you both gasping in awe and laughing in shock.

Best Vintage Mystery Reprint of 2021, part one

As the ubiquitous commercialization of Christmas invades our lives let us once again turn to the end of the year tradition begun by our dear friend Kate Jackson who blogs at Cross Examining Crime and look at candidates for Best Vintage Mystery Reprint of the Year.  2021 offered up a cornucopia of reprint editions of crime fiction and covered all aspects of the genre from traditional detective novels to clever thrillers to tension filled novels of suspense.  There were over 100 books on the list Kate sent us and I found over 50 more on my own, not the least of which was the surprise addition from Penguin of some long out-of-print books by Mabel Seeley, one time bestselling writer in the stable of Doubleday's Crime Club back in the heyday of that seminal publisher.  It was too late for me to nominate The Listening House (1938), her pioneering mystery novel heavily influenced by Rinehart, Eberhart and the rest of the HIBK school,  because I had already chosen my nominees.  But I think I found two excellent books despite not knowing of the Seeley's reprints.

Unlike most of the others who participate in the is end of the year ritual among the vintage mysteyr bloggers I adhere to a personal standard in choosing these "Best of the Year" reprint candidates. For those who missed this extravaganza in past years (or are too lazy to look it up from this blog's archives) I'll give you my own two most important rules for what I feel merit a wise choice of a vintage reprint:

1. A truly forgotten author, long out of print
2. Writing and plotting that contributes substantially to the genre

Enough of the preamble.  Here's Nominee #1 from your opinionated maven at Pretty Sinister Books...

 

Sing Me A Murder by Helen Nielsen

• Nielsen is an underappreciated and neglected writer over shadowed by her contemporaries Margaret Millar, Charlotte Armstrong and Ursula Curtiss who tend to get all the accolades when the talk turns to mid 20th century women mystery writers.
•  Her crime fiction uses the conventions of traditional detective fiction but often subvert them with innovative plotting, unusual characters, and contemporary insights for fans of history and sociology. Sing Me A Murder incorporates popular music into the storyline (a key character is a singer and recording artist). We also get some intriguing background on 1950s architecture, automobiles and car maintenance!  All of it help in solving the various mysteries in the novel.
• Nielsen's characters are vibrantly depicted.  Often it is the supporting players in the story who are the most attractive and get some of the best scenes.  I remember a nosy neighbor who stole the show, so to speak, in her scenes. Also a gas station attendant has a couple of great monologues. This rings true to me. That the people we take for granted, the background players in our lives, are often those who consciously or not have the greatest influence on us.
• She's a damn fine writer with an excellent command of English and sometimes startling uses of imagery and metaphor.
  
• Stark House Press has reprinted Sing Me a Murder in a twofer bound with Nielsen's equally innovative and gripping crime novel False Witness.  So you get two Nielsen books for the price of one if you buy the reprint of Sing Me a Murder. (Am I cheating?  Don't care!) 

You can read the full review of Sing Me A Murder back in the archives of 2016 posts by clicking here.  The Stark House Press reprint has been on sale since November of this year.  Highly recommended!  And make sure you read False Witness too!  The review for that second book can be found here. 

Tune in next week for my male writer nominee, a true classic and a giant of a writer in Golden Age of Detective Fiction.

FFB: False Witness - Helen Nielsen

Publishing executive Markham Grant has been sent to Norway to secure the rights to the memoir of renowned resistance fighter Tor Holberg.  While riding a funicular up to a well known tourist spot in Bergen he witnesses a woman being strangled in the train that is descending on the opposite side of the tracks. But when he and a fellow tourist, Ruth Atkins, investigate no body is found. The woman seems to have vanished.  This bit of amateur sleuthing makes them late catching their cruise ship and it leaves without them.  Luckily, a local named Sundequist they met on board the cruise ship comes to their rescue and gives them temporary lodging at the nearby home of his friend Dr. Bjornsen. That evening Grant and Ruth meet Sundequist's artist niece and Grant is astonished.  She is the woman he saw strangled on the funicular!

