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Suder by Percival L. Everett. New York. 1983. Viking Press. 0670681105. 171 pages. hardcover. Jacket illustration by David Fe Bland. Jacket design by George W. Sanders, Jr.  

DESCRIPTION - With his beloved Charlie Parker record (‘Ornithology') tucked under one arm and a portable phonograph under the other; Craig Suder, black third baseman for the Seattle Mariners, is headed out of town. He has lost touch with his wife, with his friends, with the ball. He is haunted by memories of a ghastly summer years ago when his mother was obsessed with running a full circle around Fayetteville in her winter coat, and he prays that insanity is not passed down through the blood. But Suder has begun to see things a little too clearly, to hear things a little too well. He is, in short, going crazy. On his way to the woods Suder adopts a companion, an elephant whom he wins fair and square and lovingly names Renoir, and is adopted in turn by a nine-year-old runaway named Jincy, sassy, exasperating, and lovable. Together the three friends hole up in a cabin and outfox au intruders - the local sheriff, a drug smuggler, an amateur taxidermist with a longing for Renoir (‘Call me if he dies?'), an overweight homosexual Chinaman, and an amorous barfly. Suder wants peace and quiet; he needs to concentrate on fulfilling a childhood dream: flight. Not running-away flight, but the soaring, swooping, gliding flight of a bird. What happens 2,000 feet in the air above Ezra Pond should come as a surprise to no one. But it will. Percival Everett's is an original and comic voice; he has taken the energies of jazz and transformed them into prose. He has located the heart of the absurd and found it full of tears. SUDER is a funny unsettling, and triumphant first novel by a gifted young writer.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Percival Everett is Professor of English at the University of Southern California. His 13 previous books include FRENZY (1997), WATERSHED (1996), and SUDER (1983).

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Percival Everett (born December 22, 1956) is an American writer and Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. He is best known for his novels Erasure (2001), I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009), and The Trees (2021), which was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize. Erasure was adapted as the film American Fiction (2023), written and directed by Cord Jefferson, starring Jeffrey Wright, Sterling K. Brown, and Leslie Uggams.

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The Weather and Women Treat Me Fair by Percival Everett. Little Rock. 1987. August House. 0874830133.  116 pages. paperback. Cover design by Communications Graphics. 

DESCRIPTION - A ranch hand inadvertently steps into the no-man's-land between an estranged father and son. A painter stakes his work and heart against the chic world of art speculation. A U.S. border patrolman hunts a desperate Mexican boy. A retired dentist turns his hands to the creation of miniature towns and landscapes and finds his fate entangled in theirs. These are some of the characters and situations you'll meet in THE WEATHER AND WOMEN TREAT ME FAIR, the first short story collection by novelist Percival Everett. Despite the wide-ranging action, these stories are unified by spare dialogue, tight plot development and a deadpan irony which is in evidence throughout. They are told in a casual, almost flat, tone - but don't be caught unawares: the understatement belies a vivid symbolic landscape that will suddenly appear before your eyes, like a mesa cropping up on the edge of the desert where Everett seems so at home. In all fifteen stories, heroes who tend to be loners grapple with alienation and falsity. Yet despite a surface pessimism, certain values emerge. Again and again, kinship, community and dignity prove resistant to the eroding and degrading forces of our times.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Percival Everett (born December 22, 1956) is an American writer and Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. He is best known for his novels Erasure (2001), I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009), and The Trees (2021), which was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize. Erasure was adapted as the film American Fiction (2023), written and directed by Cord Jefferson, starring Jeffrey Wright, Sterling K. Brown, and Leslie Uggams.

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Cutting Lisa by Percival Everett. New York. 1986. Ticknor & Fields. 0899194125. 147 pages. hardcover.  

