This is the first of the two box sets, and I loved them both. As a fan of mystery classics, I was eager to read authors new to me, and this collection was the perfect opportunity to discover new writers.

This is the second collection of crime novels that I have received from Netgalley and have loved them both. There is a terrific lineup of writers and a collection of five classic novels. These are fun to dip in and out of for when you want a quick thriller read. I highly recommend this edition and would recommend looking for the others as well.
#CrimeNovelsFiveClassicThrillers19611964LOA370 #NetGalley

It’s only in recent years that I’ve developed an interest in reading ‘classic’ pulp fiction, noir thrillers, and detective mysteries. Because I’m new to the genre, I really didn’t have a clue as to which authors I should be checking out – other than Fredric Brown, an author I consider among my favorites due to his sci-fi books. Seeing a collection like, featuring an author I knew and liked (but with a book I hadn’t yet read), seemed like a great option. It should introduce me to some great authors and stories.

I liked three of the books collected here. Two of them, Dead Calm and The Score left me a little bored, to be honest.

I appreciated the information about the books and about the authors that was provided at the end of the collection. It’s definitely helpful as I look to expand my reading in the genre.

I’ve reviewed each of the books individually, but include the reviews again here:

THE MURDERERS by Fredric Brown

It is the late 1950’s/early 1960’s and Willy Griff is a down-on-his luck actor in Hollywood. He may not have a lot of luck getting acting jobs, but he has great luck when it comes to women. He is currently making time with a hot little number by the name of Doris. Their attraction for one another is genuine and very, very passionate. Unfortunately, Doris’s husband, John Seaton, isn’t too keen on the relationship.

John Seaton is a wealthy businessman. Older than Doris, he’s suspected his young wife of having an affair and Seaton has had a P.I. following her. Seaton arranges a meeting with Willy and lets him know that he’s aware of the affair. Because Seaton is wealthy and connected, he offers to help Willy get acting work if he promises never to see Doris again. If Willy refuses, Seaton will make sure the young actor never works in the town again.

Griff agrees to the wealthy man’s terms, but the moment the old man leaves, Willy calls Doris to let her know what’s happened and instead of living up to the terms, Griff and Doris decide they want it all – their relationship AND Seaton’s money – so they plot to kill the old man. Their plan is perfect … they’ll never get caught … right?

I love the work of Fredric Brown. I ‘discovered’ him in the 1970’s when I learned that a Star Trek episode was based on one of his short stories and then I started reading his science fiction novels (such as the popular Martian, Go Home). It wasn’t until many years later that I learned he had a brilliant career writing mysteries as well as science fiction. I’ve purchased many but read only a few. This particular book is new to me.

The plot is pretty basic and, frankly, quite reminiscent of 1950’s dark, gritty mysteries. What keeps us reading is our curiosity about whether or not Willy and Doris will succeed, and the strength of the characters.

Neither Willie nor Doris are so incredibly charming that we really want to see them succeed, and Seaton isn’t supremely villainous, so it’s not as though we want to see him get his comeuppance. But these characters are drawn such that they feel like real people (and most people aren’t supremely villainous [yes, I know an exception or two] or deserving of their hearts’ desires at someone else’s expense).

Brown’s writing is incredibly fluid and it’s really easy to get caught up in the flow of the story and that’s a big reason I enjoy reading his works. This little-known work of his was quite delightful.

4 stars

###

THE NAME OF THE GAME IS DEATH by Dan J. Marlowe

‘Roy’ and ‘Bunny’ (these are the names they know each other by but not likely to be their actual names) are bank robbers. In their latest heist things don’t go as smoothly as they’d hoped in Phoenix and Roy, who killed three men, gets clipped, taking a bullet in the arm. The duo split up so that Roy can lay low and recover (and to throw off the search for two men).

There’s a contingency plan for just such an event – Bunny heads east with the money and the two will meet up later to divide their loot. Until they meet, Bunny sends regular checks to Roy so that he can stay where he is until he’s ready to travel. Roy just needs to stay out of sight and avoid the dragnet looking for the bank robbers, then travel 2000 miles and meet up with his partner in crime. Nothing to it.