In the new reprint of False Witness (1959) from Stark House Press Curt Evans rightly brings up Agatha Christie's classic Miss Marple detective novel The 4:50 from Paddington (aka What Mrs. McGillicuddy Saw!) with its similar eyewitness account of a strangling in a train on parallel tracks and the subsequent disappearing body. But Nielsen is not so much interested in the mystery of who the woman is and why she looks like Sigrid...or is it the other way around? This story is no real murder mystery.  Rather, it is a clever amalgam of psychological mystery and suspense thriller. False Witness owes less to detective novels of the Golden Age (something Nielsen indeed knows a thing or two about), but more to Alfred Hitchcock and his favorite trope of the pursuit thriller spiced up with espionage. The novel is rife with Hitchcockian details like a Macguffin (Tor Holberg's memoir), doppelgängers, dual identities, and even some questionable supernatural elements with a dash of hypnotism thrown in for good measure.  I would also mention that this novel is a cousin to The Manchurian Candidate by Richard Condon, coincidentally also published in 1959, while also hearkening back to Sax Rohmer's early Fu Manchu novels of the 1910s.  For what lies at the heart of False Witness is an intriguing idea about mind control that seems decades ahead of itself.

False Witness is also highly unusual for Nielsen, known for her gritty realism, because it dares to address the occult and extrasensory perception.  Clairvoyance and déjà vu permeate this quasi-supernatural thriller.  Grant has more visions while staying at the Bjornsen’s home.  Viewing a painting of a ruined church for the first time oddly brings back a rush of memories.  Wearing the borrowed clothes of Sigrid's dead husband makes Grant feel like someone other than himself.  The more time he spends with Sigrid the more his visions and sense of déjà vu rapidly increase. Nielsen does an effective job of making it seem like Grant is losing control of his mental faculties and that something eerie is happening to him and the people he interacts with.  But you can rest assured that there is something altogether more sinister at work here.  While the motives may appear diabolical, the villains at the heart of the devilry are entirely mortal.

In exploring alternate realities and other worldly dimensions Nielsen seems to have become more self-conscious of her writing. The dialogue is teeming with a kind of Wildean epigrammatic speech with snippets like "Someday is nothing but a delayed now" and "The heart remains loyal; the mind forgets."  An abundance of this kind of talk can ruin the serious mood with unintended hokey humor, but Nielsen shows restraint and manages to make it seem natural.  I particularly admired her prowess in creating an unusually speedy intimacy between the leads. Sigrid makes a fire, takes Markham Grant's wet shoes and clothes from him. While he warms himself she gives him her husband's robe and slippers. They look at her paintings and talk about their lives. Soon Sigrid finds herself divulging her hidden life to Grant almost instantly. It's as if she creates a new Carl, her dead husband, in the person of Grant and uses him as her confessor. The intimacy flows naturally and allows for some nice poetic touches.

The novel does not turn into a sentimental romance thankfully.  Cary Bryan, the “freeloading American” as Ruth calls him, intrudes.  Bryan has been making a living as a cheap guide for English speaking tourists ignorant of Norwegian language and customs.  And he keeps appearing in the most unlikely settings leading Grant to believe he is being followed. Bryan is often wearing a dirty raincoat that reminds Grant of the raincoat the strangler was wearing.  And wasn't the man on the train a redhead too?  Or is Grant misremembering that?  Bryan takes on a sinister aspect and Grant suspects that what he saw was a vision of an event yet to take place, that he was somehow in touch with the future. He is determined to prove Bryan to be the strangler and prevent him from killing Sigrid.  If only he could get everyone else to believe him.

Eventually Grant meets up with his publishing colleague, Nate Talmadge, who secured the rights to Holberg's memoir and wants Grant to get the contract signed. Talmdage seems to be Grant's only ally and friend. When a real murder takes place the two men will discover the reason for Grant's visions and the truth of what took place in the train.

QUOTES:  

"Very few people ever find love -- genuine love. Perhaps that's because they expect too much from something or someone outside themselves.  They feel lonely and unfinished and go looking for someone else who is lonely and unfinished, and you know what happens if they succeed, don't you?  Two miserable people go stumbling though life, lonely and unfinished together."

"Marriage is very much like the funicular. In order to fulfill its purpose, both trains must be perfectly balanced on the same cable. One can't pull more weight than the other; one can't run ahead of the other; one can't dominate the other." 

"[The portrait] was supposed to be [of Carl]; but I can't seem to get the face right. I can't  -- this is ridiculous, but I can't remember."

Discretion moves more rapidly than a police car with a screaming siren. 

"A man in your profession must have the gift of imagery. [...] A gift of imagery. With this -- with thought alone -- we can reshape the world."

"It's guided thought that conquers; not the guided missile."

"Murders are done every day. A man goes mad and slaughters his children; a nation goes mad and invades a neighboring nation. What's the difference? It's all weird; it's all madness. Someone has just found a new approach to murder..."

