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I Wake Up Screaming by Steve Fisher. Berkeley. 1988. Black Lizard Books. 0887390854. Originally Published In 1960. paperback.  

DESCRIPTION - The classic novel of sexual obsession and murder amid the star-making machinery of Hollywood in the 1950s. ‘She was as white as marble, but she looked lovely. Her hair was splayed out in fine strands of gold, and her lips were bright, rich red, and there was a green eyeshadow on her eyelids. You could see that because her eyes were closed and she was lying very still. She was lying still and she wasn't breathing.' With its portraits of washed-up directors, jaded leading men, and a ruthless cop whose one-track mind leads straight to a cyanide pellet, I WAKE UP SCREAMING is a magnificent thriller by a Hollywood insider whose screenplays included Lady in the Lake and I, Mobster. .

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Stephen Gould Fisher (August 29, 1912 - March 27, 1980) was an American author best known for his pulp stories, novels and screenplays. He is one of the few pulp authors to go on to enjoy success as both an author in “slick” magazines, such as the Saturday Evening Post, and as an in-demand writer in Hollywood. Steve Fisher was born 29 August 1912, in Marine City, Michigan. He was raised in Los Angeles, California, where he attended Oneonta Military Academy until running away to join the Navy at the age of sixteen. Fisher spent four years in the Navy submarine service, during which time he wrote prolifically, selling stories to U.S. Navy and Our Navy. After Fisher's discharge from the Navy, he settled in Greenwich Village, New York, where he decided to pursue writing as a career. The first few months proved difficult. Fisher could not sell a story and suffered eviction from two apartments, and once had his electricity shut off. In March 1934, however, he would publish his first story, “Hell's Scoop,” in Sure-Fire Detective Magazine, beginning a career of considerable literary success. Fisher's "Mistress Death" was the cover story on the May–June 1936 issue of New Mystery Adventures. Fisher published extensively in pulps throughout the 1930s, ‘40s and into the ‘50s. Magazines that featured his stories include Spicy Mystery Stories, Thrilling Detective, True Gang Life, Detective Fiction Weekly, The Shadow, New Mystery Adventures, Underground Detective, The Mysterious Fu Wang, The Phantom Detective, Ace Detective, Saucy Romantic Adventures, Mystery Adventure, Detective Tales, The Whisperer, Headquarters Detective, Hardboiled, Doc Savage, Feds, Federal Agent, Popular Detective, Clues, Detective Romances, Crime Busters, Pocket Detective and Detective Story Magazine. Some of Fisher's most significant stories, however, would be published in Black Mask, the seminal detective magazine. Famous Mask editor Joe Shaw rejected early submissions by Fisher, but under the editorship of Fanny Ellsworth, Fisher would help create a more emotional, psychological crime story, different from his hard-boiled Mask predecessors. Fisher stated, “[My] subjective style, mood and approach to a story was the antithesis of [a] Roger Torrey who, like Hammett, wrote objectively, with crisp, cold precision”. “The more emotionally charged style caught on and was featured in a number of detective pulps,” helping to establish a place for similar authors, such as Fisher's friend Cornell Woolrich. In total Fisher would publish nine stories in Black Mask: “Death of a Dummy,” “Flight to Paris,” “Hollywood Party,” “Jake and Jill,” “Latitude Unknown,” “Murder at Eight,” “No Gentleman Strangles His Wife,” “Wait for Me,” “You'll Always Remember Me,”. Fisher would also break into slick magazines during this period, a rare feat for a pulp writer. His stories saw simultaneous publication in pulps and in slicks such as Liberty, Collier's, The Saturday Evening Post, Cosmopolitan and American Magazine to name a few. He would also publish under the pennames Stephen Gould and Grant Lane, and would go on to publish hundreds of stories in pulp and slick magazines including Lt. Commander Sheridan Doome detective novels. Struggling financially, Fisher moved to Paris in 1939 to work and live more affordably. After only six month, his agent, H. N. Swanson, sold the stories “If You Break My Heart” and “Shore Leave” to Hollywood for film adaptation. Fisher returned to Hollywood where he would work for much of the remainder of his life as a screenwriter. Fisher wrote the screenplays for such notable films noir as Dead Reckoning and Lady in the Lake. He would also spent time writing novels, most notably I Wake Up Screaming, which was made into a film by the same name starring Victor Mature. During the 1970s, Fisher experienced great success writing for television, including such shows as Starsky & Hutch, McMillan & Wife and Barnaby Jones. He died of a heart attack on March 27, 1980 at his home in Canoga Park, Los Angeles, age 67.

