Cut Me In

November 16, 2015
Wheeling-and-dealing in a Manhattan literary agency drives this reissue, an ultrasmooth 1954 crime novel from Salvatore Lombino (1926–2005), better known today by two of his pen names, Evan Hunter (The Blackboard Jungle) and Ed McBain (Cop Hater and many other 87th Precinct novels). The firm of Gilbert and Blake wants to cut in on movie money being dangled in front of a client, but one of the firm’s partners, Del Gilbert, lies shot dead on his office floor—“three holes had very carelessly been left in his face.” It’s up to the firm’s other partner, fiction-peddler Josh Blake, to juggle the deal, sweat through the sweltering summer heat while finding corpses faster than the cops, and mix it up with a few even hotter babes. Originally published under the pseudonym Hunt Collins, this period classic features a great whodunit clue. Rounding out the package is “Now Die in It,” a McBain story that’s been lost for more than half a century.

October 15, 2015
Another vintage case from the days in the early 1950s before McBain created the 87th Precinct and broke away from the pack. You might think it's not literary agent Josh Blake's day. Soon after he arrives at the offices of Gilbert and Blake, he finds his partner, Del Gilbert, shot to death, the safe in his private office rifled. The most worrisome item that's missing is the contract novelist Cam Stewart signed granting Gilbert and Blake radio and television rights to Stewart's bestselling Westerns in perpetuity for $500--a document Del had planned to use to extort a major piece of the action from the impending sale of Stewart's work to Hollywood producer Dave Becker out of Carlyle Rutherford, the agent handling the sale. Even worse, the firm's only photostatic copy of the contract is stolen from Josh himself as he's leaving the apartment of Lydia Rafney, Del's secretary and lover. And Detective Sgt. Sam Di Luca, who's working the case, makes no secret of his suspicion that Josh is the killer. On the other hand, the day isn't a complete loss. Josh wakes up in the company of Janice, a half-clad blonde he doesn't remember from the night before, and two other comely ladies proposition him before the sun goes down. (There'll be a third forward pass the next day from a most unexpected quarter.) The complications are juicy, the combination of menace and sexual availability irresistible, and McBain's gift for inventing a full range of wacky episodes already in full flower. Only the solution itself disappoints. As a bonus, fans can savor "Now Die in It," a moody, overwrought 35-page case for disgraced detective Matt Cordell, who also headlined the story appended to So Nude, So Dead (2015). If this sounds like your cup of bourbon, it most definitely is.

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November 15, 2015
Hard Case Crime's project to republish out-of-print titles by the great Ed McBain continues apace with this snappy thriller, which originally appeared in 1953 under the pseudonym Hunt Collins. It's a no-nonsense hard-boiled tale but with an out-of-the-ordinary and fascinating premise: the hero is a literary agent, Josh Blake, whose partner, a slimy skirt-chaser, has been murdered in his office, with the contract for TV rights to a western novelist's works seemingly stolen from the open safe. With echoes of The Maltese Falcon When a man's partner is killed, he's supposed to do something about it Blake sets out to find the killer and reclaim the contract, only he's several steps behind, walking in on more dead bodies and, in the process, becoming the cops' prime suspect. The attraction here is really the literary backdrop: authors appearing in agents' offices with typed manuscripts in their hands; a Louis L'Amourlike western writer (only she's a dishy blonde and winds up a corpse) living large on paperback sales; gin-guzzling agents taking pages out of the Mad Men playbook. Ah, the good old days. Think Rona Jaffe's The Best of Everything with guns.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)