Shills Can't Cash Chips by
From the world-famous creator of PERRY MASON, Erle Stanley Gardner, at his death the best-selling American writer of all time, comes another baffling case for the Cool & Lam detective agency. Return to the 1960s as a simple insurance investigation into a car accident puts Bertha Cool and Donald Lam on the trail of murder, and Donald hip-deep in danger when he poses as an ex-con to infiltrate a criminal gang. It's Gardner's twistiest caper ever, and a fitting conclusion to Hard Case Crime's revival of this classic (and long unavailable) detective series.
Science Fiction Classics by 
Wallace Wood Presents Shattuck by
1972, Wallace Wood created Shattuck, a rarely seen Western comic strip, assisted by soon-to-be great cartoonists Dave Cockrum (X-Men) and Howard Chaykin (Star Wars, Punisher). It's full of gun-toting femmes fatale, fast-drawing lawmen, and snarling outlaws.
The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries by
Edgar Award-winning editor Otto Penzler collects sixty of his all-time favorite holiday crime stories--many of which are difficult or nearly impossible to find anywhere else
So Many Doors by
It begins on Death Row, with a condemned man refusing the services of the lawyer assigned to defend him. It begins with a beautiful woman dead, murdered - Vassilia Caroline Baird, known to all simply as V. That's where this extraordinary novel begins. But the story it tells begins years earlier, on a struggling farm in the shadow of the Great Depression and among the brawling "cat skinners" of Southern California, driving graders and bulldozers to tame the American West. And the story that unfolds, in the masterful hands of acclaimed author Oakley Hall, is a lyrical outpouring of hunger and grief, of jealousy and corruption, of raw sexual yearning and the tragedy of the destroyed lives it leaves in its wake. Unpublished for more than half a century, So Many Doors is Hall's masterpiece, an excoriating vision of human nature at its most brutal, and one of the most powerful books you will ever read.
Teen-Aged Dope Slaves and Reform School Girls
Republications, with some reconstructed art, from comic books originally dated 1947-1954.
L. A. Noir by
A single-volume edition of three of the novels featuring Detective Sergeant Lloyd Hopkins of Los Angeles. The first involves the apparently random killings of 20 women, the second a multiple murder committed with a pre-Civil-War revolver, and the third a conspiracy of police corruption.
American Tabloid by 
Double Down by
Veteran thieves Nolan and Jon discover that their flight home with their ill-gotten spoils is being skyjacked while a mob-connected family in Iowa believes the thieves and stop the plane from being rerouted for a six-figure fee.
The Dain Curse by
Miss Gabriel Dain Leggett is young and wealthy, with a penchant for morphine and religious cults. She also has an unfortunate effect on the people around her. They die -- violently. Is she the victim of a family curse? The Continental Op, the best private detective around, has his doubts.
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by
With this brilliant novel, the bestselling author of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and Wonder Boys gives us an exhilarating triumph of language and invention, a stunning novel in which the tragicomic adventures of a couple of boy geniuses reveal much about what happened to America in the middle of the twentieth century. Like Phillip Roth's American Pastoral or Don DeLillo's Underworld, Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is a superb novel with epic sweep, spanning continents and eras, a masterwork by one of America's finest writers. It is New York City in 1939. Joe Kavalier, a young artist who has also been trained in the art of Houdini-esque escape, has just pulled off his greatest feat to date: smuggling himself out of Nazi-occupied Prague. He is looking to make big money, fast, so that he can bring his family to freedom. His cousin, Brooklyn's own Sammy Clay, is looking for a collaborator to create the heroes, stories, and art for the latest novelty to hit the American dreamscape: the comic book. Out of their fantasies, fears, and dreams, Joe and Sammy weave the legend of that unforgettable champion the Escapist. And inspired by the beautiful and elusive Rosa Saks, a woman who will be linked to both men by powerful ties of desire, love, and shame, they create the otherworldly mistress of the night, Luna Moth. As the shadow of Hitler falls across Europe and the world, the Golden Age of comic books has begun. The brilliant writing that has led critics to compare Michael Chabon to John Cheever and Vladimir Nabokov is everywhere apparent in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. Chabon writes "like a magical spider, effortlessly spinning out elaborate webs of words that ensnare the reader," wrote Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times about Wonder Boys-and here he has created, in Joe Kavalier, a hero for the century.
Fifty-To-One by
It's 1958, and a sleazy New York pulp-fiction publisher finds himself in trouble after publishing a supposedly non-fiction account of a heist at a Mafia-run nightclub which was actually written by an 18 year-old showgirl with ambitions of writing for the New Yorker. With both the cops and the crooks after them, our heroes are about to learn that reading and writing pulp novels is a lot more fun than living them.
Lobster Johnson Volume 3: Satan Smells a Rat by
After years of captivating fans from the pages of Hellboy and B.P.R.D., the pulp-style adventures of Lobster Johnson take the limelight in this collection of the Lobster's first solo series. Written and featuring a cover by Hellboy creator Mike Mignola, Lobster Johnson is a wild ride full of fearsome monsters, mad scientists, and threats from the world beyond.
The Ten-Cent Plague by
In the years between World War II and the emergence of television as a mass medium, American popular culture as we know it was first created--in the pulpy, boldly illustrated pages of comic books. Comics spoke to young people and provided the guardians of mainstream culture with a big target. No sooner had this new culture emerged than it was beaten down by church groups, community bluestockings, and a McCarthyish Congress. This book opens up the lost world of comic books, its creativity, irreverence, and suspicion of authority, showing how--years before rock 'n' roll--comics brought on a clash between children and their parents, between prewar and postwar standards.
