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On the Beach by Nevil Shute. New York. 1957. Morrow. 320 pages. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION - On the Beach, published in 1957, written each is an apocalyptic novel by British author Nevil Shute after he emigrated to Australia. The novel details the experiences of a mixed group of people in Melbourne as they await the arrival of deadly radiation spreading towards them from the Northern Hemisphere, following a nuclear war some years previous. As the radiation approaches, each person deals with impending death differently. Shute's initial story was published as a four-part series, The Last Days on Earth, in the London weekly periodical Sunday Graphic, in April 1957. For the novel, Shute expanded the storyline. he story has been adapted twice as a film (in 1959 and 2000) and once as a BBC Radio broadcast in 2008.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Nevil Shute Norway (17 January 1899 – 12 January 1960) was an English novelist and aeronautical engineer who spent his later years in Australia. He used his full name in his engineering career and Nevil Shute as his pen name to protect his engineering career from inferences by his employers (Vickers) or from fellow engineers that he was "not a serious person" or from potentially adverse publicity in connection with his novels, which included On the Beach and A Town Like Alice.

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Moody in Winter by Steve Oliver. Spokane. 2003. Dark City Books. 0964413841. 227 pages. hardcover.  

DESCRIPTION - For most people the ‘60s ended on December 31, 1969. For some, including ex-mental patient detective Scott Moody, the ‘60s continued for years after that date. The popular myth of the ‘60s is that it was a decade of innovative and positive thinking. For Scott Moody it was the source of the delusional thinking that led directly to his incarceration in 1977 for the crime of having lost connection to reality. Two years later Moody is still trying to reconstruct his life and be a proper father. He is driving cab in Seattle and avoiding working as a private detective, a ‘career' idea that dated from delusional conversations with Humphrey Bogart at the laughing academy. But Moody, still recovering from previous to adventures as a private detective, seems to have little choice in the matter. A series of inexplicable hit-and-run accidents pursues him. As he looks into the accidents, he discovers a pattern that seems to indicate a conspiracy. But is it a conspiracy, or merely the exposed fissures of a mind that continues to prefer fantasy and paranoia to reality? Conspiracy or not, the accidents are real enough and don't seem likely to stop. Add to this deadly brew a rare Seattle event - snow, and you have a city just a little out of control.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Steve Oliver is a journalist, artist, computer programmer, and former taxi driver. He lives in Seattle.

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Dead Men by Steve Oliver. Spokane. 2002. Dark City Books. 0964413892. 196 pages. paperback.  

DESCRIPTION - Jack Starr is of an age where most men are contemplating retirement. Jack, however, has just been released from prison for the murder of his wife. He now prepares to go into his sunset years living in a small hotel room downtown working as a security guard. That was his plan before he found a pistol that has already ended one life and threatens to end his as well. .

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Steve Oliver is a journalist, artist, computer programmer, and former taxi driver. He lives in Seattle.

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Moody Forever: A Mystery by Steve Oliver. New York. 1998. St Martin's Press. 0312193017. 258 pages. hardcover. Jacket photograph by Herman Estevez. Jacket design by Jerry Todd.  

DESCRIPTION - After his release from a mental institution, Scott Moody is taking steps toward getting his life in order. Still moonlighting as a cabbie, he has given up his brief, hallucination-inspired career as a PI, and landed a part-time reporting job at a Spokane suburb's newspaper. And amazingly, at least for a guy on Thorazine whose broken nose gets comments from everyone he meets, he finds himself doting Xanthia, the rich, beautiful daughter of prominent local businessman Andrew Welch. Even if he's not getting any sleep, things are looking up - until Moody finds himself the sole witness of Welch's murder, and the prime suspect. Heading to sunny Palm Springs on the lam to look for the truth about Welch's past and his connection to the mysterious Longevity Institute of the Desert, Moody finds his obsessive thoughts about mortality ring all too true as he confronts the demons in his life - and in his mind.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Steve Oliver is a journalist, artist, computer programmer, and former taxi driver. He lives in Seattle.

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Moody Gets the Blues by Steve Oliver. Seattle. 1996. Off By One Press. 0964413876. Illustrations by the Author. 236 pages. hardcover.  

