STEEGER BOOKS SALE, Day 2: DIME DETECTIVE Library !!!

The Steeger/Altus BLACK FRIDAY-CYBER MONDAY SALE marches on! Today's new releases are six more volumes in the always cool Dime Detective Library. There's a lot of fine work here, including series by two of my favorites - Norbert Davis and Roger Torrey. 

Look for more batches of new books tomorrow and Monday. Monday's group (I think) will include the long-awaited (at least by me) BOWIE'S GOLD by Yours Truly. All these new releases (along with hundreds of those already in print) will be 30% OFF during the sale. 

My advice: Wait 'til Monday and include a copy of BOWIE'S GOLD (and maybe CROCKETT'S DEVIL) in your order. Yours Truly will appreciate it. 

New from BLACK DOG BOOKS !

DEATH HAS AN ESCORT by Roger Torrey
With an introduction by Richard A. Moore
     Crime comes in many forms, great and small—but no crime compares to murder!
     The floors runs red as Roger Torrey’s classic hard-drinking private eyes sleuth their way through eight short novels and one shorter work.
     With a ground-breaking introduction by Richard A. Moore, presenting a vast amount of new biographical information about Roger Torrey.
     Coming in at more than 300 pages, this collection is sure to find a place on your mystery shelf!

THE GARDEN OF TNT by William J. Makin
The Collected Adventures of the Red Wolf of Arabia
With an introduction by Mike Ashley
     Walking a tightrope of fragile alliances, undercover British Intelligence agent Paul Rodgers, aka the Red Wolf of Arabia, faces off against revolutionaries and foreign dignitaries, trying to sway the balance of power following the Arab revolt.
     Drawn from Makin’s personal travels and peppered with intimate color and background, it’s little wonder that the Red Wolf of Arabia stories were reader favorites when they first appeared.
     Now collected for the first time in book form are the complete thrilling adventures of the Red Wolf of Arabia—over 500 pages of action andespionage excitement in the shifting sands of international intrigue!

THE VOICE OF THE NIGHT by Hugh Pendexter
The Cases of Jeff Fanchon, Investigator
With an introduction by award-winning author Evan Lewis.
     A series of baffling robberies strike the high society of New York. What could be the purpose and who could be responsible for such odd crimes? The agents of the evil mastermind, Henri Bouchard, have infiltrated all levels of society. No precious item is safe from his criminal genius.
     Jefferson Fanchon, Inquirer, has been called in to decipher the events. Immediately he recognizes the hand of his old European adversary, Bouchard. But never before has Bouchard’s influence spanned the Atlantic. Why now?
     The game is afoot as the great Inquirer’s legendary powers of deduction are put to the test
in this series of astounding cases!
     Will Bouchard win? Or will Jeff Fanchon triumph?
     In the grand tradition of Sherlock Holmes, uncover the startling answers in The Voice of the Night.

TARRANO THE CONQUEROR by Ray Cummings
With a new introduction by Tom Roberts
     The year is 2430. The Earth awakens to find its leaders murdered! All major cities are in turmoil. It is rumored an interplanetary plot is underway. When the same situation arises on Mars, panic ensues. Who is responsible? The ruler of Venus sends word that he will protect the Earth if all its citizens will recognize and honor his supreme authority.
     A defiant Earth Council refuses to submit to such blatant tyranny. Then a second message arrives from the stars:
     Tarrano the Conqueror declares war on the Earth!

DYING COMES HARD by James P. Olsen
The Collected Cases of “Hard Guy” Dallas Duane
With an introduction by James Reasoner.
     They don’t call him Hard Guy for nothin’!
     Into the rough and tumble oil fields of Texas and the American southwest of the 1930s comes Dallas Duane, troubleshooter, freelance private dick and undercover investigator for the oil companies.
     “Hard and fast” is his motto! Watch as he works his way in and out of trouble—both with the wildcatters and wild women—knuckling a path through a series of bank robberies and payroll heists, murder and corrupt officials, crooked gambling and haunted graveyards.
     Here, for the first time are assembled the complete adventures of “Hard Guy” Dallas Duane, two-fisted troubleshooter!
     The appendix includes a nonfiction article about the wildcat oil booms of the Texas region that Olsen covered as a newspaper reporter. 

WINDY CITY PULP STORIES No.15 edited by Tom Roberts
Celebrating the 125th Birthday of H.P. Lovecraft and the 75th Anniversary of the Street & Smith comics. With cover art by Les Edwards.
      With contributions and rare articles by F. Paul Wilson, Robert Weinberg, Stephen Jones, S.T. Joshi, David H. Keller and others.

ALL BOOKS NOW AVAILABLE - HERE!

Forgotten Books: 42 Days For Murder by Roger Torrey

It’s a damn shame Roger Torrey didn’t write more novels. But he didn’t. He wrote only one. That’s the bad news.