NEW EDITION:  Stark House Press has reprinted False Witness in tandem with Sing Me a Murder also by Helen Nielsen.  This twofer volume goes on sale in mid-November 2021.  Sing Me a Murder, a superior crime novel equally worthy of its new edition, was reviewed on this blog several years ago. Those interested in knowing what that other Helen Nielsen book is about can read the post here

The Pretty Sinister Influence, or News on Reprints & Reissues

Lots of news on my overwhelming influence in getting books back into print.  OK, that's an exaggeration.  But suggestion and influence seem to commingle these days.

First. the Bruce Graeme Project of reissuing the Theodore Terhune mystery books continues with the release of the third title from Moonstone Press: A Case for Solomon.

It's been on sale since the beginning of this month at various internet sites in the UK and should be available from the US based Amazon very soon. At Book Depository the listing for this book does not have Bruce Graeme's name as the author, but instead has mine as the author of the introduction. Oops! But my often bruised ego doesn't mind that at all.

The rest of the Terhune mysteries will follow in quick succession:
Work for the Hangman in September, Ten Trails to Tyburn in October, A Case of Books in November, And A Bottle of Rum in December.

A few months ago Stark House sent me a copy of their latest Black Gat paperback reprint of Tears for Jessie Hewitt by Edna Sherry. I was surprised and happy to see this back in print. Back in 2019 I reviewed Sherry’s novel and had good things to say about it. For those of you who like noir fiction it comes recommended. A snippet from my blog post appears inside the book as the last laudatory blurb. You can read my full review on Tears for Jessie Hewitt here.  

Out of curiosity I wanted to what else Greg Shepherd had reprinted in his Black Gat imprint. These are single, smaller books in old-fashioned 4.25" x 7" size rather than his 2-for-1 volumes in larger trade paperback size. Imagine my delight when I saw this:

Yet another book I raved about on this blog.  And there's a portion of my rave right on the front cover! If you want to read the rest of the review for So Young, So Wicked click here.

Saving the best news for last.  The long awaited reprint of Pray for the Dawn by Eric Harding will soon be out from our good friends at Ramble House.  As soon as I get my copy I'll be sure to let everyone know it’s available for purchase.  In quirky style so suited for Ramble House Pray for the Dawn will have an Afterword by Yours Truly rather than a foreword.  With an afterword I was able to talk about all sorts of surprise elements in the book without worrying about ruining the story for anyone. 

Expect book giveaways and fun contests to win copies when the Moonstone and Ramble House books are ready for sale.

IN BRIEF: The Bank with the Bamboo Door – Dolores Hitchens

In the introduction to Dolores Hitchens’ The Bank with the Bamboo Door (1965), another knockout reprint from Stark House Press, Curt Evans quotes Anthony Boucher’s book review. Boucher wrote of Hitchens’ seedy exploration of small town California: “It’s a little as if a Lionel White Big-Caper plot had wandered into the midst of Peyton Place.” And a better precis could not have been done in less than twenty words. Those aching for that Big Caper plot will be sorely disappointed, it never gets past the initial planning stages. A past crime plays a bigger part in the story floating over the action like a funereal shroud and taking shape as a ghost of sorts to haunt many of the characters in Hitchens’ novel. There was an attempt at a caper long ago. A bank heist went spectacularly wrong ending in murder of several bank employees and the arrest of nearly all the thieves. Legend has it that $65,000 of the bank’s money went missing and may still be somewhere in the maze of underground tunnels, remnants of an old Chinatown in which the shopkeepers had connected all the buildings with a network of passages in the cellars and basement. But there is plenty of crime, planned or pending or commissioned. And, of course, a murder.

For much of the book it was hard to shake the Peyton Place mood. Perhaps Edge of Night is the more apt analogy if soap operas must be mentioned. For this is a town mostly plagued by criminal impulses and a bank robbery no one can forget. In the episodic narrative we learn a lot about a large assortment of people fairly quickly. Unhappy marriages, terminal illness, all manner of emotional problems --the stuff of soap opera melodrama -- are par for the course. While many of the local social club’s women dish the dirt about the “horrifying” possibility of a Jewish woman among their membership and a doctor’s wife mulls over an ambiguous medical diagnosis, crime festers beneath the town’s surface. A bitter doctor plots a permanent end to the blackmailer draining his finances, a woman ponders how and where to get an abortion without anyone finding out, a drug addicted nympho craves morphine while shiftily gathering the latest hush money payment from her victim, the co-owner of a pet shop cum garden supply store is drawn to the mysterious new customer interested in the basement of her store, and that mysterious man soon reveals he’s planning on searching for the missing bank money no matter what it takes.