DESCRIPTION - Early one morning sixty-six-year-old John Livesey, a recently retired Virginia obstetrician, is called in on a bizarre case: a man with no medical training has successfully performed a Caesarean, without anesthesia, on his wife. The act itself appalls Livesey, but the man's uncompromising willfulness somehow moves him and continues to haunt him all the way to the Oregon coast, where he is to spend the summer with his son's family. Elgin worries that his widowed father may be at loose ends, but John is totally captivated by his granddaughter, starts an affair with a much younger woman, and drinks beer and eats bacon - to the horror of his fastidious daughter-in-law, Lisa. Lisa is pregnant, but something is amiss. In a dramatic mishap, John discovers the truth about Lisa's baby. Will he dare to play a wrathful God? In characteristically lean prose Percival Everett pits the harsh tenets of Old Testament retribution against a twentieth-century morality based on freedom of choice.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Percival Everett (born December 22, 1956) is an American writer and Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. He is best known for his novels Erasure (2001), I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009), and The Trees (2021), which was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize. Erasure was adapted as the film American Fiction (2023), written and directed by Cord Jefferson, starring Jeffrey Wright, Sterling K. Brown, and Leslie Uggams.

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For Her Dark Skin by Percival Everett. Seattle. 1990. Owl Creek. 0937669458. 152 pages. hardcover. Cover art by Shere C. Everett.  

DESCRIPTION - FOR HER DARK SKIN is a tightly crafted exploration of the story of Jason and Medea weaving both traditional and contemporary fictional and thematic elements into a sharply ironic tale of revenge, ambition, passion and pride. Desires and consequences lead the all-too-human characters through a piercing new interpretation of classic themes.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Percival Everett (born December 22, 1956) is an American writer and Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. He is best known for his novels Erasure (2001), I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009), and The Trees (2021), which was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize. Erasure was adapted as the film American Fiction (2023), written and directed by Cord Jefferson, starring Jeffrey Wright, Sterling K. Brown, and Leslie Uggams.

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Wounded: A Novel by Percival Everett. Minneapolis. 2005. Graywolf Press. 1555974279. 210 pages. hardcover. Cover design: Scott Sorenson. Cover photograph: Tim Flach.

DESCRIPTION - Training horses is dangerous--a head-to-head confrontation with a 1,000 pounds of muscle and little sense takes courage, but more importantly patience and smarts. It is these same qualities that allow John and his uncle Gus to live in the beautiful high desert of Wyoming. A black horse trainer is a curiosity, at the very least, but a familiar curiosity in these parts. It is the brutal murder of a young gay man, however, that pushes this small community to the teetering edge of fear and tolerance. As the first blizzard of the season gains momentum, John is forced to reckon not only with the daily burden of unruly horses, a three-legged coyote pup, an escape-artist mule, and too many people, but also a father-son war over homosexuality, random hate-crimes, and―perhaps most frightening of all--a chance for love. Highly praised for his storytelling and ability to address the toughest issues of our time with humor, grace, and originality, Everett offers yet another brilliant novel.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Percival Everett (born December 22, 1956) is an American writer and Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. He is best known for his novels Erasure (2001), I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009), and The Trees (2021), which was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize. Erasure was adapted as the film American Fiction (2023), written and directed by Cord Jefferson, starring Jeffrey Wright, Sterling K. Brown, and Leslie Uggams.

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Telephone: A Novel by Percival Everett. Minneapolis. 2020. Graywolf Press. 9781644450222. 220 pages. paperback. Cover design: Kapo Ng.  

DESCRIPTION - FINALIST FOR THE 2021 PULITZER PRIZE IN FICTION. An astonishing new novel of loss and grief from “one of our culture’s preeminent novelists” (Los Angeles Times). Zach Wells is a perpetually dissatisfied geologist-slash-paleobiologist. Expert in a very narrow area―the geological history of a cave forty-four meters above the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon―he is a laconic man who plays chess with his daughter, trades puns with his wife while she does yoga, and dodges committee work at the college where he teaches. After a field trip to the desert yields nothing more than a colleague with a tenure problem and a student with an unwelcome crush on him, Wells returns home to find his world crumbling. His daughter has lost her edge at chess, she has developed mysterious eye problems, and her memory has lost its grasp. Powerless in the face of his daughter’s slow deterioration, he finds a mysterious note asking for help tucked into the pocket of a jacket he’s ordered off eBay. Desperate for someone to save, he sets off to New Mexico in secret on a quixotic rescue mission. A deeply affecting story about the lengths to which loss and grief will drive us, Telephone is a Percival Everett novel we should have seen coming all along, one that will shake you to the core as it asks questions about the power of narrative to save.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Percival Everett (born December 22, 1956) is an American writer and Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. He is best known for his novels Erasure (2001), I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009), and The Trees (2021), which was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize. Erasure was adapted as the film American Fiction (2023), written and directed by Cord Jefferson, starring Jeffrey Wright, Sterling K. Brown, and Leslie Uggams.