The good news is that that ONE, 42 Days for Murder, is available for free electronic download (that’s HERE), and a fine collection of shorter works, Bodyguard and Other Crime Dramas, is available from Black Dog Books (that’s HERE).

My first impression of Roger Torrey, based on some of his many stories for the Trojan magazine line (Spicy, Speed, Hollywood, Private and Super-Detective) was that he was one of the more successful emulators of Dashiell Hammett.

But I read 42 Days for Murder sandwiched in between a fistful of Continental Op stories and discovered that’s not the case. Torrey was his own man, with his own style, and it comes through strong in this novel.

Our hero is Shean Connell, a nightclub piano player turned private dick - and yeah, he does play piano, in a nightclub, in this book. The friend of a friend is having wife trouble (she’s leaving him and won’t say why), drawing Connell into a mess that pits him against mobsters, dope runners, white slavers and the bought-and-paid-for police force of Reno, Nevada. The 42 days of the title represents the six weeks it will take the friend-of-a-friend’s wife to get a divorce, so Connell has only that long to solve the case.

Torrey populates the book with vivid characters - a rich kid determined to learn the gumshoe business, a lousy sax-player, an unruly client and a line-up of dames ranging from dizzy to dangerous. It’s a smooth read, with just the right blend of violence and humor.

The novel was first published in 1938, and reprinted in this paperback edition sometime in the '40s.

The Black Dog book Bodyguard, meanwhile, features eleven stories, plus a great bibliography. The bibliography showed me that Torrey was a far more prolific pulp writer than I realized. He made over fifty appearances in Black Mask alone, another twenty in Detective Fiction Weekly and many more in various other mags, in addition to the hundred and thirty or so stories he wrote for the Trojan line.

I recommend you give this guy a try. In addition to these two books, you’ll find sample stories in The Hard-boiled Omnibus and The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps.

And you’ll find more Forgotten Books at pattinase.

Behind the BLACK MASK with Whitfield, Gardner, Torrey & Coxe

Ever wonder what Raoul Whitlfield, Erle Stanley Gardner, Roger Torrey and George Harmon Coxe were up to back in September 1934? Well, wonder no more, because here's the scoop from that month's issue of Black Mask. (My copy is coverless, so I borrowed the pic above from Galactic Central.)

(click to enlarge)

Private Detective Stories: Roger Torrey

Roger Torrey was a Black Mask contemporary of Hammett and Chandler who never quite graduated out of the pulps. He did have one novel published, but only by a minor-league paperback company, and continued into the 40s writing for other detective pulps. Much of his work was done for the Speed line (formerly the Spicy line) - mags like Private Detective Stories, Super-Detective and Hollywood Detective.

I’m not saying Torrey was a good as Hammett, but I find his prose reminiscent of that in Hammett’s best Continental Op stories. Torrey doesn’t write for show (like, say, Robert Leslie Bellem). His stuff is economical and matter of fact, but laced with wry wit. It’s easy to hear the radio Sam Spade, Howard Duff, doing the talking.

Here’s a sample from the 1942 story “Somebody Stole My Gal.” This story features private detective John Ryan, one of Torrey’s major series characters. Ryan’s constant companion is his dog Toby (probably part pit bull), who’s always ready to bite the hand off anyone threatening his master.  

I stood beside him - with Toby between us as always - and we talked of this and that and the other thing. It was his turn first. I heard that business - what little there was of it - was lousy. I felt very sorry about this. I heard that the suckers screamed when they were hurt these days - and admitted that was a crying shame. That the nation was breeding a bunch of softies who couldn’t take more than more than six inches of knife in the back in a pleasant fashion.

I agreed that the wholesale liquor dealers were reaping a fortune from poor saloon keepers who were only trying to give their patrons an honest drink of whiskey and I argued right along with him about how the liquor dealers’ greed was the curse of the country.

Then it was my turn at bat. I told him about my landlord being a money-hungry vulture, hanging over the dead remains of my bank account. I complained about the War Department not giving my kid brother any leave and about them turning down first class soldier material in my own form. Griffo admitted, at this point, that they’d turned him down also, on account of a dilated heart.

We sobbed together on this.

I went into horse racing in some detail, claiming that they rigged every single race as soon as I got my money down on any single nag. I argued that the jocks were in combine against me - anything to let Ryan’s horses lose the pot.

And I ended with the tale about Toby and the police dog. How I was going to be sued for damages by the owner of a police dog, because of Toby taking a solid grip on the mutt’s ear and hanging on and shaking it a little bit. And that things had come to a pretty pass when a man’s pet dog couldn’t amuse himself in little ways like that.

All in all we had a swell time singing the blues.

Torrey’s novel 42 Days for Murder has been reprinted a few times and is not hard to find. A new story collection, Bodyguard and Other Crime Dramas was published recently by Black Dog Books, and a chapbook called The Quires Matter is available from The Vintage Library.