Hardboiled paperbacks February 2024

Hardboiled Paperbacks

February 2024

Looking to take a break from a steady diet of science fiction, fantasy, and horror paperbacks, I stopped in at a bookstore in downtown Charlottesville this past weekend and picked up a selection of hardboiled crime paperbacks. 

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...........