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So Much Blue by Percival Everett. Minneapolis. 2017. Graywolf Press. 9781555977825. 244 pages. paperback. Cover design: Kapo Ng.  

DESCRIPTION - A new high point for a master novelist, an emotionally charged reckoning with art, marriage, and the past. Kevin Pace is working on a painting that he won’t allow anyone to see: not his children; not his best friend, Richard; not even his wife, Linda. The painting is a canvas of twelve feet by twenty-one feet (and three inches) that is covered entirely in shades of blue. It may be his masterpiece or it may not; he doesn’t know or, more accurately, doesn’t care. What Kevin does care about are the events of the past. Ten years ago he had an affair with a young watercolorist in Paris. Kevin relates this event with a dispassionate air, even a bit of puzzlement. It’s not clear to him why he had the affair, but he can’t let it go. In the more distant past of the late seventies, Kevin and Richard traveled to El Salvador on the verge of war to retrieve Richard’s drug-dealing brother, who had gone missing without explanation. As the events of the past intersect with the present, Kevin struggles to justify the sacrifices he’s made for his art and the secrets he’s kept from his wife.So Much Blue features Percival Everett at his best, and his deadpan humor and insightful commentary about the artistic life culminate in a brilliantly readable new novel.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Percival Everett (born December 22, 1956) is an American writer and Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. He is best known for his novels Erasure (2001), I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009), and The Trees (2021), which was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize. Erasure was adapted as the film American Fiction (2023), written and directed by Cord Jefferson, starring Jeffrey Wright, Sterling K. Brown, and Leslie Uggams.

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I Am Not Sidney Poitier by Percival Everett. Minneapolis. 2009. Graywolf Press. 9781555975272. 236 pages. paperback. Cover design: Kapo Ng.

DESCRIPTION - I Am Not Sidney Poitier is an irresistible comic novel from the master storyteller Percival Everett, and an irreverent take on race, class, and identity in America. I was, in life, to be a gambler, a risk-taker, a swashbuckler, a knight. I accepted, then and there, my place in the world. I was a fighter of windmills. I was a chaser of whales. I was Not Sidney Poitier.Not Sidney Poitier is an amiable young man in an absurd country. The sudden death of his mother orphans him at age eleven, leaving him with an unfortunate name, an uncanny resemblance to the famous actor, and, perhaps more fortunate, a staggering number of shares in the Turner Broadcasting Corporation. Percival Everett's hilarious new novel follows Not Sidney's tumultuous life, as the social hierarchy scrambles to balance his skin color with his fabulous wealth. Maturing under the less-than watchful eye of his adopted foster father, Ted Turner, Not gets arrested in rural Georgia for driving while black, sparks a dinnertable explosion at the home of his manipulative girlfriend, and sleuths a murder case in Smut Eye, Alabama, all while navigating the recurrent communication problem: "What's your name?" a kid would ask. "Not Sidney," I would say. "Okay, then what is it?"

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Percival Everett (born December 22, 1956) is an American writer and Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. He is best known for his novels Erasure (2001), I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009), and The Trees (2021), which was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize. Erasure was adapted as the film American Fiction (2023), written and directed by Cord Jefferson, starring Jeffrey Wright, Sterling K. Brown, and Leslie Uggams.

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Percival Everett by Virgil Russell by Percival Everett. Minneapolis. 2013. Graywolf Press. 9781555976347.  230 pages. paperback. Cover design: Kapo Ng.

