Stark House Press

The Hoods Take Over by Ovid Demaris

Litchfield Reviews Ovid Demaris’s The Hoods Take Over for the Lancashire Post

Nicholas Litchfield in the Lancashire Post: Reprinted from the late 1950s comes a tautly plotted, gritty tale of gang wars, racketeering, police corruption, and the dangers faced by a murder witness who risks his life to give testimony against powerful mobsters. Late American author Ovid E. Desmarais, better known as Ovid Demaris, was a journalist and bestselling author of thirty books. Praised for his investigative reporting on organized crime, political and business corruption, gambling and the underworld, several of his nonfiction books enjoyed a combined 64 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and have been translated and published in twenty-two countries.

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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 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 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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Paperback Warrior Reviews James O. Causey’s The Baby Doll Murders / Killer Take All! / Frenzy

“James O. Causey got his start in the 1940s writing short stories for “Weird Tales” and “Detective Story Magazine.” As the pulps died off, he became a highly-regarded, if not well-known, author of short, hardboiled crime novels. Stark House has compiled three of Causey’s classics into one volume for 21st Century audiences. The new trade

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Litchfield Reviews You’ll Get Yours by William Ard

Mysteriously lured by thieves into taking part in a ransom delivery, an honest Manhattan private-eye becomes involved in a perilous blackmail plot and the prime suspect in the murder of a stripper. First published in 1952 by paperback publisher Lion Books under the pseudonym Thomas Wills, You’ll Get Yours is a hardboiled Fifties tale of

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Lancashire Post Reviews Bill S. Ballinger’s Portrait in Smoke and The Longest Second

“[Bill S.] Ballinger, who died in 1980 at the age of 68, wrote scripts for eight feature films, more than 150 teleplays, 30 books, and in 1961, he won an Edgar Award for one of his teleplays for Alfred Hitchcock Presents. His novels, several of which were made into films, have sold more than ten

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No Harp for My Angel / Booty for a Babe / Eve, It’s Extortion by Carter Brown

Litchfield Reviews No Harp for My Angel, Booty for a Babe, and Eve, It’s Extortion by Carter Brown

Lancashire Post book review by Nicholas Litchfield: Wise-cracking, lecherous homicide detective Lieutenant Al Wheeler investigates the disappearances of pretty ‘˜dames,’ a complex hit-and-run case, and murders at a science fiction convention in three entertaining entries in the phenomenally successful Carter Brown mystery series. Written in the 1950s and long since out-of-print, No Harp for My Angel, Booty for a Babe, and Eve, It’s Extortion are a trio of swift-paced, tongue-in-cheek stories by the incredibly prolific Alan Geoffrey Yates, writing under the house name Carter Brown.

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Lancashire Post Review of Floyd Mahannah’s ‘The Broken Angel and Backfire and Other Stories’ by Lowestoft Chronicle Editor

Floyd Mahannah was a talented but overlooked 1950s writer of hardboiled tales. Although his novels received strong critical reviews and he managed to place his shorter work in numerous popular magazines, Mahannah didn’t achieve the success he was striving for and his writing career fizzled out early. This week, Stark House Press publishes a collection

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