DESCRIPTION - Scott Moody has a few problems. He's fresh out of a mental hospital. His wife has left him. He drives a taxi and occupies a dumpy apartment. He lives in the obscure inland city of Spokane, Washington and takes frequent doses of Thorazine. He became a private investigator after hallucinations about Humphrey Bogart. Now he's involved with the police who don't think it was a good idea. When this slightly off-center detective tries to find his ex-girlfriend's husband, it becomes clear that the real question is whether he can solve the mystery of his own life - the mystery of happiness and sanity. MOODY GETS THE BLUES is a compelling, humorous mystery and also a portrait of the pathology of madness.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Steve Oliver is a journalist, artist, computer programmer, and former taxi driver. He lives in Seattle.

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Nightmare Alley by William Lindsay Gresham. New York. 1946. Rinehart & Company. 275 pages. hardcover. 

DESCRIPTION - This story is a study of the lowest depths of showbiz and its sleazy inhabitants and environs, the dark, shadowy world of a second rate carnival filled with cheap hustlers, scheming grifters, and Machiavellian femmes fatales. Gresham was born in Baltimore in 1909, but grew up in New York. Nightmare Alley was highly influenced by the freaks and sideshows he routinely observed at Coney Island as a child. The dark side of carnival life is the world of Nightmare Alley, deeply rooted in early film noir and the hard-boiled books of Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain. The book depicts the rise of Stan Carlisle from a carnival mentalist to a successful 'spiritualist,' preying on the rich and gullible matrons of society, to his eventual fall and total disintegration. Gresham's first book, and the basis for the 1947 film noir of the same title starring Tyrone Power.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William Lindsay Gresham (August 20, 1909 - September 14, 1962) was an American novelist and non-fiction author particularly well-regarded among readers of noir. His best-known work is Nightmare Alley (1946), which was adapted into a 1947 film starring Tyrone Power. Gresham was born in Baltimore, Maryland. As a child, he moved to New York with his family, where he became fascinated by the sideshow at Coney Island. Upon graduating from Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn in 1926, Gresham drifted from job to job, and worked as a folk singer in Greenwich Village. In 1937, Gresham served as a volunteer medic for the Loyalist forces during the Spanish Civil War. There, he befriended a former sideshow employee, Joseph Daniel "Doc" Halliday, and their long conversations inspired much of his work, particularly Gresham's two books about the American carnival, the nonfiction Monster Midway and the fictional Nightmare Alley. Returning to the United States in 1939, after a troubling period that involved a stay in a tuberculosis ward and a failed suicide attempt, Gresham found work editing true crime pulp magazines. In 1942, Gresham married Joy Davidman, a poet, with whom he had two children, David and Douglas. Gresham was an abusive and alcoholic husband. Davidman, an ethnically Jewish atheist, became a fan of the writings of C. S. Lewis, which led eventually to her conversion to Christianity. After a violent encounter with Gresham, who wanted a divorce, Davidman ultimately agreed to end her marriage to Gresham and later married Lewis, their relationship forming the inspiration for the play and movie Shadowlands. Gresham married Davidman's first cousin, Renee Rodriguez, with whom he had been having an affair and who was herself suffering an abusive marriage. Gresham joined Alcoholics Anonymous and developed a deep interest in Spiritualism, having already exposed many of the fraudulent techniques of popular spiritualists in his two sideshow-themed books and having written a book about Houdini with the assistance of noted skeptic James Randi. He was also an early enthusiast of Scientology but later denounced the religion as another kind of spook racket. In 1962, Gresham's health began to take a turn for the worse. He had started to go blind and was diagnosed with tongue cancer. On September 14, 1962, he checked into the Hotel Carter, Manhattan  -  which he had often frequented while writing Nightmare Alley over a decade earlier. There, 53-year-old Gresham took his life with an overdose of sleeping pills. His death went generally unnoticed by the New York press, but for a mention by a bridge columnist. In his pocket they found business cards reading, "No Address. No Phone. No Business. No Money. Retired."

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Quit Monks Or Die! by Maxine Kumin. Ashland. 1999. Story Line Press. 1885266774. 185 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Lysa McDowell.  

DESCRIPTION - Set in a small town that houses little more than a research lab and an engineering school, the body of the lab's director is found in a pit used for maternal deprivation experiments with monkeys. A few days later, a graduate student is found murdered as well. Are these deaths connected? And who's responsible for these murders? Written by one of America's greatest poets, this mystery is a scathing social commentary with a criminal twist. 