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The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson. New York. 1952. Lion.  356 pages. paperback. Lion #99.  

DESCRIPTION - Lou Ford is the deputy sheriff of a small town in Texas. The worst thing most people can say against him is that he's a little slow and a little boring. But, then, most people don't know about the sickness--the sickness that almost got Lou put away when he was younger. The sickness that is about to surface again. An underground classic since its publication in 1952, The Killer Inside Me is the book that made Jim Thompson's name synonymous with the roman noir. In a small town in Texas there is a sheriff's deputy named Lou Ford, a man so dull that he lives in cliches, so good-natured that he doesn't even lay a finger on the drunks who come into his custody. But then, that would be too easy, for Lou's sickness requires other victims. . . . A nightmarish book of psychopathic evil. 

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - James Myers Thompson (September 27, 1906 - April 7, 1977) was an American author and screenwriter, known for his pulp crime fiction. Thompson wrote more than thirty novels, the majority of which were original paperback publications by pulp fiction houses, from the late-1940s through mid-1950s. Despite some positive critical notice, notably by Anthony Boucher in The New York Times, he was little-recognized in his lifetime. Only after death did Thompson's literary stature grow, when in the late 1980s, several novels were re-published in the Black Lizard series of re-discovered crime fiction. Thompson's writing culminated in a few of his best-regarded works: The Killer Inside Me, Savage Night, A Hell of a Woman and Pop. 1280. A number of Thompson's books became popular films, including The Getaway and The Grifters. The writer R.V. Cassill has suggested that of all pulp fiction, Thompson's was the rawest and most harrowing; that neither Dashiell Hammett nor Raymond Chandler nor even Horace McCoy, author of the bleak They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, ever ‘wrote a book within miles of Thompson'. Similarly, in the introduction to Now and on Earth, Stephen King says he most admires Thompson's work because ‘The guy was over the top. The guy was absolutely over the top. Big Jim didn't know the meaning of the word stop. There are three brave lets inherent in the forgoing: he let himself see everything, he let himself write it down, then he let himself publish it.' Thompson admired Fyodor Dostoyevsky and was nicknamed ‘Dimestore Dostoevsky' by writer Geoffrey O'Brien. Film director Stephen Frears, who directed an adaptation of Thompson's The Grifters as 1990's The Grifters, also identified elements of Greek tragedy in his themes.

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The Watcher by Dolores Hitchens. New York. 1961. Perma Books. 181 pages. paperback. M-4205.

  
DESCRIPTION - An anonymous letter triggers the police into reopening three cases of 'accidental' death. . . THE FACE OF TERROR. To the Chief of Police: During the last year I have killed three young people. I put down x here their names and xxxxxxxxxx their ages: Edith Tomlinson - Aged fifteen. Charles Carrol - Twelve, Barbara Martin - About eighteen. In each case, it seemed to me at the time xxxx that the child x was better off dead. I have chosen my fourth victim. I had hoped not to continue with this thing, but conditions are much too offensive not to demand the remedy. Perhaps this may be x taken, sensibly, as a warning. And perhaps this last death may be avoided. So x take heed. There was no signature. The rest of page was blank. 

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Julia Clara Catharine Dolores Birk Olsen Hitchens (1907, San Antonio, Texas - 1973, San Antonio, Texas), better known as Dolores Hitchens, was an American mystery novelist who wrote prolifically from 1938 until her death. She also wrote as D. B. Olsen, a version of her first married name, and under the pseudonyms Dolan Birkley and Noel Burke. Hitchens collaborated on five railroad mysteries - 'police procedurals about a squad of railroad cops' - with her second husband, Bert Hitchens, a railroad detective. She also branched out into other genres including Western fiction. Many of her mystery novels centered on a spinster character named Rachel Murdock.Hitchens wrote Fool's Gold, the 1958 novel adapted by Jean-Luc Godard for his film Bande à part (Band of Outsiders, 1964). Her novel, The Watcher, was adapted for an episode of the TV series 'Thriller' which aired November 1, 1960.

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True Confessions by John Gregory Dunne. New York. 1977. Dutton. 0525223657. 341 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Neil Stuart.  

