VIRGIL MARKHAM – The Devil Drives. Alfred A. Knopf, hardcover, 1932. Bart House #10, paperback, 1944. Ramble House, trade paperback, 2007.

   The Devil Drives is an offbeat and highly individual novel by a writer who, it would seem, must have had some familiarity with the work of that master American zany Harry Stephen Keeler. It is somewhat reminiscent of Keeler’s Amazing Web (1929), but is shorter, slighter, less ambitious, more straightforward, and, though complex enough in plot, lacks the unbelievable convolutions and ramifications of the Keeler work.

   The authors do share the ability to propel their narratives forward in such a manner that readers will keep turning pages breathlessly in order to discover what astounding plot development will next occur, and what outrageous coincidence will help to resolve (or amplify) the current situation.

   The Markham novel concerns George Lawson Peters, the warden of Franklin Penitentiary in New Jersey, who deserts his post to seek a lost treasure left by an adventurer nicknamed “Dubrosky” for a girl named Philadelphia Boston. On his odyssey, Peters meets a gangster with a heart of garbage; a repulsive blackmailer who exacts no tribute from his victims; the blackmailer’s unhappy wife; her friend the eccentric countess; and Detective Veen, who reads mysteries.

   At the two-thirds point in the narrative, Peters encounters a honey of a locked-room problem. The door is locked and bolted, and the two windows are locked-all from the inside. The floor and ceiling are ungimmicked, and the fireplace and chimney show no signs of entrance or egress. The victim met his death by drowning. The author’s unique solution is even more bizarre than the problem he has propounded.

   The locked-room situation and many strands of the plot are finally resolved by a few well-placed Keeleresque coincidences. But Markham has still done an ingenious job of deceptive clue-planting that is worthy of Christie, Carr, or Queen; and his unexpected and grimly ironic finale is worthy of Francis Iles or Richard Hull.

   Markham’s other novels include Death in the Dusk (1928), The Black Door (1930), and Inspector Rusby’s Finale (1933). The last-named title has an irresistible premise:

   A Scotland Yard inspector, spending a weekend at a crowded country house, wakes up the morning after his arrival to find that the hostess and guests have vanished and he is alone — except for the dead body of a perfect stranger. The ending, however, as Barzun and Taylor have noted, is a bit hard to swallow.

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   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

Editorial Comments:   Curt Evans recently posted on his blog a review of Red Warning (aka Song of Doom in the UK), another work of crime fiction by Virgil Markham. Included with the review is a considerable amount of information about the author himself, and I highly recommend it to you. (Follow the link.)

   More. A link on Curt’s blog led to blogger TomCat’s review of Death in the Dusk, also by Markham, which he says “turned out to be a rival for Joel Townsley Rogers’ The Red Right Hand (1945) and Fredric Brown’s Night of the Jabberwock (1950) in the race for the title of most outlandish detective story ever contrived.”

PAUL CAIN – Fast One. Doubleday Doran & Co., hardcover, 1933. First appeared in serialized form in non-consecutive issues of Black Mask magazine between March and September, 1932. Bond Mystery #10, digest paperback, 1945. Avon #178, pbbk, 1948; Avon #496, ppbk, 1952. Southern Illinois University Press, hardcover, 1978. Popular Library, paperback, “American Fiction” series, 1980. Black Lizard, paperback, 1987.

   The hardest of the hard-boiled writers for Black Mask in the early 1930s was unquestionably Paul Cain (Peter Ruric). His style, as pulp authority Ron Goulart has noted, at times “becomes as sparse and clipped as that of a McGuffey’s Reader.”

   In an afterword to the Southern Illinois reprint edition, critic Irvin Faust says that Cain “hasn’t the time or patience for excess baggage. He picks up his literary scalpel and scrapes away conjunctions as if they were bad merchandise… He digs into the page with a hard sentence: simple, declarative, exact.”

   Fast One is Cain’s only novel. (He was primarily a screenwriter and is responsible for such films as One for the Money, Grand Central Murders, and Mademoiselle Foi.)