But the checks stop coming and Roy learns that something has happened to Bunny and their money. Roy has to travel incognito to the rural town that Bunny was supposed to be in and find out what happened and where his money is. To do this, thought, Roy has to take on the role of a traveling laborer so that he can take stock of the people whom Bunny interacted with.

When I think of the dark, hard-boiled, shoot-’em-up thriller novel (not the hard-boiled detective books), this is exactly the sort of book I imagine. We’re in the life of someone you probably would never want to hang around with. A bank robber ad a killer with very little moral compass. And yet … we want to know what’s happened.

We easily get caught up in the mystery of what happened to Bunny and the money. Whether Roy ever reunites with either really isn’t as important as just knowing.

It’s a short book (not even 150 pages) which was fairly standard for pulp, paperback fiction of this sort (I tend to think of this as 1950’s hard-boiled fiction, but this book was published in the very early 1960’s). Even so, we manage to get into the psyche of Roy Martin and know what he’s capable of, so his descending on the small town is rife with tension and danger.

Author Dan J. Marlowe’s prose is tight and gritty, suiting the story perfectly. I wondered why I wasn’t more familiar with Marlowe’s work but a quick Google search filled me in a bit as to why he didn’t make it bigger (even though this is considered a classic in the genre).

You can’t be squeamish and you can’t be prudish to read a book like this. There’s plenty of violence and sex as you would expect (hope?) in such a story. But it’s this enigma of a character, Roy Martin (aka Chet Arnold, aka …), who holds the story together, despite (or maybe because of) his darker side.

4 stars

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DEAD CALM by Charles Williams

Rub-a-dub-dub, three men in a tub…

John and Rae Ingram are on their honeymoon, cruising casually on their yacht through the Indian Ocean when they encounter a young man, Hughie Warriner, along in a small boat. Hughie claims to have come from another boat where the other three passengers succumbed to food poisoning, and with them incapacitated, the ship sank with them aboard, with Hughie only barely managing to escape in the dinghy.

John, a former Naval officer, senses too many inconsistencies in Hughie’s story and heads off in the direction that the young man had come from. He finds the listing boat and when Hughie is asleep below deck, John takes a small boat over to investigate. What he finds is an unhappy Russ Bellows and Mrs. Warriner, begging for help. Hughie, it seems, caused the death of Bellows’ wife and has gone off the deep end (pun acknowledged).

While John was investigating, Hughie takes the Ingram yacht, with Rae still aboard, and leaves John with the abandoned boat. John will pursue the kidnapper and his new wife in any way he can.

I was not familiar with author Charles Williams prior to this, and I see now that this is a follow-up to another book with John and Rae Ingram – though this definitely stands alone.

I thought it was really interesting to set the entire novel aboard a small boat on an ocean. It really contributed to a strong sense of claustrophobia which greatly added to the psychological unease.

There wasn’t really any ‘terror’ here, but when you are stuck in cramped quarters with someone you find suspicious, perhaps even a murderer, the constant emotional strain really wears a person down. Williams really captures this sense well, but manages to change it up when Hughie takes off with the boat and Rae. We then get the chase and a new sense of danger for Rae as she’s now alone on the boat, nowhere to escape, with the man who’s left her husband for dead.

I quite enjoyed the book. I liked the challenge of containing the action to such small spaces, really forcing this to be a story of people and their actions. But though I liked it, I can’t honestly say that it’s made me want to seek out more of Williams’ writing.

3-1/2 stars

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THE EXPENDABLE MAN by Dorothy B. Hughes

Hugh Denismore is a young doctor driving his mother’s Cadillac from Los Angeles to Phoenix to attend a family wedding. He is well educated, polite, and civilized – he is privileged. Although he hesitates to pick up the young, female hitchhiker along his drive, he has a soft spot for the trouble she seems to be in and he hopes he can help her out in some way. She is equally hesitant to get in a car with Hugh, but perhaps the Cadillac changes her mind.

