Posts Categorized: Guest Posts

BLACKBALL is Back!

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Here's Robert Randisi's full, 1987 review of Jimmy Sangster's hardboiled classic BLACKBALL, which Brash Books has just re-released in new ebook & trade paperback editions. Randisi is the founder of the Private Eye Writers of America.   Jimmy Sangster first made a name for himself in film and television. He wrote horror films for Hammer in England and then did a lot of episodic television in the United States, including scripts for S.W.A.T., Ironside, The Six Million Dollar Man, McCloud and Wonder Woman. His first novel, Private I (aka The Spy Killer), was published in 1967, and both it and its sequel, Foreign Exchange, were produced for TV with Robert Horton in the role of... more

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Ralph

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Today we're publishing  The Buy Back Blues, the 12th and final book in the Hardman series by Ralph Dennis. To mark the occasion, we're sharing the revealing, deeply personal essay that author Cynthia Williams wrote about Ralph as an afterword for Murder is Not an Odd Job, the 6th book in the series. I knew Ralph Dennis first as a teacher, and later as a friend and mentor. Eventually, he asked me to marry him, but I refused, and our friendship ended. Obviously, I will remember Ralph differently from the men who knew him, because he was, in some ways, a different person with me. I met Ralph Dennis in 1966. I was in my junior year at UNC- Chapel Hill, majoring in... more

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A Hardman is Good To Find

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Paul Bishop is a huge Hardman fan and in this essay,  from our reissue of Pimp For The Dead, he talks about the cultural forces that shaped the creation of the series...and the market forces that doomed it to obscurity. Paul is 35-year veteran of the Los Angeles Police Department. His career included a three year tour with his department's Anti-Terrorist Division and over twenty-five years' experience in the investigation of sex crimes. He currently conducts law enforcement related seminars for city, state, and private agencies.  In 1974, Atlanta Deathwatch, the first Hardman novel by Ralph Dennis, debuted as a paperback original from Popular Library. It was done... more

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The Literary Life of Ralph Dennis

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RICHARD A. MOORE is a former reporter, a retired public relations executive, and the author of various short stories published by Ellery Queen, Alfred Hitchcock and other mystery magazines and anthologies. He played a big role in making it possible for Brash Books to acquire the rights to the published and unpublished works by Ralph Dennis, an author perhaps best known among crime writers for his 12 legendary Hardman novels...which we will begin re-releasing today. This essay has previously appeared, in various forms, on an array of crime fiction blogs... and is reprinted in the Brash edition of THE GOLDEN GIRL AND ALL, the third book in the Hardman series.  Ralph Dennis... more

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Getting in Touch with Touchfeather

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Jimmy Sangster was an amazing writer.  He was one of the best screenwriters for Hammer's horror movies, and he was all over U.S. TV in the '70s (check out his IMDb entry).  He also wrote novels, several of which I read and enjoyed, including two about a spy named Katy Touchfeather. When Touchfeather's boyfriend is killed, it's revealed to her by the head of a super-secret British spy agency that he was murdered.  She's offered a chance to work for the same agency, as she already has the perfect cover, as she's a stewardess ('60s parlance).  Aftr attending spy school, she'll be able to work for any airline at any time and fly over the world on assignment. The big... more

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Double Down on Waverly

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Novelist James L. Thane, author of No Place to Die and Until Death, shares his fondness for Tom Kakonis' thriller Double Down. This is the second book in Tom Kakonis's excellent short series featuring Timothy Waverly, a professional gambler whose business card wryly describes him as an "Applied Probabilities Analyst."The end of the first book, Michigan Roll, found Waverly in a world of hurt after he accidentally stumbled into a drug deal that went bad. When all was said and done, $500,000 worth of drugs wound up destroyed. The drugs belonged to a crime boss named Gunter Dietz who blames Waverly for the loss of the drugs and who expects to be repaid. Waverly and his best friend and... more

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