   It was written on a bet and its various sections first appeared in Black Mask as five self-contained novelettes prior to book publication. It is unrelentingly grim and stark and brutal, to such an extent that it becomes uncomfortable to read; one begins to feel a kind of breathless despair well before the end.

   The “hero” is Gerry Kells, a mysterious loner, a criminal who insinuates himself into the Los Angeles underworld and wreaks havoc on its denizens and on others who happen to get in his way. The dust jacket blurb on a 1978 reissue by Southern Illinois University Press says about Kells:

   Cain knew his Los Angeles and he knew the ways of its Prohibition and post-Prohibition underworld. The portrait he paints of both, and of Gerry Kells, makes Fast One an important and compulsively readable novel, despite that feeling of breathless despair it engenders.

   The only other book by Cain is Seven Slayers (1946), a collection of seven of his other Black Mask stories, all of which are in the same tough vein and all of which are excellent samples of pulp writing at its best.

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   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

DEREK MARLOWE – Somebody’s Sister. Viking, hardcover, 1974. Penguin, paperback, 1977. First published in the UK: Jonathan Cape, hardcover, 1974.

   Somebody’s Sister is an attempt by a British author to write an American hard-boiled private-eye novel — and quite a successful attempt it is.

   The investigator, Walter Brackett, is a fifty-three-year-old Englishman operating in San Francisco. His wife has died, his business has nearly gone to ruin, and he has an emotionally crippled partner, Harry Kemble, in a rest home.

   Brackett visits Kemble every Saturday; otherwise he sits in his office above Fatty’s Delicatessen waiting for clients who seldom materialize. Brackett is likable and sympathetic but — in the tradition of the hard-boiled novel — he keeps his reader at a distance.

   On this particular Saturday, Brackett returns from his usual visit to find the police waiting: A young girl has been killed in an auto accident on the Golden Gate Bridge, and Brackett’s card was in the car; the police want him to make an identification.

   At the morgue, Brackett finds the girl is Mary Malewski, a prospective client who wanted him to find her father; Brackett never investigated for her, however, because she suddenly ran out of his office. Also at the morgue Brackett encounters a man named Loomis who apparently witnessed the accident.

   Later Loomis leaves a message asking Brackett to visit him at his Sausalito motel. Brackett goes, but before he can talk to the man, Loomis is fatally shot in the car wash across the street! The police tell Brackett to stay out of the investigation; Loomis was a drug informer, involved in something too big for a down-at-the-heels private eye. But Brackett can’t stay out of it; he senses Loomis’s death and that of the girl are connected.

   So he digs — in the lowly dives of North Beach where the girl lived; in an expensive home in Pacific Heights where her aging lover resides — until he finally must face a personally shattering truth.

   The book is well plotted, and just when the reader thinks he knows what is really going on, he encounters another unexpected twist. In fact, its only faults are minor: a clue that could have been better placed; geographical discrepancies that are more likely to bother San Franciscans than anyone else; the San Francisco police having jurisdiction over a crime which happens in Sausalito across the Bay. (The novel is dedicated to newspaper columnist Herb Caen, who is often referred to as “Mr. San Francisco”; perhaps if Marlowe had consulted Caen, these discrepancies wouldn’t have happened.)

   Unfortunately Marlowe — who has written a number of other suspense novels, including the well-received Dandy in Aspic (1966) — chose not to make Brackett a series character.

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   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

SIMON TROY – Waiting for Oliver. Macmillan, US, hardcover, 1963. Originally published in the UK by Gollancz, hardcover, 1962.

   The work of Simon Troy (a pseudonym of Thurman Warriner) is distinguished for the eccentricity of its plotting, characters, and construction. Most people in a Troy novel aren’t “normal”; they are obsessed, perverse, secretive, profoundly different.

