Posts Tagged: private eye

BIG NEWS! We've found a long-lost, never-before-published Jimmy Sangster novel! It's called Fireball...and here is the incredible story behind the major, literary discovery.   Jimmy Sangster, who died in 2011, was an acclaimed screenwriter (Curse of Frankenstein, Deadlier Than the Male, The Legacy,etc), director (Lust for a Vampire, Banacek, etc), TV writer (Wonder Woman, Cannon, Movin’ On, BJ and The Bear, The Magician, Kolchak: The Night Stalker, etc) and novelist (Touchfeather, Touchfeather Too, The Spy Killer and Foreign Exchange).   He was also the author of three James Reed crime novels... more

Read More of FIREBALL – Long Lost, Unpublished Jimmy Sangster Novel Found

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

Read More of Max Allan Collins: Talkin’ About SHAFT

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

Read More of Geoffrey Miller: How I Wrote “THE BLACK GLOVE”

Andy Straka is the author of the award-winning and beloved Frank Pavlicek series... about an ex-NYPD cop who becomes a PI and falconer in Virginia... which kicks off with our new Brash Books' releases of  A Witness Above and A Killing Sky. Here he talks about how he created the series... How did I fall into this gig anyway? All I ever wanted to do was write the world's greatest private eye novels and have someone pay me gazillions of dollars to live happily ever after. But I had two problems. Problem number one: How could I possibly contribute anything new to such a classic private eye genre replete with masterful voices? Problem number two: Private eye novels most often feature... more

Read More of Andy Straka: A Bird’s Eye View of the Private Eye Genre