RARA-AVIS: the Blue Murder series

From: Dixon H Chandler II ( dchandler@nettally.com)
Date: 07 Mar 2001


In response to Pelecanos:

I second the recommendation of this series. Great stuff. I don't have it handy, George, but wasn't there also a leigh Brackett title in that series? I THINK I have copies of The Tiger Among Us and No Good From A Corpse under the Blue Murder label, and I have here in front of me a copy of Shock Corridor, albiet in a smaller, traditional pb-size format. (The other BM titles were in trade format.) Looks like the Shock Corridor (and another title I have elsewhere, Scarface, by Armitage Trail), was in the smaller format, as "an imprint of Xanadu Books," it says on the back cover.

Also, somehow I have scribbled notes that say the following were either forthcoming, or already out there, but I've never seen them:

Paul Buck, The Honeymoon Killers, L.A. Morse, The Big Enchalida Joel Town Rogers, The Red Right Hand Jim Thompson, Texas By the Tail Gordon Williams, Straw Dogs

FINALLY: I have another in the trade size, Dolores Hitchens, Sleep With Strangers.

-dc

Pelecanos wrote:

> the late 80s Maxim Jakubowski edited a trade paperback series for Simon >
Schuster called Blue Murder, which included those two titles. The gimmick
> was that all of the books in the series had been made into noir or noirish
> films. Maxim wrote an introduction for each book detailing the author's
> career. Among the other titles were William McGivern's THE BIG HEAT,
> Charles Williams's THE DIAMOND BIKINI, Gil Brewer's 13 FRENCH STREET and
THE
> RED SCARF, and Woolrich's REAR WINDOW. Most importantly, the series
> introduced me to Thornburg's CUTTER AND BONE and Goodis's THE BURGLAR.
All
> of the books were worthwhile reads and the cover treatments were nicely
> done; I've managed to collect most of the series and still see them out
> there in various stores. I noticed a couple of weeks ago, for example,
that
> Black Orchid in New York had various titles in their used bins.

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