   So, too, the situations in which they find themselves. This is true whether Troy is writing tales of psychological suspense and horror, like Waiting for Oliver, or what might be termed “psychological procedurals” featuring his sensitive Cornish policeman, Inspector Smith. All of Troy’s novels — even the few that don’t quite work — are quietly disquieting and absorbing from start to finish.

   Waiting for Oliver is probably his oddest book. It is the story of a frightening, almost symbiotic relationship between two men who have known each other since boyhood: Oliver Townside and the narrator, Alex Monro.

   Oliver is the dominant personality, a personification of evil, a kind of modern vampire who, spongelike, absorbs the personas of those around him, corrupting or destroying them. Alex has always been terrified of Oliver, has always hated and pitied him, and yet has always responded to Oliver’s hypnotic power and done his bidding. When they were children, he could not bring himself to expose his friend/enemy as the perpetrator of unspeakable acts of violence.

   Nor could he bring himself to seek personal vengeance as an adult, when Oliver maliciously seduced Alex’s sweetheart, Margery, married her, and later cold-bloodedly murdered her.

   When the book opens, two years have passed since Margery’s “accidental” fall from a cliff near Petit Sant, Oliver’s home in the Channel Islands. Alex, a teacher in a small secondary school in England, has had no contact with Oliver since then and prefers to keep it that way. But when he receives a telegram announcing Oliver’s intention to take a second wife — Frances, another woman Alex knows — he is drawn back to the islands.

   It is then, while once more waiting for Oliver, that he realizes he cannot let the man marry Frances, for surely he will murder her too. He sets out to do what the local police have not been able to do — prove that Oliver killed Margery — and also to free himself from Oliver’s thrall, if necessary to destroy the evil before it destroys him.

   The suspense here builds slowly, inexorably, to a terrifying climax on one of the smaller islands. And as a bonus, Troy portrays the Channel Islands (as he does all his settings) with a sharp eye for detail.

   The novel does have its flaws: its eccentric construction makes things seem confusing at times, especially in the early pages; Troy withholds vital information about Oliver’s and Alex’s boyhood until much too late in the book; and there are minor points that seem a bit too quirky, that don’t quite ring true. Still, this is a powerful and unsettling work.

   Also well-worth investigating is Troy’s only other nonseries psychological suspense novel, Drunkard’s Walk (1961), and his ten mysteries featuring Inspector Smith. Among the best of the Smith novels are Second Cousin Removed (1961), Don’t Play with the Rough Boys (1963), and Cease Upon the Midnight (1964). The last-named title also has a Channel Islands setting.

   Under his own name, Troy/Warriner also published a series of novels featuring an outspoken private detective named Mr. Scotter, none of which has been published in this country.

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   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

      Previously on this blog:

THURMAN WARRINER: Method in His Murder, reviewed by Bill Deeck.

DAN J. MARLOWE – The Name of the Game Is Death. Gold Medal s1184, paperback original, January 1962. Fawcett Gold Medal T2663, paperback, revised edition, January 1973.

   The Name of the Game Is Death is Dan J. Marlowe’s best book, which means that it’s just about as good as original paperback writing can get. It’s hard, fast, tough, and terse, with an opening scene so strong that you’ll wonder if Marlowe can possibly come up with an ending to top it. But he does, and it’s good enough to jolt you out of your chair.

   Marlowe’s narrator, Earl Drake, is a bank robber and a cold-blooded killer — they don’t come any colder — who works part-time as a tree surgeon. He hates most people and loves animals.

   When he’s wounded in a robbery in Phoenix, he sends his partner on ahead with the money and instructions to mail some of it to him each week. At first the money arrives on schedule; then it doesn’t. Recovered, Drake starts for Florida to find out why. Not everyone between Arizona and Florida lives until Drake finishes his trip.

   In Florida, Drake gets work as a tree surgeon, makes friends with several of the locals, and even appears to be falling in love. But always in the back of his mind is his desire to find his money and his partner. He does, shortly before the (literally) explosive climax.

   Drake’s story is strong stuff, and it moves with the speed of a bullet from his Colt Woodsman. Take a deep breath when you plunge into the story; you might not have time for another before it’s finished.

