Posts Categorized: Private Eyes

The Wit and Wisdom of Shell Scott

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Here are some of my favorite lines from Richard S. Prather's immensely entertaining Shell Scott novels, the bestselling detective series from the 1960s... which are all but forgotten today, even though, at one point, there were over 10 million copies in print.   “He lay there with his face on the cement, in his own blood and wastes. Lesson for would be killers: Either don’t miss with your first shot, or else eat light, go to the john, take an enema, and be ready to die neat.” Kill Him Twice   “She had short mouse-brown hair, rather nice full lips and gray eyes. But they weren’t pretty eyes. Not dawn gray, slate gray or even muddy gray. They were sort of... more

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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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Max Allan Collins: Talkin’ About SHAFT

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I bought Ernest Tidyman’s novel Shaft in 1970 at Iowa Book & Supply in Iowa City, on my way to class at the University of Iowa. I bought the first edition hardcover primarily because its black private eye hero was described in the jacket copy as making “Mike Hammer look like a sissy.” When the film Shaft came out in 1971, Barb and I were there. We were perhaps unlikely fans of blaxploitation movies (then in their earliest stages), but we went to scads of the things, from Cotton Comes to Harlem to Coffy, from Slaughter to Super Fly. For us, Shaft topped them all, due to the perfect marriage of the opening Isaac Hayes theme, Richard Roundtree’s charismatic performance, and... 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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Ben Jones: My Friend HARDMAN

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Brash Books is republishing the 12 Hardman novels by Ralph Dennis.... a brilliant series of crime novels long sought-after by collectors and beloved by crime writers. Very little is known about the author, who died in 1988. So we sought out some of the people who knew him best to tell us about him. Ben Jones was one of Ralph's oldest friends and became famous as an actor (he was "Cooter" on Dukes of Hazzard) and later as a Congressman from Georgia in the House of Representatives. His remembrance of Ralph below appears as the Afterword in the Brash edition of the Hardman novel Down Among the Jocks. If, on a late summer afternoon in 1973, you had walked into George’s Deli on Highland... more

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Geoffrey Miller: How I Wrote “THE BLACK GLOVE”

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Brash Books is honored to be republishing Geoffrey Miller's The Black Glove, which was a sensation when it was first published and snagged a Edgar Award nomination for Best First Novel. Now it's back in new and revised ebook and trade paperback editions. We invited Geoff to talk a bit about how the book came about and the changes he's made to it since it was first published. When I was at the UCLA Film School in the middle to late 60s I saw for the first time The Maltese Falcon, Murder, My Sweet and The Big Sleep (in 1974 I would see Chinatown).  For reasons that even today I cannot explain, I became extremely enthusiastic about the hardboiled detective story, especially Dashiell... more

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