DESCRIPTION - In 1940s Los Angeles, an unidentified murder victim is found bisected in a shadowy lot. A catchy nickname is given her  in jest-'The Virgin Tramp'-and suddenly a 'nice little homicide that would have drifted off the front pages in a couple of days' becomes a storm center. Two brothers, Tom and Des Spellacy, are at the heart of this powerful novel of Irish-Catholic life in Southern California just after World War II. Played in the film version by Robert Duvall and Robert De Niro respectively, Tom is a homicide detective and Des is a priest on the rise within the Church. The murder investigation provides the background against which are played the ever changing loyalties of the two brothers. Theirs is a world of favors and fixes, power and promises, inhabited by priests and pimps, cops and contractors, boxers and jockeys and lesbian fight promoters and lawyers who know how to put the fix in. A fast-paced and often hilarious classic of contemporary fiction, True Confessions is about a crime that has no solutions, only victims. More important, it is about the complex relationship between Tom and Des Spellacy, each tainted with the guilt and hostility that separate brothers.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - John Gregory Dunne (May 25, 1932 – December 30, 2003) was an American writer. He began his career as a journalist for Time magazine before expanding into writing criticism, essays, novels, and screenplays. He often collaborated with his wife, Joan Didion. Dunne was born in Hartford, Connecticut and was a younger brother of author Dominick Dunne. He was the son of Dorothy Frances (née Burns) and Richard Edwin Dunne (1894–1946), a hospital chief of staff and heart surgeon. John was the fifth of six children in the family. John's maternal grandfather, Dominick Francis Burns (1857–1940), founded the Park Street Trust Company. John Dunne developed a severe stutter as a child and took up writing to express himself. He learned to manage it by observing others. He attended the Portsmouth Abbey School and graduated from Princeton University in 1954, where he was a member of Tiger Inn. Dunne started working as a journalist in New York City for Time magazine. He credited the political essayist Noel Parmentel as a mentor in many ways. In the late 1950s, he met Joan Didion in New York City, where she was an editor at Vogue. After they married in 1964, the couple moved to a remote house on the California coast; Didion worked on a novel to follow her debut Run, River, and Dunne on a book about the California grape pickers' strike. They wrote a jointly bylined column for the Saturday Evening Post magazine for years. Dunne and Didion gradually picked up writing work from book publishers and magazines, traveled together on journalism assignments, and established a working pattern that served for the next 40 years. They had a constant advising, consulting, and editing collaboration. Critically acclaimed bestselling books followed for each, including Dunne's The Studio, his nonfiction account of 20th Century Fox. They also collaborated on a series of screenplays, including The Panic in Needle Park (1971), A Star Is Born (1976), and True Confessions (1981), an adaptation of Dunne's novel of the same name. He wrote a nonfiction book about Hollywood, Monster: Living Off the Big Screen. As a literary critic and essayist, Dunne was a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. His essays were collected in two books, Quintana & Friends (1980) and Crooning (1990). He wrote several novels, among them True Confessions, based loosely on the Black Dahlia murder, and Dutch Shea, Jr. He was the writer and narrator of the 1990 PBS documentary L.A. is It with John Gregory Dunne, in which he guided viewers through Los Angeles's cultural landscape. Dunne and Didion later moved to Manhattan. He died there of a heart attack on December 30, 2003.[9] His final novel, Nothing Lost, which was in galleys at the time of his death, was published in 2004. Dunne married Didion on January 30, 1964, at Mission San Juan Bautista in California. He was 31 and she 29. They contemplated filing for divorce in 1969, as Didion famously wrote in one of her essays. Unable to have children, in 1966 they adopted a baby at birth and named her Quintana Roo, after the Mexican state. Quintana died in 2005 at age 39 after a series of illnesses. Dunne was uncle to actors Griffin Dunne (who co-starred in An American Werewolf in London) and Dominique Dunne (who co-starred in Poltergeist). Didion wrote and published The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), a memoir of the year following his death, during which their daughter was seriously ill. It won critical acclaim and the National Book Award.

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Ask For Me Tomorrow by Margaret Millar. New York. 1976. Random House. 0394408837. 179 pages. hardcover.  

DESCRIPTION - Gilda Decker hires Tom Aragon to go to Mexico to search for her first husband, B.J. Lockwood, because she has heard that he has amassed a fortune there. Her present husband is a helpless invalid and dying and she wants her share of Lockwood's money. 