Chance plays a cruel part in the outcome and the most tenuous of threads will result in deadly connections. Despite the tendency to lean heavily towards episodic melodrama, Hitchens does an admirable job of interweaving the various storylines with some startling intersections of lives and unexpected crossed paths. The finale is as noirish as her fine private eye novel Sleep with Slander and some of her other equally nightmarish suspense novels.

As is their usual practice Stark House Press has paired The Bank with the Bamboo Door  with another Dolores Hitchens suspense novel, The Abductor.  The two-in-one trade paperback was released in March 2021 and is now available from the usual online bookselling sites.

Home Is the Prisoner/The Little Lie Gets Booklist Rave

Some of you may know that I was involved in another Jean Potts reprint from Stark House Press. After the rousing success of the first Potts twofer -- Go Lovely Rose/The Evil Wish -- the publisher followed up with another two-in-one volume. That book, Home Is the Prisoner/The Little Lie, was released earlier this month. Greg Shepard sent me yet another glowing review from Booklist.  Although this one didn't achieve a "Booklist Starred" rating like last year's Potts reprint the two new novels clearly come highly recommended.  See the full review below.

Home Is the Prisoner/The Little Lie is available online by visiting the Stark House Press website or any of the usual online bookselling sites. This volume includes another foreword by me about Potts' literary style and innovative contributions to the genre as a crime fiction pioneer.

NEW STUFF: Tears Are for Angels - Paul Connolly

Tears Are for Angels by Paul Connolly
A Black Gat Book/Stark House Press
ISBN: 978-1944520922
200 pp. $9.99
Publication date: February 24, 2020

Flashbacks. I like a little time travel in my crime fiction. You get it a lot in mystery fiction, whether it’s a simple telling of a client’s reason for hiring a private eye, or the apparently guilty heir coolly going over his actions the night his wealthy uncle was bashed on the head with a silver plated candlestick. It’s nearly inescapable in the conventional formula of the Q&A style of “Where were you on the night of…?” you get in everything from English manor whodunnits to hard-edged police procedurals to melodramatic courtroom battles. But rarely are flashback techniques used with such stunning effect as in Tears Are for Angels (originally published 1952) the final crime novel Tom Wicker wrote as “Paul Connolly” before he decided to use his own name on his work.

Here's the bare bones story:  The murderous result of a jealous husband’s rage, his insane method of covering up the murder as a suicide, the bizarre self-mutilation done to bolster his claim of self-defense which later leads to amputation and disfigurement, and the subsequent amateur investigation of his wife’s previously unknown friend trying to get at the truth of that violent death.

Wicker uses multiple viewpoints in his detailed flashbacks as both narrative experiment and to create suspense in a story of duplicity, mistrust and hidden desires. There is an element of the unreliable narrator in the storytelling that always leaves the reader questioning which story he should believe. Is anyone telling the truth? Much as we get a tortured confession from Harry London at the outset is he just making it all up? And is Jean, his wife’s supposed good friend from the Big City, to be trusted with her story? Is she too creating a story of her relationship they had as a sympathetic diner customer looking after a lost and needy waitress?

On the surface this novel may seem nothing more than a tawdry tale of revenge, but there is more to this sex and violence tale than a retread of another familiar getting even story. Surprisingly, for a tale that ostensibly seems to be about crime and revenge Tears Are for Angels turns out to be a novel of love and forgiveness, for redemption and rebirth. Wicker has his protagonist come to this eyebrow raising realization:

I had never really loved Lucy [his wife]. What I had thought was love was only conceit, because she had been my property, because I had made her my property.

...now I know what love is, I thought. Now I know. It's what I feel for this woman who lies naked and sleeping beside me. It's something I never knew existed in this world or any other. It's what you feel when you are able to do anything and suffer anything and endure anything and give anything, any time, anywhere, for someone else. Or at least it is for me. That's what love is for me. 

A more lusty and transformative love has rarely been depicted so intensely or unexpectedly as in this compact novel. For all its action oriented scenes, for all the desire captured in passionate and desperate moments this final work as "Paul Connolly" is one of Wicker's most mature works. We still get a shocking climax in which one final plot twist is delivered with a hefty punch, but the ending of what might have been a deeply disturbing noir tale delivers not only redemption for Harry, but for the memory of his dead wife. More importantly, Tears Are for Angels promises a glimmer of light for our two protagonists after a descent into the abyss. This was the book Tom Wicker needed to write in order to pave the way for his later, even richer novels like The Devil Must (1957) which were published under his own name.  here is a minor classic, in my opinion, and one of the few paperback originals that absolutely deserves this new reprint from Black Gat/Stark House.

Highly recommended!  Grab a copy now.