DESCRIPTION -  "Anything we take for granted, Mr. Everett means to show us, may turn out to be a lie." ―Wall Street Journal. * Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize * Finalist for the PEN / Faulkner Award for Fiction * A story inside a story inside a story. A man visits his aging father in a nursing home, where his father writes the novel he imagines his son would write. Or is it the novel that the son imagines his father would imagine, if he were to imagine the kind of novel the son would write? Let's simplify: a woman seeks an apprenticeship with a painter, claiming to be his long-lost daughter. A contractor-for-hire named Murphy can't distinguish between the two brothers who employ him. And in Murphy's troubled dreams, Nat Turner imagines the life of William Styron. These narratives twist together with anecdotes from the nursing home, each building on the other until they crest in a wild, outlandish excursion of the inmates led by the father. Anchoring these shifting plotlines is a running commentary between father and son that sheds doubt on the truthfulness of each story. Because, after all, what narrator can we ever trust? Not only is Percival Everett by Virgil Russell a powerful, compassionate meditation on old age and its humiliations, it is an ingenious culmination of Everett's recurring preoccupations. All of his prior work, his metaphysical and philosophical inquiries, his investigations into the nature of narrative, have led to this masterful book. Percival Everett has never been more cunning, more brilliant and subversive, than he is in this, his most important and elusive novel to date.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Percival Everett (born December 22, 1956) is an American writer and Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. He is best known for his novels Erasure (2001), I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009), and The Trees (2021), which was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize. Erasure was adapted as the film American Fiction (2023), written and directed by Cord Jefferson, starring Jeffrey Wright, Sterling K. Brown, and Leslie Uggams.

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A History of the African-American People [proposed] by Strom Thurmond by Percival and Kincaid Everett. New York. 2004. Akashic Books. 1888451572. 312 pages. paperback. Cover design by Celena Pane and Keith Campbell.  

DESCRIPTION -  ‘This is the funniest novel I have read in years!' - Clarence Major. In A HISTORY OF THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN PEOPLE (proposed), Percival Everett and James Kincaid present a fictitious chronicle of former South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond's desire to pen a history of African-Americans - his and his aides' belief being that he has done as much, or more, than any American to shape that history. An epistolary novel, A HISTORY follows the letters of loose-cannon Congressional office workers, insane interns at a large New York publishing house, and disturbed publishing executives, along with homicidal rival editors, and kindly family friends. Strom Thurmond appears charming and open, mad and sure of his place in American history. ‘Percival Everett has been wrestling the angel for years, in all its incarnations - literary novel, Western, naturalist story, experimental work, satire - and in each case he's pinned the angel, made it call uncle. Now he's gone tagteam with James Kincaid, so expect more damage. That Everett is not better known, that he fails to be mentioned alongside the likes of Philip Roth, John Updike, and Tony Morrison, shames us all.' - JAMES SALLIS, author of CHESTER HIMES: A LIFE. ‘This is the funniest novel I've read in years! I had trouble reading it because I had to stop to laugh out loud so often. Among many other things it's a treasure of satiric humor. Don't pass it up!' - Clarence Major, author of CONFIGURATIONS.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Percival Everett is the author of fifteen works of fiction, among them GLYPH, WATERSHED, GOD'S COUNTRY and FRENZY. His most recent novel ERASURE won the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and did little to earn him friends. James Kincaid is Aerol Arnold Professor of English at the University of Southern California and has written seven scholarly books in literary studies, literary theory, and cultural studies. Kincaid has gradually lost his moorings in the academic world, so there is nothing left for him to do but adopt the guise of fiction writer. Writing about madness comes easy to him.

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Watershed by Percival Everett. Saint Paul. 1996. Graywolf Press. 1555972373. 204 pages. hardcover. Cover design by Adrian Morgan at Red Letter Design. Cover image courtesy of Photodisc.  

