Kayo With Me

So I've been on this cross-country road trip (which is why this blog hasn't been updated since June 1973, or something) and while I have many, many adventures to recount... I thought I'd share a list of books I picked up today at Kayo Books on Post Street in San Francisco, just a block east of Dashiell Hammett's old apartment. I've been dying to visit this shop--which sells all vintage paperbacks, all the time--since Bill Crider mentioned it on his blog. I spent an hour shopping, though I easily could have disappeared inside this place for days on end.

My purchases fell into two categories: lurid true crime, and lurid fiction. The true crime:

Sintown U.S.A., a beat-up (but entirely readable) Lion pb. The real skinny on mid-century sin palaces like... Buffalo! Pittsburgh! Oklahoma City! Er... Fresno! (Edited by Noah Sarlat.)

Hollywood R.I.P, by I.G. Edmonds, a Regency paperback from 1963 detailing all kinds of grisly L.A. death stories. Harlan Ellison was a Regency editor for a brief while; I wonder if this was one of the titles he acquired.

Patty/Tania by Jerry Belcher and Don West and The Strange Case of Patty Hearst by John Pascal and Francine Pascal. What can I say? In a Patty Hearst mood.

Sudden Endings by Vin Packer (a.k.a. Marijane Meaker). An upbeat Gold Medal about 13 infamous suicides. How could I resist?

The "Dutch" Schultz Story by Ted Addy. Yeah, I can't seem to pass up gangster paperbacks, either.

The Girl in Lover's Lane by Charles Boswell and Lewis Thompson and The Girl in the Death Cell by Fred J. Cook. Apparently, Gold Medal had this "classic murder trials" series, all of which focused on girls, judging from the titles. The latter, Death Cell, covers the infamous Ruth Snyder/Henry Judd Gray case that inspired James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice.

As for the fiction:

A Man Called Spade. Hammett, of course. A Dell mapback, too. Beat to shit, but only $10... which is a great price for this edition. Had to own it.

As Tough As They Come, edited by Will Oursler. One of those great hardboiled anthologies, up there with The Hard-Boiled Omnibus. Also a beat to shit copy, but only $3 for a thick little hardboiled bible.

The Big Kiss-Off by Day Keene. There's always room for more Keene.

Suddenly By Shotgun by Norman Daniels. Hollywood starlet noir.

The Deadly Desire and Run for the Money by Robert Colby. Pretty sure Crider mentioned these. At $3 a pop, worth the risk.

42 Days For Murder, by Roger Torrey. Not a vintage paperback, but a Dennis McMillan reprint from 1988. Still, I couldn't resist, because it's about an SF PI who goes to Reno. (Coincidentally, I am a nerd currently in SF, and headed to Reno in the near future.)

Anybody out there ready any of these?

The Feel-Good Noir Collection of the Summer

I'm calling it now.

Today I received an advance copy of Stark House Press's latest Harry Whittington collection, which includes three insanely rare short novels: To Find Cora, Like Mink Like Murder and Body and Passion. Whittington, of course, was the King of the Paperback during the 1950s and the author of the paperback suspense classics Web of Murder, The Devil Wears Wings and A Moment to Prey. All three were reprinted by Black Lizard in the late 1980s; all three are definitely worth hunting down and savoring. (This Harry Whittington, it's worth noting, was not the dude Dick Cheney shot in the face.)

Now I haven't read a single word of these short novels—I only received this ARC today—but the introduction alone is worth the price of the book. In it, mystery expert David Laurence Wilson talks about how he tracked down these rare finds, and it's like a pulp-nerd detective story. Sam Spade had his Maltese Falcon; Wilson has his "39 Unknowns"—namely, the 39 novels Whittington wrote under house names starting in 1960. Each were required to be 60,000 words long, and Whittington later wrote that he cranked out 39 of these suckers, month after month. Yet, he never revealed their titles. Wilson writes that it was "the beginning of a literary legend."

I won't ruin the surprise for you, but you'll be amazed how many of these Wilson pins down. Wilson's my new hero. And the three short Whittington novels, one of which has never been available in English? I consider them a bonus.

The new collection will be available this coming July. I'd pre-order this one from Stark House directly, or through your favorite indie mystery shop.

Paperbacks I Picked Up Today

Mickey Spillane's The Twisted Thing and Fritz Leiber's You're All Alone; both have this freaky mid-1960s black/purple horror vibe that I love.