NEWS FLASH: Jean Potts, Attention Getter

As many of you already know Go, Lovely Rose/The Evil Wish will soon be available for purchase from Stark House (release date Feb 15, 2019). Greg, the publisher, received a lovely notice from Booklist -  one of their treasured starred reviews.  Here it is:

Go, Lovely Rose / The Evil Wish.
by Jean Potts
Feb. 2019. 304p. Stark House, paper, $19.95
(ISBN: 9781944520656)
Stark House's ongoing project—reissuing high-class crime fiction from a vanished time—strikes gold with this double-decker release of two fine novels by the nearly forgotten Potts. Go, Lovely Rose dates from 1954; The Evil Wish from 1962. Employing techniques both classic and contemporary, the two tales share the meticulous build-up of tension typical of the Golden Age and the modern tendency to use a crime as an excuse to explore the lives affected. The "Rose" of the first novel is dead when the narrative begins, a crumpled heap with her skull bashed in. There's some detective work here—keep an eye on that headband—but Potts uses rich, vivid language to examine the damage Rose did to a handful of people with their own secrets. If Hitchcock had written a novel, it would have been similar to The Evil Wish, with its study of the corroding effects of guilt. Two sisters plot to murder their father and his fiancée. Turns out they don't have to, but their obsessions—What did the neighbors overhear? What's in that diary?—lead them to near madness. And real crime. Two masterpieces here.    — Don Crinklaw

As the editor of Booklist told us in his cover letter: "A star beside the title indicates a work judged to be outstanding in its genre." More importantly, Booklist is the reviewing and news journal of the American Library Association, the magazine which thousands of librarians across the US use to make their decisions in purchasing new books for their collections. Let's hope that the review can drum up sales for libraries all over the USA. That would make me immensely happy!

From the Department of Life's Unexpected Ironies: The author of this review is writer and English professor Don Crinklaw who not only is the husband of mystery writer Elaine Viets, he also used to be a somewhat regular customer of mine over ten years ago when I was selling books as the owner of Pretty Sinister Books, my former online bookstore.

Coming Soon: Jean Potts Reprints!

Well, I've just handed in my final draft of the foreword for the next exciting reprint from Stark House Mystery Classics. After reading my piece on Go, Lovely Rose and my astonishment at what a great writer Potts was Greg Shepard began reading her crime fiction. Like me he was impressed with her books, like me he also couldn't stop reading them. In fact he's read more than me as of this date and has pointed me to some of her best ones I still have yet to read. For several months Greg did dogged research, searching for the proper literary executor in order to gain permission to reprint her books. His hard work paid off.

Coming in a few months the world will have the first paperback reprint of two Jean Potts books in over fifty years. Go, Lovely Rose, her Edgar award winning debut detective novel will appear side by side with her Edgar nominated novel The Evil Wish. That's two of Potts' best novels in a single volume! And both reviewed here at Pretty Sinister Books.

When the book is available for purchase I'll make another announcement. But I know this book is ready for the printer and eager to get out there into the world.  Though I didn't do as much work as Greg did I'm very proud to have been largely responsible for getting Jean Potts back into print. This is the first time I can definitely claim that honor after years of being only influential in reviving interest in other writers and seeing their books eventually get back into print. With luck we'll see more of Jean Potts in Stark House Press reprints.

Surprise! Surprise!

Yesterday I went to the mailbox and found yet another review copy from a publisher who often sends me ARCs. The timing couldn't have been better; I had just finished a book and was looking for a new read for this week's daily commute. I thought to myself, "Hmm... I wonder if this one is worth reading." I opened the package and burst out laughing. It was an ARC for a reprint of The Woman on the Roof by Helen Nielsen. (But you probably already knew that because of the picture over there on the left.) Yes, the very same book I had just finished and written up for FFB three days ago.

So for the handful of you who read my Friday's Forgotten Book post a few days ago here's some fantastic good news for you. A new paperback edition of this very fine noir thriller (which is also a detective novel) is coming to you in November.  Can you stand the waiting?

I bet Stark House never had this kind of ESP/synchronicity from the vintage book blogs for any of their planned reprints. Ever. I seriously had no clue that anyone had any interest in reprinting anything by Helen Nielsen. I am very, very happy that this book is being reprinted. And talk about advance reviews!

PLUS! Here's my first giveaway in many moons. Be the first person to email me with your interest in reading Nielsen's excellent book, and your mailing address of course, and I'll mail this ARC to you. I don't need it at all obviously since I already have a 1954 paperback as well as a 1st edition hardcover.

UPDATE, AUG 24: BOOK IS TAKEN. GIVEAWAY OVER.