    Warning:   Earl Drake was eventually turned into a series character, a sort of secret agent. As a result, in 1972 Fawcett issued a revised edition of The Name of the Game Is Death in which Drake was made a bit more socially acceptable. Find and read the original if possible.

   Equally exciting books by Marlowe are The Vengeance Man (1966) and Four for the Money (1966).

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   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

          Earlier on this blog:

   The Vengeance Man, reviewed by Noel Nickol.

   And a long look at the differences between the two editions of The Name of the Game Is Death can be found here.

CHARLES ALVERSON – Goodey’s Last Stand. Houghton Mifflin, hardcover, 1975. Playboy Press, paperback, 1977, 1979.

   Joe Goodey’s career as a private investigator is launched when he mistakes the mayor’s cousin for a gunman and shoots him, an error that forces his resignation from the San Francisco Police Department.

   His boss, Chief of Detectives Ralph Lehman, promises to wangle Goodey a PI’s license as soon as emotions cool, and Goodey takes off — for Mexico, he thinks — stopping at a seaside motel just over the county line. But by the next morning, Lehman tracks Goodey down and forces him to take his first case, dangling the promise of an immediate license.

   A stripper named Tina D’Oro — whom Goodey knew slightly but San Francisco mayor Sanford F. Kolchick knew altogether too well — has been stabbed to death, and the mayor wants the homicide cleared up quickly without involving his name or risking his reelection.

   Goodey begins by studying Tina’s diary, which has been stashed in the safe of Deputy Chief of Police Bruno Kolchick (by no coincidence, the mayor’s brother), but finds little to go on. “You could pick up more gossip on a bus ticket,” Goodey concludes.

   Goodey’s investigation takes him to the strip clubs of North Beach; into the back alleys of Chinatown; to the offices of a plastic surgeon who claims to have “created” Tina’s body; to the posh home of the mayor himself (who inexplicably lives outside the city in Marin County across the Bay); and even, for a while, to jail. Along the way he finds a Chinese girl asleep in his bed, a dead man on his stair landing — and his true calling as a private eye.

   This book is rich in San Francisco background and colorful characters, and includes a nice ongoing bit about Goodey’s Chinese landlord, but Goodey’s wisecracking manner and lone-wolf posture make him virtually indistinguishable from scores of other stereotypical fictional private eyes. Goodey has appeared in one other adventure, Not Sleeping, Just Dead (1977).

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   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

[UPDATE] 02-02-12.   And the two books of Joe Goodey’s adventures were all there were. For more about the author, check out his entry on Wikipedia here, where you’ll also find this description of Goodey’s Last Stand in a review in The New Yorker, where the novel is called “the next best thing to finding a new and unsuspected Raymond Chandler phantasmagoria.”

MARGERY ALLINGHAM – Traitor’s Purse. Doubleday Crime Club, US, hardcover, 1941. First published in the UK: Heinemann, hardcover, 1941. Reprinted many times, in both hardcover and paperback.

   England is at war. The country is threatened by a catastrophic stroke, and time is desperately short. All lines of investigation have gone slack, and only one man knows the enormity of the situation. Only one man has the faintest clue to the heart of the conspiracy. As the story opens, Albert Campion awakes in a hospital bed with total amnesia from a blow to the head.

   Hearing himself described as the killer of a policeman, he recklessly escapes and heads for the Bridge Institute, a research organization that is “a living brain factory.” The Masters of Bridge are a hereditary group who are the governors of the Institute, and Sir Henry Bull is one of the Senior Masters. When the secretary to the masters is killed, the police question Campion, who was the last man to see him alive.

   Campion’s investigations are invested with the psychology of paranoia. He walks a tightrope, of sifting clues while trying to reestablish his memory. Stanislaus Oates, head of the CID, has disappeared, and Campion can’t confide his memory loss to his love interest, Amanda, because of her trust in him.

