Hardboiled Paperbacks
February 2024
I have to admire the grasping way Fawcett Crest took old John D. MacDonald novels and novelettes from the detective fiction digests of the 1950s, and repackaged them for paperback publication in the 1980s. Hard Case Crime displays a similar sense of enterprise in reprinting Richard Prather's 1963 novel 'The Peddler' in 2006, with a nice Robert McGuiness cover illustration.
And who knew that sometime in the early 1970s, Roger Zelazny had written a spy / suspense novel ?! I'll have to see if it incorporates New Wave parlance, or sticks with a straightforward prose styling...........
The MacDonalds are all readable, the Travis McGee one is good.
ReplyDeletePlease report back on the Zelazny, that's new to me too.
Wow, I had no idea Jimmy Sangster, who wrote the screenplays for so many Hammer films and even directed three of them, also published novels.
ReplyDeleteWhen I worked in a used bookstore in the late 80s man we had like two shelves of ol' MacDonald! He was just the most old-man of old-man pop writers to me, like Louis L'Amour. Today, of course, I've read about half his McGee novels and enjoyed (almost) all of them (in fact, one of the most horrific things I've read in recent years is in THE LONG LAVENDER LOOK, yikes). Love all the covers of his various editions, and now enjoy collecting them, except for the execrable early 1990s ones--look 'em up, they're *horrible.*
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