Lead With Your Left and The Best That Ever Did It by Ed Lacy

Litchfield Reviews Lead With Your Left and The Best That Ever Did It by Ed Lacy

Lancashire Post book review by Nicholas Litchfield: Using the pseudonym Ed Lacy, American novelist Len Zinberg achieved fame as a writer of critically successful mysteries in the 1950s and ’60s. Winner of an Edgar Award for best novel in 1957 for Room to Swing, a typically hard-hitting story featuring African-American private detective Toussaint Moore, Lacy’s thirty novels have sold more than 28 million copies. Lead With Your Left and The Best That Ever Did It, two of the author’s finest works, are a pair of taut, fast-paced detective stories that are noted for their gritty realism and sharply defined central characters.

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Litchfield Reviews End of the Line by Bert and Dolores Hitchens

“Born Julia Clara Catherine Dolores Robbins, prolific American novelist and playwright Dolores Hitchens began her career as a hospital nurse, and then a teacher, before becoming a successful professional writer. From 1938 until her death in 1973, she published forty books, utilising four nom-de-plumes. Her suspense novel The Watcher was adapted for the television series

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Litchfield Reviews The Action Man and Terror Tournament by Jay Flynn

A former US Army soldier and journalist, the late John M. Flynn was a prolific American author of crime and espionage novels, occasionally contributing Westerns using the house name Jack Slade.  In a career spanning from the late fifties to the late seventies, he penned somewhere in the region of thirty novels, mostly for Ace Books, Avon

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Litchfield Reviews So Many Doors by Oakley Hall

First published by Random House in 1950, So Many Doors is the debut novel by Pulitzer Prize-nominated American writer Oakley Hall, an English professor emeritus at UC Irvine and author of 25 books, who died in 2008. During his distinguished career, Hall won numerous awards, including the Wrangler Award and the Western Writers of America

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Litchfield Reviews The Red Scarf and A Killer is Loose by Gil Brewer

Hugely popular and prolific during the 1950s, selling millions of copies of paperback originals, the late Gil Brewer is considered one of the best American crime writers of his era. Between 1950 and the late 1970s, he authored hundreds of short stories and dozens of novels, including The Red Scarf and A Killer is Loose,

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Litchfield Reviews The Count of 9 by Erle Stanley Gardner

“Habitually sparring with police officers, suspects, and adversaries, the petite, lightweight Lam once again finds himself up against rough cops and vindictive crooks eager to turn him into a human punching bag. Though competent at meting out verbal jabs, he leads with his chin while ‘somebody always works him over.’ In this especially bruising tale,

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Litchfield Reviews Cape Diamond by Ron Corbett

“Dark, gory, and cinematic, with a constant ominous tone, Cape Diamond is a compelling crime tale with plenty of shocks, surprises, and visceral thrills.” Former Ottawa newspaper columnist and radio host Ron Corbett received high praise for his debut novel, Ragged Lake, the first in a three-book deal he signed with Toronto’s ECW Press. The

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Litchfield reviews ‘Let Us Now Speak of Extinction’ for the Colorado Review

“Let Us Now Speak of Extinction marks an unexpected but welcome departure for Keith from his usual compendiums of supernatural fiction. Absurd, provocative, philosophical, and idiosyncratic, these markedly varied, darkly amusing pieces of condensed prose are as engrossing and satisfying as they are surprising and thought-provoking.” American media historian, author, and professor emeritus at Boston

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Litchfield reviews ‘Mademoiselle Bambù’ for the Colorado Review

“Mademoiselle Bambù is an unexpected pleasure. Rich with dark humor, fertile imagination, and eloquent, intelligent reflection, it offers an admirably unique, disorienting, hallucinatory approach to storytelling.” Merging crime, espionage, and absurdist fiction, French author Pierre Mac Orlan (born Pierre Dumarchey in 1882)—a prolific writer of adventure novels, erotica, songs, essays, and memoirs—constructs a compelling novel

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