DESCRIPTION - On a windswept landscape somewhere north of Denver, Robert Hawks, a feisty and dangerously curious hydrologist, finds himself enmeshed in a fight over Native American treaty rights. What begins for Robert as a peaceful fishing interlude, ends in murder and the disclosure of government secrets. Why was the impossibly short Louise Yellow Calf hitching a ride on a snowy, deserted road following the discovery of two FBI agents murdered on the reservation? And what is the female FBI agent doing in Robert's shower? As our reluctant hero fits together the pieces in the all too rapidly unfolding drama, connections emerge to his own family's long-standing civil rights battles - battles that he has thus far managed to avoid. In WATERSHED, Percival Everett has created an original mystery that crackles with tension and sly wit. Robert Hawks is revealed as someone who has been indelibly defined by the history of our country's racial relationships, and the one man uniquely qualified to take us with him through this complex and contested territory.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Percival Everett (born December 22, 1956) is an American writer and Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. He is best known for his novels Erasure (2001), I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009), and The Trees (2021), which was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize. Erasure was adapted as the film American Fiction (2023), written and directed by Cord Jefferson, starring Jeffrey Wright, Sterling K. Brown, and Leslie Uggams.

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The One That Got Away by Percival Everett. Boston. 1992. Clarion/Houghton Mifflin. 0395564379. Illustrated by Dirk Zimmer. 32 pages. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION - In this zany book with a Wild West setting, three cowpokes chase and corral "ones." "This offbeat but endearing little book exhibits a congenial marriage between text and illustration, at once whimsical and humorous." -- School Library Journal.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Percival Everett (born December 22, 1956) is an American writer and Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. He is best known for his novels Erasure (2001), I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009), and The Trees (2021), which was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize. Erasure was adapted as the film American Fiction (2023), written and directed by Cord Jefferson, starring Jeffrey Wright, Sterling K. Brown, and Leslie Uggams.

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Erasure by Percival Everett. Hanover. 2001. University Press of New England. 1584650907. 265 pages. hardcover. Cover photo by Elliott Erwitt.

  
DESCRIPTION - Avant-garde novelist, college professor, woodworker, and fly fisherman - Thelonious (Monk) Ellison has never allowed race to define his identity. But as both a writer and an African American, he is offended and angered by the success of WE'S LIVES IN DA GHETTO, the exploitative debut novel of a young, middle-class black woman who once visited some relatives in Harlem for a couple of days. Hailed as an authentic representation of the African American experience, the book is a national bestseller and its author feted on the Kenya Dunston television show. The book's success rankles all the more as Monk's own most recent novel has just notched its seventh rejection. Even as his career as a writer appears to have stalled, Monk finds himself coping with changes in his personal life. Forced to assume responsibility for a mother rapidly succumbing to Alzheimer's, Monk leaves his home in Los Angeles to return to the Washington D. C. house in which he grew up. There he must come to terms with his ailing mother, his siblings, his own childhood and youth, and the legacy of his physician father, a suicide some seven years before. In need of distraction from old memories, new responsibilities, and his professional stagnation, Monk composes, in a heat of inspiration and energy, a fierce parody of the sort of exploitative, ghetto wanna-be lit represented by WE'S LIVES IN DA GHETTO. But when his agent sends this literary indictment (included here in its entirety) out to publishers, it is greeted as an authentic new voice of black America. Monk - or his pseudonymous alter ego, Stagg R. Leigh - is offered money, fame, success beyond anything he has known. And as demand begins to build for meetings with and appearances by Leigh, Monk is faced with a whole new set of problems. Percival Everett's most recent novel, the academic satire GLYPH, was hailed b the New York Times as ‘both a treatise and a romp. This new novel combines a touching story of a man coming to terms with his family heritage and a satiric indictment of race and publishing in America.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Percival Everett (born December 22, 1956) is an American writer and Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. He is best known for his novels Erasure (2001), I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009), and The Trees (2021), which was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize. Erasure was adapted as the film American Fiction (2023), written and directed by Cord Jefferson, starring Jeffrey Wright, Sterling K. Brown, and Leslie Uggams.

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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 Root of His Evil by James M. Cain. Berkeley. 1989. Black Lizard Books. 0887390870. Originally Published In 1951. paperback. Painted front cover by Kirwan.

