Titan Comics imprint Hard Case Crime drops the last issue of Peepland today. Peepland #5 is where NY cops are closing in on Roxy and friends on New Year’s Eve.
Comic Book Preview: Peepland #5
The Assignment Vol. #1
SoHo Sins by Richard Vine
Messed-up marriages, adultery, temptation, jealously and power all come to play in this pulp novel SoHo Sins. With a long career in the modern art scene, author Richard Vine pens his first novel using New York City art world as the backdrop.
In SoHo Sins the art scene golden couple is Philip and Amanda Oliver. Philip a techy millionaire is in a broken marriage with his current wife Amanda Wingate, the art collector heiress. The art world is rocked when Amanda is found murdered in her home. Art dealer and friend of the couple Jackson Wyeth and his P.I. buddy Hogan are on the job to investigate Amanda’s grisly death.
The Original QUARRY Novel by Max Allan Collins
The Wrong Quarry
Over the weekend, I was excited to get my hands the new Quarry book “The Wrong Quarry” by author Max Allan Collins (Road to Perdition). His long-running series is about a former US Marine sniper Quarry (no need to know his real name) turned professional hitman. Quarry offers clients that are marked-for-death a unique service, dependent on the fee paid, he gets rid of the hit team after the clients and investigates who hired the hit.
The Twenty-Year Death by Ariel S. Winter
If you like sexy women, French accents, booze, cigarettes, and murders to solve, you will want to read Ariel S. Winters debut crime novel – “The Twenty-Year Death.” The crime tale begins with a dead body on the streets of a small French town. What unravels are three complete stories that are interconnected – making one epic narrative. The first story – “Malvineau Prison” takes place in France in 1931; Book 2 – “The Falling Star” takes place in 1941 and involves a private detective keeping an eye on a studio’s leading lady in Hollywood; and the final Book – “Police at the Funeral” happens in 1951 and tells the tale of one man’s last chance at redemption.
This is a great debut novel by the author and I thoroughly enjoyed reading through the different writing styles in each book. If you are not in the mood for summer blockbuster flicks at the theater or sitting at home playing with your iPad, may I suggest some page turning thrills with “The Twenty-Year Death.”
Interview with The Twenty-Year Death Author Ariel S. Winter
Next week on August 7th 2012, Titan Books will be releasing Ariel S. Winter’s debut crime noir novel “The Twenty-Year Death.” Our Retrenders staff had a chance to interview Mr. Winter and talk a little about the book, his influences, and more:
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RTNDR: How did you come up with the idea to start The Twenty-Year Death? What inspired you to write not just one story but three complete novels written in the style of three different iconic mystery writers?
Ariel: I originally set out to write a different book. It was going to have a frame narrative, and within that frame would have been full novels of various genres. So it was in that context that I wrote Malniveau Prison in the style of Georges Simenon. When I decided to jettison the original idea but keep Malniveau Prison and expand it into what became The Twenty-Year Death, it only made sense to continue with other pastiche/homages. The character that I was going to follow from book to book was an American writer living in France in the 1930s, and so many of the writers who did that in real life, like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, ended up writing for Hollywood at some point. And Hollywood led naturally to Raymond Chandler in the 1940s. So with ten years between the first two books I figured there should be another ten years between book two and book three, and the list of choices of master crime writers from the 1950s was basically Jim Thompson and Patricia Highsmith. At the time, I’d read more Thompson and his style fit better for the subject of the book.