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Margaret Ellis Millar (nee Sturm) (February 5, 1915 - March 26, 1994) was an American-Canadian mystery and suspense writer. Born in Kitchener, Ontario, she was educated at the Kitchener-Waterloo Collegiate Institute and the University of Toronto. She moved to the United States after marrying Kenneth Millar (better known under the pen name Ross Macdonald). They resided for decades in the city of Santa Barbara, which was often utilized as a locale in her later novels under the pseudonyms of San Felice or Santa Felicia. The Millars had a daughter who died in 1970.

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Bird Dog by Philip Reed. New York. 1997. Pocket Books. 0671001639. 291 pages. hardcover. Jacket illustration by Eric Peterson.  

DESCRIPTION - Harold Dodge is pushing fifty, going gray, and carrying a few extra pounds. He's a good man, always looking to help people out. But in a less-than-perfect world - that is, Los Angeles - good men sometimes have to do bad things. Now Harold's in a friend's car - and in a spot. A pair of hired repo men in a stolen Buick are trying to run him off the freeway and into an early grave. But the cops pull him over first - a blessing, except for one little thing, Harold's got a dead body in the trunk. It all started because Harold has a weakness for killer legs. And in her spike heels, Marianna Perado is the kind of woman who makes guys like Harold leap first and look later. When she asks him to help her ‘unwind' a rip-off deal at Joe Covo's dealership, where Harold once bird-dogged suckers into buying used cars, he jumps . . . and lands in a cesspool of corruption.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Philip Reed is a former police reporter who turned to writing mysteries, non-fiction books, plays and screenplays. His latest novel, Off & Running, is a darkly funny thriller about a desperate biographer who kidnaps his celebrity subject. We can only wonder how much of the novel was inspired by Reed's experience writing his first book, Candidly Allen Funt, an autobiography of the 1960s TV legend. Reed's first novel, the “car noir” thriller, Bird Dog, was nominated for the Edgar and Anthony awards and optioned by Hollywood seven times. His many other books include Low Rider, Marquis de Fraud, Free Throw, In Search of the Greatest Golf Swing and Wild Cards, a non-fiction account of a year spent playing blackjack in casinos across the country with a professional card counter. He lives in Long Beach, California.

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The Redbreast by Jo Nesbø. New York. 2007. Harper. 9780061133992. Translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett. 521 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Stephen Parker.  

DESCRIPTION - Police Detective Harry Hole has made a terrible mistake. An embarrassment in the line of duty has pulled him off his usual beat. Reassigned to mundane surveillance tasks, he reluctantly agrees to monitor neo-Nazi activities in Oslo. But as Hole is drawn into an underground world of illegal gun trafficking, brutal beatings, and sexual extortions, he soon learns that he must act fast to prevent an international conspiracy from unfolding. Trapped in the crosshairs of the man with all the answers, Harry Hole plunges headlong into a mystery with roots deep in the past. His investigation takes him back to Norway's darkest hour - when members of the young nation's government collaborated with leaders of Nazi Germany. Dredging up a painful history of denial, Hole turns his attention to the Norwegian troops who fought for Adolf Hitler on the Eastern front. Branded by their countrymen as traitors, the soldiers who survived the brutal Russian winter - the hunger, fear, cold, grenades, and snipers - returned home as scapegoats of a nation's atonement. Sixty years later, old grudges and betrayals appear to have been laid to vest, until Hole realizes that someone has begun to pick off the surviving soldiers one by one. With only his troubled, guilt-ridden conscience as a guide, Hole must move quickly through the traps and mirrors of a twisted criminal mind. But as his sanity slips in a slow burn of anger and alcohol, his mistakes continue to pile up. And if he fails to quicken the pace, Norway's darkest hour since World War II just might lie in the future.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jo Nesbø is a musician, songwriter, economist, and one of Europe's most critically acclaimed and successful crime writers today. His first novel featuring Police Detective Harry Hole was an instant hit in Norway, winning the Glass Key Award for Best Nordic Crime Novel - the most prestigious crime-writing award in Northern Europe. In 2004, THE REDBREAST was voted the ‘Best Norwegian Crime Novel Ever Written' by members of Norwegian book clubs. Nesbø lives in Oslo.