  
DESCRIPTION - A thriller which tells of the deadly corrupting influence between love and money as one man falls desperately in love with an innocent girl who proves willing but inadequate in satisfying his overwhelming demands.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - James Mallahan Cain (1892 - 1977) was a first-rate writer of American hard-boiled crime fiction. Born in Baltimore, the son of the president of Washington College, Cain began his career as a reporter, serving in the American Expeditionary Force in World War I and writing for THE CROSS OF LORRAINE, the newspaper of the 79th Division. He returned from the war to embark on a literary career that included a professorship at St. John's College in Annapolis and a stint at The New Yorker as managing editor before he went to Hollywood as a script writer. Cain's famous first novel, The POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE, was published in 1934 when he was forty-two, and became an instant sensation. It was tried for obscenity in Boston and was said by Albert Camus to have inspired his own book, THE STRANGER. The infamous novel was staged in 1936, and filmed in 1946 and 1981. The story of a young hobo who has an affair with a married woman and plots with her to murder her husband and collect his insurance, THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE is a benchmark of classic crime fiction and film noir. Two of Cain's other novels, MILDRED PIERCE (1941) and DOUBLE INDEMNITY (1943), were also made into film noir classics. In 1974, James M. Cain was awarded the Grand Master Award by the Mystery Writers of America. Cain published eighteen books in all and was working on his autobiography at the time of his death.

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His Name Was Death by Fredric Brown. Berkeley. 1987. Black Lizard Books. 0887390447. 139 pages. paperback.

DESCRIPTION - Joyce Dugan had no idea she was about to commit an act that would instigate a chain of murders, but you know what they say: the first killing was hard, after that they were easy.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Fredric Brown (October 29, 1906 - March 11, 1972) was an American science fiction and mystery writer. He was born in Cincinnati. He is perhaps best known for his use of humor and for his mastery of the "short short" form - stories of 1 to 3 pages, often with ingenious plotting devices and surprise endings. Humor and a somewhat postmodern outlook carried over into his novels as well. One of his stories, "Arena," is officially credited for an adaptation as an episode of the landmark television series, Star Trek.

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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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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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Out of Sight by Elmore Leonard. New York. 1996. Delcorte Press. 0385308485. 296 pages. hardcover. Jacket illustration by Artparts Studio.  

DESCRIPTION - Deputy U.S. marshal Karen Sisco is just stopping off to serve a summons and complaint on Florida's Glades Prison. She's all decked out in her black Chanel suit and heels, but ready with her pump-action shotgun when the breakout begins, minutes after she pulls into the prison parking lot. But she's not ready for Jack Foley, the celebrity con who disarms her, invites her to climb into the trunk of her own car, and then joins her as his pal Buddy guns the blue Caprice onto the highway, heading for freedom. Squeezed into a trunk littered with handcuffs and tactical gear, the escapee bank robber is a perfect gentleman who shares her passion for movies and wonders if it would be different if they'd met in a bar. Karen escapes and they do meet again. Only this time she's part of the federal task force hunting the escapees. This time she's sitting in the bar of the Detroit Westin, nursing a sour mash and watching a blizzard outside. This time Foley finds her. First come cocktails and conversation. Then Time Out. In Karen's suite. ‘You like taking risks,' she says. ‘So do I.' Next morning Foley's gone and Karen's out to get him. She cruises Detroit's mean streets and boxing hangouts looking for Foley, Buddy, and a hard case named Maurice, one step behind them as they plot the biggest heist of their careers - and a double cross that will leave only one man holding the goods. This time Karen means business as she races toward a hair-raising climax that careens pell-mell into suspense-writing history.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Elmore John Leonard Jr. (born October 11, 1925), better known as Elmore Leonard, is an American novelist and screenwriter. His earliest published novels in the 1950s were westerns, but Leonard went on to specialize in crime fiction and suspense thrillers, many of which have been adapted into motion pictures. Among his best-known works are GET SHORTY, OUT OF SIGHT, HOMBRE, MR. MAJESTYK and RUM PUNCH, which was filmed as Jackie Brown. Leonard's short stories include ones that became the films 3: 10 to Yuma and The Tall T, as well as the current TV series on FX, Justified.

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