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Maxine Kumin (June 6, 1925 - February 6, 2014) was an American poet and author. She was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1981–1982. Born Maxine Winokur in Philadelphia, the daughter of Jewish parents, she attended a Catholic kindergarten and primary school. She received her B.A. in 1946 and her M.A. in 1948 from Radcliffe College. In June 1946 she married Victor Kumin, an engineering consultant; they had three children, two daughters and a son. In 1957, she studied poetry with John Holmes at the Boston Center for Adult Education. There she met Anne Sexton, with whom she started a friendship that continued until Sexton's suicide in 1974. Kumin taught English from 1958 to 1961 and 1965 to 1968 at Tufts University; from 1961 to 1963 she was a scholar at the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study. She also held appointments as a visiting lecturer and poet in residence at many American colleges and universities. From 1976 until her death in February 2014, she and her husband lived on a farm in Warner, New Hampshire, where they bred Arabian and quarter horses. Kumin's many awards include the Eunice Tietjens Memorial Prize for Poetry (1972), the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1973) for Up Country, in 1995 the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, the 1994 Poets' Prize (for Looking for Luck), an American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award for excellence in literature (1980), an Academy of American Poets fellowship (1986), the 1999 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and six honorary degrees. In 1979, the Supersisters trading card set was produced and distributed; one of the cards featured Kumin's name and picture. In 1981–1982, she served as the poetry consultant to the Library of Congress. Critics have compared Kumin with Elizabeth Bishop because of her meticulous observations and with Robert Frost, for she frequently devotes her attention to the rhythms of life in rural New England. She has been grouped with confessional poets such as Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell. But unlike the confessionalists, Kumin eschews high rhetoric and adopts a plain style. Throughout her career Kumin has struck a balance between her sense of life's transience and her fascination with the dense physical presence of the world around her. She served as the 1985 judge of the Brittingham Prize in Poetry and she selected Patricia Dobler's Talking To Strangers. She taught poetry in New England College's Low-Residency MFA Program. She was also a contributing editor at The Alaska Quarterly Review. Together with fellow-poet Carolyn Kizer, she first served on and then resigned from the board of chancellors of the Academy of American Poets, an act that galvanized the movement for opening this august body to broader representation by women and minorities. Kumin, aged 88, died in February 2014 at her home in Warner, following a year of failing health. Kumin is believed to be the last person to have seen Anne Sexton alive, as the two of them had had lunch the day of Sexton's suicide in 1974.

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The Man Who Killed Himself by Julian Symons. New York. 1967. Harper & Row. 186 pages. hardcover.  

DESCRIPTION - The perfect murder planned by a man who wants to kill his wife. In the end he killed himself - though his death was no suicide. But first timid little Arthur Brownjohn decided to kill his dominating, handsome wife Clare. 'A story which is comic, fantastic, and full of surprises including a neat parody on [1960s] fashions in spy stories and sidelights on the incidental benefits of running a matrimonial agency.'

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Julian Gustave Symons (May 30, 1912, London, United Kingdom - November 23, 1994, Kent, United Kingdom) was a British crime writer and poet. He also wrote social and military history, biography and studies of literature. Julian Symons was born in London. He was a younger brother, and later the biographer, of the writer A. J. A. Symons. He left school at 14. He founded the poetry magazine Twentieth Century Verse in 1937, editing it for two years. ‘He turned to crime writing in a light–hearted way before the war and soon afterwards established himself as a leading exponent of it, though his use of irony to show the violence behind the respectable masks of society place many of his books on the level of the orthodox novel.' In World War II he applied for recognition as an anti-capitalist conscientious objector, but ended up in the Royal Armoured Corps 1942 to 1944, when he was invalided out with a non-battle-related arm injury. After a period as an advertising copywriter, he became a full-time writer in 1947. During his career he won two Edgar Awards from the Mystery Writers of America and, in 1982, received the MWA's Grand Master Award. Symons served as the president of the Detection Club from 1976 till 1985. Symons's 1972 book Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel (published as Mortal Consequences in the US) is one of the best-known critical works in the field of crime fiction. Revised editions were published in 1985 and 1992. Symons highlighted the distinction between the classic puzzler mystery, associated with such writers as Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr, and the more modern ‘crime novel,' which puts emphasis on psychology and motivation. Symons published over thirty crime novels and story collections between 1945 and 1994. His works combined elements of both the detective story and the crime novel, but leaned clearly toward the latter, with an emphasis on character and psychology which anticipated current crime fiction writers such as Ruth Rendell and P.D. James. His novels tend to focus on ordinary people drawn into a murderous chain of events; the intricate plots are often spiced with black humour. Novels typical of his style include The Colour of Murder (1957), the Edgar-winning The Progress of a Crime (1960), The Man Whose Dreams Came True (1968) The Man Who Lost His Wife (1970) and The Plot Against Roger Ryder (1973). Symons's crime fiction is highly prized by connoisseurs, even if it is less well-known to the general reading public. Symons wrote two modern-day Sherlock Holmes pastiches, as well as a pastiche that was set in the 1920s. In A Three Pipe Problem (1975), the detective was ‘. .a television actor, Sheridan Hayes, who wears the mask of Sherlock Holmes and assumes his character. The book neatly reversed the usual theme of the criminal behind the mask by having a rather commonplace man wearing the mask of the great detective.' The Kentish Manor Murders was written in 1988. For his 1981 book The Great Detectives, he wrote a Sherlock Holmes pastiche instead of a biographical sketch. Entitled ‘How a Hermit was Disturbed in His Retirement,' the events of the tale take place in the 1920s as Sherlock Holmes is drawn out of retirement in order to solve an unusual missing persons case. The story was included in the collection The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, in which it was given a more Doylean title of ‘The Adventure of Hillerman Hall.' He also made occasional forays into historical mystery, such as The Blackheath Poisonings (1978), which was filmed for television in 1992.