The girl doesn’t provide a very clear, or consistent, story as to where she’s headed, which convinces Hugh of her troubles. As they drive, they chat and she becomes more and more comfortable around Hugh – such that after dropping her off at the bus station and providing her with bus fare to where she wants to go, she turns up at his motel room. This would seem to be dangerous in a normal situation and is doubly so given that Hugh is a Black man.

A few days later, the girl is found dead and a tip leads the local police to Hugh who first denies knowing her (the name she provided was different than the name the police were using). Hugh finds himself facing a murder charge and the police don’t seem to want to look any further than the Black man who gave the girl a ride, so he knows he has to find the killer on his own.

This was a really difficult book for me to read. Not because it was bad or poorly written – just the opposite … it was too good.

I can feel really anxious in some situations, one is when an innocent person is railroaded into looking guilty and the other is racial discrimination. Combine them as well as author Dorothy B. Hughes does, and I was constantly fidgety and anxious and reading through this at breakneck speed to (hopefully) get to where both situations would resolve.

It was easy to read through this quickly – the writing is smooth and direct. There aren’t a lot of extraneous characters and I really, really liked the support that Hugh gets from his family and his lawyer. It definitely helps the reader trust Hugh and root for him. I can’t imagine how any reader, even those who might otherwise have race issues, couldn’t root for the man.

It’s hard to believe that a book with these characters, in these situations, could be published and achieve success in the early 1960’s and I suspect it rattled a few cages. Sadly, I don’t think the general consensus has changed much in Arizona.

4 stars

###

THE SCORE by Richard Stark

Is it possible to rob an entire city? If that city is Copper Canyon, and the heist is planned by Parker, on of the best in the business, it just might be possible. The idea is brought to Parker who initially dismisses it, but after careful consideration, he begins to make a plan. The heist will need a team of people and of course the more people in on it, the less each man takes.

A mining town in the middle of nowhere, with only one way in and out of the town, Parker gets to work on a plan and hiring a team. Given the specific needs, he needs specific men – some of them no longer available so going to second and third options. Each man will need to accomplish his job with clockwork precision but by all measures, it should work.

Parker believes he has everything planned for a perfect heist … but he never planned for the blonde.

This was a really fast-moving, straight-forward story. An idea, a plan, the plan in action, the hiccup. There’s no sub-plot and until we get into the heist itself, when we get to see some of the different men in action, it’s quite singularly focused.

There is some curiosity and interest in how this is going to work, but at least the first half of the book (maybe the first 2/3rds) is plan, plan, plan. The book picks up a bit when the heist actually gets underway. We know that something has to go wrong (or at least we hope that’s the case or this would be even more boring than it already is) so our curiosity is piqued a bit.

For the most part, this book just never captured my interest. Or, rather, it let my interest down. The idea of robbing an entire town sounded interesting, but the very direct manner of storytelling didn’t really serve the excitement for this reader.

2-1/2 stars

###

Looking for a good book? Anyone interested in classic mysteries or noir fiction need not scour the used books store – five classics are gathered here in Crime Novels: Five Classic Thrillers 1961-1964, for the interested reader.

I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review.

4 stars for 4 great books, plus Dead Calm. Maybe if I understood sailing jargon, which is approximately 2/3 of the book, or if the pop psychology of the antagonist wasn't so laughable, it could have been a great short story. Too bad it's a full-length novel. Definitely worth a read for the other four novels included though.

I highly recommend this excellent collection of dark crime. I was familiar with the names and for some reason had not yet read the Stark, which surprised me, because I am a huge Donald E Westlake fan. This story is typically over-the-top, with the bad guys not trusting each other even though they are going to attempt an enormous heist. I was really surprised that Dead Calm felt so modern -- maybe because it was set at sea, it felt timeless to me. The others show immediate differences in technology but still hold up well story-wise. Thanks to NetGalley for letting me read these.

Five exceptional thrillers from the early 1960s. I was only familiar with Richard Stark and was pleasantly surprised to experience the works of Brown, Marlowe and Hughes. This sharp collection is a must for thriller fans.