   The only really practical help that comes his way is from his man, Magersfontein Lugg, who recognizes what a blow to the head can do and protects Campion from the police manhunt and from the gang of criminals on his track.

   The search for the traitor weaves through the criminal conspiracy and the institute itself (and by extension into the government) and leads into the cavernous heart of Nag’s Head, the rocky headland that looms over the town of Bridge.

   Many characters appear, disappear, and reappear throughout the saga, including friends and relations; the policemen Oates, Yeo, and Luke; and the spymaster L. C. Corkran.

   This story is Campion’s trial by fire — afterward he is a changed man. Later in his career, he has less to do and becomes a sort of consultant.

   After Allingham’s death, her husband continued the Campion adventures in three more novels. One novel that has received much critical approval, The Tiger in the Smoke (1952), in some ways seems overdrawn and overwritten.

   Other recommended titles by Allingham are Mystery Mile (1930), Look to the Lady (1931), Sweet Danger (1933), and More Work for the Undertaker (1948). Inducements to read them include the memorable names of characters, both major and minor, and of the various settings. And if you’re a fan of that Golden Age staple, a proper plan or map of the scene, these provide cartographic delight.

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   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

  DAVID ALEXANDER – Paint the Town Black. Random House, hardcover, 1954. Bantam 1534, paperback, 1956.

   Bart Hardin, managing editor of the Broadway Times, is in urgent need of $500. On the recommendation of an old friend, television commentator Mike Ainslie, he applies for a press-agent job with the Latin American Trade Alliance.

   Hired for the position, Hardin returns to his apartment over Bromberg’s Flea Circus and finds Ainslie’s tortured body in front of his fireplace. Hardin’s problems are compounded by the fact that he must break the news to Ainslie’s wife, Dorothy, with whom he is in love.

   The newspaperman’s personal involvement with both the murder and the trade alliance — which urgently wants to recover a fake pre-Columbian jug that Ainslie reportedly had in his possession prior to his death — leads him into encounters with a strange curio-shop owner, a psychologist who collects art, a strongman named Andes, and a chinless man with a penchant for sadism.

   Hardin is an engaging character: a denizen of Broadway who sports embroidered vests and a cynicism that is undermined by his ability (which he would term a flaw) to care deeply — be it for a murdered friend or his old blind dog.

   David Alexander’s portrayal of the people of Broadway gives full rein to their eccentricities, but stops short of being unbelievable. The plot is intricate, and all elements tie off neatly at the conclusion.

   Other notable Bart Hardin titles are Terror on Broadway (1954), Die, Little Goose (1956), Shoot a Sitting Duck (1957), and Dead, Man, Dead (1959).

   Alexander also created two other series of two books each. The first features the detective duo of Tommy Twotoes, an eccentric penguin fancier, and private eye Terry Rooke (Most Men Don’t Kill and Murder in Black and White, 1951); the second stars Broadway lawyer Marty Land, who also appears in the Hardin series (The Death of Daddy-O, 1960, and Bloodstain, 1961).

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   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

DAVID ALEXANDER – The Madhouse in Washington Square. J. B. Lippincott, hardcover, 1958. Collier 113, paperback, 1961.

   The Madhouse in Washington Square is a tavern frequented by a regular group of social misfits, one of whom is John Cossack, “a painter of barber poles … a barroom porter, a manufacturer of bombs, and something of a philosopher.”

   It is Cossack who finds failed writer Carley Dane beaten to death in Dane’s Greenwich Village cold-water flat. Any number of people had reason to kill the despicable writer, including most of the habitues of the Madhouse.

   Cossack doesn’t wish to see any of these people, his friends, behind bars. Besides, reporting the murder will interfere with preparations for his grand and compassionate scheme to blow up the tavern with one of his homemade bombs, thus putting its largely unhappy patrons — himself included — out of their collective misery.

