Hardboiled Treasures

Look what turned up in the mail the other day! And it wasn’t even Christmas!

The Mighty Hocking had some duplicate hardboiled paperbacks lying about (as well as another Elmore Leonard western) and generously sent them on to me. Feast your eyes upon them.

These things are usually packaged in a tawdry way, often with ludicrous back cover copy that might have sold them in the old days but don’t do much to promote them to a modern audience because you have no idea how good the actual prose inside might be. Here’s an example, from the back of Million Dollar Murder:

A living dead man, tortured beyond recognition. A suitcase crammed with a million dollars in fresh, green currency. An eerie island. A sadistic millionaire. An exotic girl who knew all the answers, but whose lips didn’t look like they had been kissed as often as her manner indicated.

That’s what Sam sailed into. That, and murder: murder and more murder.

Now the odds are that if you’re like me you’ll go “yeah!” and think that might be fun. But if you don’t know how oversold and over the top a lot of this old back cover copy is you’d probably think I’d lost my mind or decide I had bad taste. Although maybe you already suspected that.

This weekend I also conquered Persia and moved on towards India courtesy of Field Commander: Alexander. It only took me a few hours, whereas it took him years. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!