Thieves Fall Out by
Follows the exploits of a down-on-his-luck American as he tries to smuggle an ancient relic out of Cairo during a time of revolution.
Derby Dugan's Depression Funnies by
The 1930s world of strip cartoons through the eyes of Al Beady, a lightning-fast pulp fiction writer. He writes text for "Derby Dugan," a cartoon on an orphan boy and his smart-aleck talking dog, serving as comic relief for hard times. By the author of Funny Papers.
The Long Goodbye by
Marlowe is constantly on the move with a case involving a war-scarred drunk and his nymphomaniac wife. A psychotic gangster is on his trail; he is in trouble with the cops; and an unequaled number of corpses turn up.
The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps by
The biggest, the boldest, the most comprehensive collection of Pulp writing ever assembled. Weighing in at over a thousand pages, containing over forty-seven stories and two novels, this book is big baby, bigger and more powerful than a freight train - a bullet couldn't pass through it. Here are the best stories and every major writer who ever appeared in celebrated Pulps like Black Mask, Dime Detective, Detective Fiction Weekly, and more. These are the classic tales that created the genre and gave birth to hard-hitting detectives who smoke criminals like packs of cigarettes; sultry dames whose looks are as lethal as a dagger to the chest; and gin-soaked hideouts where conversations are just preludes to murder. This is crime fiction at its gritty best
Double Feature by
In New York City, a movie critic has just murdered his girlfriend - well, one of his girlfriends (not to be confused with his wife). Will the unlikely crime-solving partnership he forms with the investigating police detective keep him from the film noir ending he deserves? On the opposite coast, movie star Dawn Devayne - the hottest It Girl in Hollywood - gets a visit from a Navy sailor who says he knew her when she was just ordinary Estelle Anlic of San Diego. Now she's a big star who's put her past behind her. But secrets have a way of not staying buried...
Men of Tomorrow by
Animated by the stories of some of the last century's most charismatic and conniving artists, writers, and businessmen, Men of Tomorrow brilliantly demonstrates how the creators of the superheroes gained their cultural power and established a crucial place in the modern imagination. "This history of the birth of superhero comics highlights three pivotal figures. The story begins early in the last century, on the Lower East Side, where Harry Donenfeld rises from the streets to become the king of the 'smooshes'-soft-core magazines with titles like French Humor and Hot Tales. Later, two high school friends in Cleveland, Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel, become avid fans of 'scientifiction, ' the new kind of literature promoted by their favorite pulp magazines. The disparate worlds of the wise guy and the geeks collide in 1938, and the result is Action Comics #1, the debut of Superman. For Donenfeld, the comics were a way to sidestep the censors. For Shuster and Siegel, they were both a calling and an eventual source of misery: the pair waged a lifelong campaign for credit and appropriate compensation.
Somebody Owes Me Money by
When cab driver Chet Conway goes to collect his winnings on a horse race, he finds his bookie lying dead on the living room floor.
Phantom - The Inexorables 1942/1943 Daily Strips by
" During World War II, The Phantom and his tribal allies join the fight as Axis forces seek a foothold in their land of Bengali. They want to cut off Allied supply lines, but they weren't expecting resistance fighters led and organized by The Phantom." --MyComicShop.com
Pulp by
Max Winters, a pulp writer in 1930s New York, finds himself drawn into a story not unlike the tales he churns out at five cents a word--tales of a Wild West outlaw dispensing justice with a six-gun. But will Max be able to do the same when pursued by bank robbers, Nazi spies, and enemies from his past?
The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories by
An anthology culled from "Black Mask" magazine is a tribute to its mastery of the pulp noir genre that includes such stories as "Murder Is Bad Luck" and "Diamonds Mean Death" as well as two full-length novels including Paul Cain's "Fast One."
The Goon: Fancy Pants Edition Volume 1 by
This volume collects issues one and two of The Goon originally published by Albatross Exploding Funy books, as well as issues one, three, five and nine of the Dark Horse Comics series The Goon
Joyland by
Set in a small-town North Carolina amusement park in 1973, Joyland tells the story of the summer in which college student Devin Jones comes to work as a carny and confronts the legacy of a vicious murder, the fate of a dying child, and the ways both will change his life forever.
Turn on the Heat by
Erle Stanley Gardner was not just the creator of Perry Mason -- at the time of his death, he was the best-selling American author of all time, with hundreds of millions of books in print. Among those books were the 29 cases of the brash, irresistible detective team of Bertha Cool and Donald Lam. Last year, Hard Case Crime brought out the first new Cool and Lam novel in decades, THE KNIFE SLIPPED, lost for 77 years after Gardner's publisher refused it. Now, we're bringing you the book Gardner wrote to replace it, often considered the best in the series: TURN ON THE HEAT. Hired by a mysterious 'Mr. Smith' to find a woman who vanished 21 years earlier, Donald Lam finds himself facing a sadistic cop, a desperate showgirl, a duplicitous client, and one very dogged (and beautiful) newspaper reporter -- while Bertha Cool's attempts to cut herself in on this lucrative opportunity land them both hip-deep in murder ...
Gone Fishin' by
A novel exploring the early years of Easy Rawlins and Mouse Alexander, protagonists in a current black PI series. The setting is Texas, the time the 1930s, and the two embark on a car ride which will engulf them in the bayou world of voodoo, sex and murder.
Grave Descend by
Diver James McGregor is used to exploring sunken ships. But there's something strange about the wreck of the Grave Descend. No one aboard tells quite the same story about what happened. Then there's the mysterious cargo they were carrying ... In one of the most beautiful places on Earth, a sinister plot is about to unfold. And if McGregor's not careful, he may find himself in over his head.