   As Cossack’s scheme unfolds (and as circumstances force him to reluctantly assume the role of sleuth), Alexander introduces the reader to each habitue: Manley Ferguson, a frustrated artist; Helen Landers, a model who, when in her cups, suffers an overwhelming urge to do an impromptu striptease; wasted Peter Dotter, once rich and now a hopeless and pitiful alcoholic; Major Trevor, eighty-year-old veteran of the Boer War and World War 1, who supports himself by playing small character roles on the stage and on television; bitter old Martha Appleby, whose driving force for close to twenty years has been her hatred of Carley Dane.

   Other suspects include Bruno Madegliani, owner of the Madhouse, who loathes and mistrusts his customers and whose secret passion is to find the long-lost idol of his youth, a champion cyclist named the Great Goldoni; Penny Caldwell, a sensitive young poet who fancies herself another Emily Dickinson; and George Dabney Sturgis, a recently discharged soldier who came to New York just to meet Dane and received a rude welcome.

   Events set in motion in each of these characters’ lives during this crucial day are neatly resolved in the final pages; and Cossack reveals the identity of Dane’s murderer. As for his bomb … well, you’ll have to read the novel to find out whether or not the climax is literally an explosive one.

   In A Catalogue of Crime, Barzun and Taylor called The Madhouse in Washington Square “close to unreadable”; Barzun and Taylor obviously have no patience with eccentric prose styles and no empathy for eccentric characters.

   The fact is, the novel is not only readable but quite moving, owing in large part to David Alexander’s ability to sympathetically portray individuals whose lives and actions are far beyond the limits of rational human behavior. His treatment of these misfits is compassionate and gently humorous — and Madhouse is a kind of poignant tribute to all misfits, everywhere.

   Alexander’s other non-series novels are Murder Points a Finger (1953) and Pennies from Hell (1960). The latter, a tale of menace and persecution reminiscent of Hugo’s Les Miserables, is particularly good.

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   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

WILLIAM [G.] BOGART – Hell on Friday. Jonathan Swift, hardcover, 1941. Also published as Murder Man, Tech Mysteries, digest paperback, no date [1943?]

   William G. Bogart was a prolific pulp writer in the Thirties and Forties. His chief claim to fame is that he ghosted a handful of the Doc Savage novels that have become so popular in paperback reprint. At his best, he was only a fair novelist; Hell on Friday is noteworthy primarily as one of only two mystery novels with a pulp publishing background. (The other is William P. McGivern’s But Death Runs Faster, published seven years later — a much better mystery novel but lacking the range of pulp lore and true pulpy feel of the Bogart book.)

   Hell on Friday‘s protagonist, private eye Johnny Saxon, is a former “prince of the pulps” who quit writing after three years of phenomenal success because “the business had lost its kick for him [and] his stuff went stale.” His partner, Moe Martin, is “the loneliest literary agent in New York” — an emotional sponge who can lose himself in any narrative and therefore is incapable of telling the good from the bad.

   Saxon is hired by Joe Rogers, head of Rogers Publishing Company, a chain publisher of some twenty-two pulp magazines, to investigate the dubious business practices of a rival publisher, Sam Sontag.

   Rogers also wants him to help persuade a love-pulpeteer who writes under the name Dulcey Dickens to sign an exclusive contract with his firm. Murder, the appearance of a racketeer named Jasper Ward, the disappearance of Dulcey Dickens, and other complications carry the narrative.

   The plot isn’t particularly clever or exciting, and the solution holds no real surprises. Still, there is a certain charm to Hell on Friday (the title refers obliquely to the fact that Friday was payday for the legion of pulp writers, and often make-up day for the various magazines as well).

   Saxon and Moe Martin are engaging characters (as is Dulcey Dickens), and the pulp setting is well drawn and packed with details fascinating to anyone with an interest in that vanished era. Saxon also stars in two other novels by Bogart — Murder Is Forgetful (1944) and The Queen City Murder Case (1946).

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   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

Bibliographic Note: All three novels are available in an omnibus edition (Hell on Friday: the Johnny Saxon Trilogy) published by Altus Press, 2010).