Before he began to remap the geography of the crime novel and venture out into the darkest noir night of them all with L.A. Confidential, The Black Dahlia, White Jazz, and American Tabloid, James Ellroy started his career with this powerful but basically straightforward...

Armchair Detective...

Multilingual, anarchic spy Evan Tanner once again goes behind the Iron Curtain in this 1966 seriocomic tale. This time, he must break into a Prague prison to liberate a despicable Nazi who will lead Tanner to the documents exposing his network of hatred. As is typical i...

Block introduced Evan Tanner, specialist in lost political causes, in this rousing, often comic 1966 yarn. Unable to sleep for 15 years following a Korean War head wound, Tanner devotes his considerable free time to reading, learning languages, and turning his afflictio...

Block introduced Evan Tanner, specialist in lost political causes, in this rousing, often comic 1966 yarn. Unable to sleep for 15 years following a Korean War head wound, Tanner devotes his considerable free time to reading, learning languages, and turning his afflictio...

Stephen King and Nelson DeMille on Ed McBain I think Evan Hunter, known by that name or as Ed McBain, was one of the most influential writers of the postwar generation. He was the first writer to successfully merge realism with genre fiction, and by so doing I think he ...

"What is this drug anyway?" Westlake asks about the timeless attraction of detective stories. This anthology answers by breaking the genre into eight types, each illustrated by four splendid examples. In subgenres such as Locked Rooms, Armchair Detectives and Brilliant ...

“Sink your teeth in.”—People Otto Penzler is the proprietor of The Mysterious Bookshop in New York City. He was publisher of The Armchair Detective, the founder of the Mysterious Press and the Armchair Detective Library, and created the publishing f...

The eponymous hero of this gothic-like mystery is a modern variant of mad scientist, an ambitious and attractive psychobiologist doing research in a psychiatric hospital on Roosevelt Island. The story begins, however, after Solo's death, and is narrated by his accused k...

"A fast-paced plot, witty dialogue, more than a few surprises, and a you'll-never-guess-whodunit denouement."—Armchair Detective"Superb writing...Harlan Coben serves up an ace with Drop Shot."—John Lutz, author of Death by Jury"A fast-paced plot, witty dialo...