Classic crime novels of the early 60s including In The Murderers (1961) by Fredric Brown,Dan J. Marlowe’s The Name of the Game Is Death (1962), Charles William' thriller Dead Calm (1963), The Expendable Man (1963), Dorothy B. Hughes’s final masterpiece of suspense The Expendable Man (1963) and Richard Stark's (aka Donald Westlake) The Score (1964).

All are good, but The Score is probably my favorite.

Thanks to NetGalley and the Library of America for the ARC.

Crime Novels: Five Classic Thrillers 1961-1964 is a collection omnibus which includes 5 full-length novels. Released 12th Sept 2023 as part of the Library of America series, it's 950 pages and is available in hardcover and ebook formats. It's worth noting that the ebook format has a handy interactive table of contents as well as interactive links and references throughout.

The five novels included are true classics and the authors will be familiar to most readers of crime fiction. This collection includes Fredric Brown, Dan J. Marlowe, Charles Williams, Dorothy B. Hughes, and Richard Stark. All are well known capable writers writing at the top of their formidable forms.

The editor, Geoffrey O'Brien, has also included biographical and background notes and an essay on text selection. For lovers and students of classic form American mystery, these extras and introduction will undoubtedly prove valuable and interesting.

Four and a half stars. The actual novels included in this and its sister volumes will likely be familiar to most die-hard lovers of American crime fiction; much of the value of the series comes from having the library as a reference source and to be able to revisit the classics over and over again. It would be a superlative choice for public library acquisition, for authors' home reference, and for lovers of classic American cinema/fiction.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.

In my younger days I used to read a lot of pulp fiction which was quick and easy to read. This book expands on the genre, no less than 30yr later, to crime fiction. A much more sophisticated fiction which is more suspenseful and thrilling, and which required the reader to invest a lot more energy and effort in the reading. This set of five crime novels are well written, with good story lines. Although it is not my favorite fiction, (I prefer a gentler type or fiction from the golden age). these Classic Thrillers will be greatly enjoyed by many reader.

Thanks you NetGalley and the publishers for the DR..

If you're looking for dark, gritty crime stories from a time long before cell phones and the internet, then make sure you grab this collection. I love how unique each author's style is, but each story is engaging and interesting in its own right. There's a bit of mystery and plenty of tension within the stories, and you'll find it hard to stop reading each novel once you start. If you're a fan of older fiction and mystery thrillers, then you'll want to add this to your TBR pile.

I originally wanted to read this book because of the crime novel Dead Calm by Charles Williams it is a book my grandfather and I read together in one I will always cherish and probably the reason I love Crime mysteries and thrillers to this day. It reads like a modern day thriller while a couple sales from Panama over the Atlantic Ocean they run across a man in a lifeboats who claims everyone on board his yacht has died due to food poisoning Bonobo Ray insist they find his job he is totally against it and when they find it the couple find out why he didn’t want to locate his lost ship. OMG this is a great story but this is just one out of five great stories in this crime Collection. There’s one where a wife cheats on her husband and her lover decides after getting caught it may just be easier to kill her husband instead that one is called The Murderers by Frederick Brown and it also has lots of twists they also have The Expendable Man by Dorothy B Hues and my new favorite crime mystery The Score by Richard Stark A group of gangsters get together and try to rob a whole town in for those of you who think this may not be for you I thought that as well because I love historical crime novels I gave it a try and OMG it is my new favorite Storkel crime novel. Each story is between two and 400 pages long and OMG if every story doesn’t give you something different it’s not like today’s mystery thriller of the world they have the same old tropes it’s something new and totally worth reading I absolutely loved it and loved every story in it. I want to thank Blackstone publishing, American library, and Net Galley for my free-ARC copy please forgive any mistakes as I am blind and dictate my review.

If the title of this book was as descriptive as it should be would read.....Five Classic Thrillers By Some of The Best Authors to Ever Grace Us With A Story. And it would be true. These stories are forerunners for today's crime novels. These authors had the abilities to take their readers into the story, you will refuse to acknowledge anyone trying to talk to you. If you have never read these stories, I envy you the experience. Enjoy.