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The Monkey's Wrench by Primo Levi. New York. 1986. Summit Books. 0671622145. Translated from the Italian by William Weaver. 175 pages. hardcover. Jacket illustration & design by Bascove.  

DESCRIPTION - In this exuberant novel, one of Italy's greatest living writers celebrates the art of storytelling and the spirit of work through weaving the mesmerizing t ales of an itinerant construction worker, Libertini Faussone, and a writer-chemist, the true and fictional Primo Levi.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Primo Michele Levi (31 July 1919 - 11 April 1987) was an Italian Jewish chemist and writer. He was the author of several books, novels, collections of short stories, essays, and poems. His best-known works include If This Is a Man (1947) (U.S.: Survival in Auschwitz), his account of the year he spent as a prisoner in the Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland; and his unique work, The Periodic Table (1975), linked to qualities of the elements, which the Royal Institution of Great Britain named the best science book ever written. A chemist by training, Primo Levi (1919-87) was arrested as an anti-fascist partisan during World War Two, and deported to Auschwitz in 1944. His books include THE DROWNED AND THE SAVED, IF THIS IS A MAN and THE PERIODIC TABLE.

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The Periodic Table by Primo Levi. New York. 1984. Schocken Books. 0805239294. Translated from the Italian by Raymond Rosenthal. 233 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by John Clarke.

DESCRIPTION - Primo Levi is justly regarded in his native Italy as one of its leading men of letters. A chemist by profession, in this book he writes about incidents of his life in which one or another of the elements of the periodic table figured in such a way as to become a personal preoccupation. For example, vanadium: Levi was a chemist for an Italian company that imported vanadium from Germany to use in its varnish. On one occasion the shipment from the German supplier was of such a character that the batch of varnish with which it was mixed never dried. Levi wrote to his opposite number, the chemist in the German firm. After much correspondence, that person admitted that the vanadium supplied had not been up to sample, paid Levi's claim, and shipped the proper chemical. But the suspicion had been growing in Levi's mind that the man with whom he was corresponding had been the chief of a laboratory m Auschwitz in which he himself had worked as a starved and abused prisoner. What that recognition meant-for both men-and what happened thereafter was an ironic working out of an infamy decades old but not ended. PRIMO LEVI is the author of two classic memoirs of the experience of the concentration camps, SURVIVAL IN AUSCHWITZ and THE RE-AWAKENING.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Primo Michele Levi (31 July 1919 - 11 April 1987) was an Italian Jewish chemist and writer. He was the author of several books, novels, collections of short stories, essays, and poems. His best-known works include If This Is a Man (1947) (U.S.: Survival in Auschwitz), his account of the year he spent as a prisoner in the Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland; and his unique work, The Periodic Table (1975), linked to qualities of the elements, which the Royal Institution of Great Britain named the best science book ever written. A chemist by training, Primo Levi (1919-87) was arrested as an anti-fascist partisan during World War Two, and deported to Auschwitz in 1944. His books include THE DROWNED AND THE SAVED, IF THIS IS A MAN and THE PERIODIC TABLE.

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