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Author
Pub. Date
1990
Description
Press agent Jake Justus doesn't care if all of Chicago drops dead. He's just tied the knot with debutante Helene Brand, and a Bermuda honeymoon is only three in-flight martinis away. But the shooting death of a man in broad daylight, on the busiest shopping day of the year, with plenty of witnesses, is particularly ill timed. Jake's pal, attorney John J. Malone, agrees. Only a day before, wedding guest Mona McClane, notorious jetsetter and tipsy big-game...
Author
Series
Formats
Description
That's the product description for Blackstone Audio's excellent rendition of You Could Call It Murder, expertly voiced by Peter Berkrot, and we could leave it at that-but there's an interesting backstory to the book, and the Classic Crime Library seems a good place to share it with you.
In 1961, Lawrence Block was living in New York and earning a living writing Midcentury Erotica and crime fiction. He'd just sold his first book under his own name,...
Author
Pub. Date
1999
Description
SHE WAS EVERY MAN'S DREAM — AND ONE MAN'S NIGHTMARE!
Johnny Hayden and Doug Rance had a scheme to take real estate entrepreneur Wallace Gunderman for all he was worth. But they needed a girl on the inside to make it work.
Enter Evelyn Stone: Gunderman's secretary, his lover — and his worst enemy. Gunderman had promised to marry her, but never came through. Now she's ready to make him pay...
Johnny Hayden has spent a lifetime working the long...
Author
Pub. Date
2008
Description
Your name's Joe Marlin, but you change it almost as often as you change your shirt. It's David Gavilan when you skip a hotel bill and head for Atlantic City. You left empty-handed, and you need luggage to check into a decent hotel, so you grab two checked bags before the owner turns up to claim them. They're monogrammed L.K.B.-so now your name is Leonard K. Blake.
But you're not the only L.K.B. in Atlantic City. L. Keith Brassard is the owner of...
Author
Pub. Date
2009
Description
SO A WAR VET, A PSYCHOPATH, AND A HOT BABE WALK INTO WASHINGTON SQUARE PARK...
...and years later they tell us what Greenwich Village was like in the 1950s. Lawrence Block was on the scene, just starting to find himself as a writer, and A Diet of Treacle was his attempt to get it all down on paper.
It was published by a low-rent paperback house, with a tacky title and a pen name, and disappeared from view until Hard Case Crime found it and published...
Author
Series
Formats
Description
Alex Penn wakes up in a squalid Times Square hotel room. This is what he sees when he finally opens his eyes:
"The floor was a sea of blood. A body floated upon this ocean. A girl-black hair, staring blue eyes, bloodless lips. Naked. Dead. Her throat slashed deeply.
"It had to be a dream. It had to, had to be a dream. It was not a dream. It was not a dream at all.
"I've done it again, I thought. Sweet Jesus, I've done it again."
Years before,...
Author
Pub. Date
2014.
Description
"Never, even in his most optimistic moments, had he visualised a scene of this nature--himself in one arm-chair, a police officer in another, and between them . . . a mystery." So thinks the Reverend Dodd--vicar of the quiet Cornish village of Boscawen and a reader of detective novels--when an actual mystery unexpectedly lands on his doorstep in The Cornish Coast Murder. Julius Tregarthan, a secretive and ill-tempered magistrate, is found at his house...
Author
Pub. Date
2014.
Description
The Lake District Murder opens with the discovery of a faceless body in an isolated garage, then follows Inspector Meredith through a complex investigation where every clue seems to lead only to another puzzle. Was this a bizarre suicide, or something more sinister? Why was the dead man apparently making plans to flee the country? And what does all this have to do with the newly discovered shady business dealings of the garage?
Author
Pub. Date
c2015
Description
George Surridge, director of the Birmington Zoo, is a man with many worries: his marriage is collapsing; his finances are insecure; and an outbreak of disease threatens the animals in his care. As Surridge's debts mount and the pressure on him increases, he begins to dream of miracle solutions. But is he cunning enough to turn his dreams into reality - and could he commit the most devious murder in pursuit of his goals?
Author
Pub. Date
2015.
Description
Several local residents have disappeared in suspicious circumstances at the Hog's Back ridge in Surrey. When a doctor vanishes, followed by a nurse with whom he was acquainted, Inspector French deduces murder, but there are no bodies. Can he eventually prove his theory and show that murder has been committed?
Author
Pub. Date
2015.
Formats
Description
Mystery crime fiction written in the Golden Age of MurderMurder in Piccadilly 'Scores of men and women died daily in London, but on this day of days one of them had died in the very midst of a crowd and the cause of his death was a dagger piercing his heart. Death had become something very real.'When Bobbie Cheldon falls in love with a pretty young dancer at the Frozen Fang night club in Soho, he has every hope of an idyllic marriage. But Nancy has...
Author
Pub. Date
2016.
Description
In the seeming tranquility of Regency Square in Cheltenham live the diverse inhabitants of its ten houses. One summer's evening, the square's rivalries and allegiances are disrupted by a sudden and unusual death - an arrow to the head, shot through an open window at no. 6. Unfortunately for the murderer, an invitation to visit had just been sent by the crime writer Aldous Barnet, staying with his sister at no. 8, to his friend Superintendent Meredith....
Author
Pub. Date
2016.
Description
When Professor Julius Arnell breathes his last in the hushed atmosphere of the British Museum Reading Room, it looks like death from natural causes. Who, after all, would have cause to murder a retired academic whose life was devoted to Elizabethan literature? Inspector Shelley's suspicions are aroused when he finds a packet of poisoned sugared almonds in the dead man's pocket; and a motive becomes clearer when he discovers Arnell's connection to...
Pub. Date
2017.
Description
"A man is forbidden to uncover the secret of the tower in a fairy-tale castle by the Rhine. A headless corpse is found in a secret garden in Paris - belonging to the city's chief of police. And a drowned man is fished from the sea off the Italian Riviera, leaving the carabinieri to wonder why his socialite friends at the Villa Almirante are so unconcerned by his death. These are three of the scenarios in this new collection of vintage crime stories....
Pub. Date
2017.
Description
Impossible crime stories have been relished by puzzle-lovers ever since the invention of detective fiction. Fiendishly intricate cases were particularly well suited to the cerebral type of detective story that became so popular during the 'golden age of murder' between the two world wars. But the tradition goes back to the days of Edgar Allan Poe and Wilkie Collins, and impossible crime stories have been written by such luminaries as Arthur Conan...
Author
Formats
Description
Mystery crime fiction written in the Golden Age of Murder
"Steeped in atmosphere, with skillful plotting and intriguing characterization." —Booklist
'The death was an odd one, it was true; but there was after all no very clear reason to assume it was anything but natural.'
In the winter of 1942, England lies cold and dark in the wartime blackout. One bleak evening, Councillor Grayling steps
...