This title is not inexpensive but readers get five novels within this volume that comes in at over 900 pages so still pretty reasonable overall. The books that are included here reflect a transition in crime fiction away from the neater and less violent books of writers like Agatha Christie. Here, I would say, there is more gritty realism.

The general reader may well enjoy these stories. I think that anyone who wants to study mysteries in context and in an academic way will want to add this title to their collection as well.

Note: Books included are by Frederic Brown, Dan J. Marlowe, Charles Williams Dorothy B. Hughes and Richard Stark. Several of them are authors with whom I was not familiar.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Library of America for this title. All opinions are my own.

Emerging from the social push toward conformism of the 1950s, the United States found itself in a strange circumstance as the 1960s got under way. Big shifts in the politics and culture were shaking the nation to the core, and these found avenues for larger expression in the era's entertainments. Particularly in fiction, we saw an emergence of conscientiousness and rebelliousness in various genre fiction modes. For the sf readers, the New Wave got going looking to the real issues of the day and casting them in satiric, dystopian, or generally angry near and far futures. Horror would be going strong, as well, particularly in the film side, since the decade would end with one of the most potent nightmares committed to celluloid: Night of the Living Dead (1968) might have been cast blindly, but it nevertheless cast a Black man in the lead and therefore positioned itself to make several points about current events. Mysteries might generally still be trying to keep rationality intact, providing solutions to various murders and other crimes, but a strong undercurrent was withholding even that delight by presenting mysteries that had no actual answers. And the hardboiled school was continuing to undo the nice, neat picture of America as a calm or happening place to be, land of the free, home of the brave. The best crime fiction shows the tarnish on that gilded American Dream. Yeah, the 1960s were a time of profound turmoil for America.

Across a two volume Crime Novels set, the Library of America showcases nine novels that use the crime fiction mode of storytelling to provide a picture of how this model of storytelling was reacting and showcasing those strange and often painful times. The first of these volumes is the subject of this piece, and it's a doozy of a book, offering five unsettling and dramatic visions of where we'd been, where we were careening toward, and what was going on in the first half of that decade.

Fredric Brown's The Murderers spins the tale of an actor with ambitions, for a career as well as the wife of a prominent man in LA. When he has the means and opportunity to rub that man out, well, he jumps at it … despite having zero experience with criminal activities other than small time drug use, loitering, and adultery. Still, he gives it his best, being undone at every turn until an unlikely opportunity arises to trade murders with an associate. Hollywood and its creators have always been eager to recycle old ideas, it would seem, so the fact that this idea didn't work out for the protagonists of Strangers on a Train doesn't enter into our protagonist's thoughts. But as the matriarch of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night opines: Things have a way of turning out so badly. But in this case not without twists, troubles, and a strong dose of gallows humor.

Dan J. Marlowe's The Name of the Game is Death finds an operator looking to capture his boodle from a missing partner in a bank robbery gone sour. The trail brings him to sunny, sweltering Florida where a trio of small town characters with big ambitions and low impulse control might hold the key to the missing moneys. The criminal chasing his swag is not a forgive and forget type of guy, and the situation he finds himself involved in is not the nicest. The nameless protagonist (later rewritten as Earl Drake to feed into a sequel novel and then a men's adventure series) will stop at nothing to get the answers he so desperately seeks. Even if he has to outthink small town minds intent on double crosses and murder …

Charles Williams Dead Calm finds a becalmed married couple making the acquaintance of another becalmed traveler, welcoming him aboard their yacht, and then discovering he's not quite what he seems. When the husband finds out this stranger's sinking yacht actually holds imprisoned fellow travelers, it is too late to stop him from sailing for the mainland in as taut and tense a nautical chase scene as you're likely to find.

Dorothy B. Hughes' final novel, The Expendable Man, finds a young Black doctor picking up a white hitchhiker while driving through the deserts between LA and Phoenix. It's a decision that will come to haunt him because just when he thinks he can move on, she resurfaces. First, it's for a ride, then it's for leverage, finally it's for an illegal surgical procedure … That stranger will make this doctor's life a living hell, particularly when she gets him mixed up in murder and sets a racist system on his trail.