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Nemesis by Jo Nesbø. New York. 2009. Harper. Translated From The Norwegian by Don Bartlett. 474 pages. Jacket Photograph By Premium Stock/Curb's. Jacket Design By Jarrod Taylor. 9780061655500. January 2009. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION - GRIPPING AND SURPRISING. NEMESIS is a nail-biting thriller from one of the biggest stars in crime fiction. Grainy closed-circuit television footage shows a man walking into an Oslo bank and putting a gun to a cashier's head. He tells the young woman to count to twenty-five. When the robber doesn't get his money in time, the cashier is executed, and two million Norwegian kroner disappear without a trace. Police Detective Harry Hole is assigned to the case, While Hole's girlfriend is away in Russia, an old flame decides to get in touch. Former girlfriend and struggling artist Anna Bethsen invites Hale to dinner, and he can't resist a visit. But the evening ends in an all too familiar way as Hale awakens with a thundering headache, a missing cell phone, and no memory of the past twelve hours. That same morning, Anna is found shot dead in her bed. Hole begins to receive threatening e-mails. Is someone trying to frame him for this unexplained death? Meanwhile, the bank robberies continue with unparalleled savagery. As the death tall continues to mount, Hole becomes a prime suspect in a criminal investigation led by his longtime adversary Tom Wader and Waaler's vigilante police force. Racing from the cool, autumnal streets of Oslo to the steaming villages of Brazil, Hole is determined to absolve himself of suspicion by uncovering all the information needed to crack both cases. But the ever-threatening Waaler is not finished with his old archenemy quite yet.

  Jo Nesbø’s books have sold more than twenty million copies worldwide, and have been translated into forty-seven languages. His Harry Hole novels include The Bat, The Redbreast, Nemesis, The Devil’s Star, The Redeemer, The Snowman, The Leopard, Phantom, and Police, and he is the author of Headhunters and several children’s books. He has received the Glass Key Award for best Nordic crime novel. He is also a musician, songwriter, and economist and lives in Oslo.

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The Jazz Bird by Craig Holden. New York. 2001. Simon & Schuster. 0743212967. 314 pages. hardcover. Cover: Jackie Seow.  

DESCRIPTION - An exquisitely written novel of love and betrayal, of money and power, set at the apex of that time of glitz and innocence known as the Jazz Age. . . CINCINNATI, 1927... Lawyer George Remus became the country's biggest bootlegger, grossing over $80 million until his arrest. Upon his release from prison, he learns that his beautiful wife, Imogene, has left him and that his bank accounts are empty. On the morning of their divorce, he runs her car off the road in the middle of rush hour in Eden Park and shoots her to death. Shocked and fascinated by this horrible crime, the country gears up for a sensational trial pitting the man known as ‘‘the king of the bootleggers'' against Chief Prosecutor Charlie Taft, the youngest son of the former president. The trial is a national spectacle, a lens focused on the fabulous rise and fall of the Remus empire and the tragic love story within it, and an attempt to answer some tantalizing questions: What actually happened to the fortune? What are the motives of the federal agent who brought Remus down? What complex emotions and desires, leading ultimately to the ruin of three men, really lie within the heart of the woman known as the Jazz Bird? Based on a true story, The Jazz Bird is at once a love story, a crime novel, and the tale of the courtroom battle between two powerful men whose respective futures hang in the balance.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Craig Holden is the author of four previous novels: The Jazz Bird, The River Sorrow, The Last Sanctuary, and Four Corners of Night. He lives in Michigan.

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The Birds of Prey by John Ralston Saul. New York. 1978. McGraw Hill. 0070548609. 247 pages. hardcover.  

DESCRIPTION - THE BIRDS OF PREY, a political novel based in Gaullist France, was an international best seller. On a May night in 1968, the plane carrying the French Chief of Staff General Ailleret explodes over the island of REunion in the Indian Ocean, killing all aboard except for one. Four years later, writer Charles Stone is drawn irresistibly into the mystery that still surrounds the General's death.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - John Ralston Saul (born June 19, 1947) is a Canadian author, essayist, and President of International PEN. As an essayist, Saul is particularly known for his commentaries on the nature of individualism, citizenship and the public good; the failures of manager-, or more precisely technocrat-, led societies; the confusion between leadership and managerialism; military strategy, in particular irregular warfare; the role of freedom of speech and culture; and his critique of contemporary economic arguments.

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