Finally, Donald E. Westlake gets his first inductance into the annals of the Library of America via his down, dirty, and mostly humorless penname Richard Stark, and that nom-de-plume's flagship character, the amoral operator called Parker. While the first novel in that series, 1962's The Hunter, gives readers a sense of the changes happening to societal expectations (not only is a ruthless crook the protagonist, he gets away in the end); however, it has seen plenty of printings over time. Instead, the Library of America volume shines a light on a masterful later volume of the series. The Score might have been the fifth novel Westlake wrote under the Stark name, but it's a doozy of a book that stands on its own quite nicely. The heist is an ambitious one: robbing an entire small town over the course of one night. It's going to take a full team of skilled thieves to pull it off and it can all crash and burn if even one of them gets a little more eager for the boodle than for his fellow crooks' lives. This is also the book where Westlake gets to peek into his pseudonym's work via the actor and "loveable" cad, Alan Grofield.

These five works deliver solid storytelling in the gritty vein. That each of them is also a timestamp of a nation on the move into a dark period makes those stories resonate all the stronger these days. But the novels themselves are quality page turners, each exploring the genre through very different means. No one will mistake Williams' meticulously written thriller for Marlowe's speedy descent into hell. And no one is going to confuse Brown's hardboiled page turner with Hughes' rich psychological character study. And The Score is just a triumph from a series of numerous triumphs and from a career with more successes than one author should conceivably possess.

Having these five very different books in one place really draws out the kinds of themes and motifs running rampant at the time. Books stand by themselves (whether they are entries in a series or not), but they are also part of a larger conversation with the culture they are written in as well as with the books that came before them. These five books kick off a fascinating chapter of this conversation from a tumultuous era, and they speak to the books Library of America features in the previous two volume set that tackled the American Noir of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s as well as the sets dedicated to Women Crime Writers of the 40s & 50s and those dedicated to Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, David Goodis, Ross MacDonald, and Elmore Leonard's fiction. Reading all the contents of these various sets offers a brilliant overview of how crime fiction has developed and reflected upon American society across the twentieth century. They are all great books, well worth the investment.
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Thank you to the Library of America and NetGalley for providing an eARC edition of the book in exchange for an honest review.

"In the 1960s the masters of crime fiction expanded the genre's literary and psychological possibilities with audacious new themes, forms, and subject matter - here are five of their finest works.

This is the first of two volumes gathering the best American crime fiction of the 1960s, nine novels of astonishing variety and inventiveness that pulse with the energies of that turbulent, transformative decade.

In The Murderers (1961) by Fredric Brown, an out-of-work actor, hanging out with Beat drifters on the fringes of Hollywood, concocts a murder scheme that devolves into nightmare. This late work by a master in many genres is one of his darkest and most ingenious.

Dan J. Marlowe's The Name of the Game Is Death (1962) channels the inner life of a violent criminal who freely acknowledges the truth of a prison psychiatrist's diagnosis: "Your values are not civilized values." Written with unnerving emotional authenticity, the story hurtles toward an annihilating climax.

Charles Williams drew on his experience in the merchant marine for his thriller Dead Calm (1963). A newlywed couple alone on a small yacht find themselves at the mercy of the mysterious survivor they have rescued from a sinking ship, in a suspenseful story that chillingly evokes the perils of the open ocean.

In the beautifully told and sharply observant The Expendable Man (1963), Dorothy B. Hughes's final masterpiece of suspense, a young man in the American Southwest runs afoul of racial assumptions after he picks up a hitchhiker who soon turns up dead.

In twenty-four brilliantly constructed novels, Richard Stark (a pen name of Donald Westlake) charted the career of Parker, a hard-nosed professional thief, with rigorous clarity. The Score (1964), a stand-out in the series, finds Parker and his criminal associates hatching a plot to rob simultaneously all the jewelry stores, payroll offices, and banks in a remote Western mining town, only to come up against the human limits of even the most intricate planning.

Volume features include an introduction by editor Geoffrey O'Brien (Hardboiled America), newly researched biographies of the writers and helpful notes, and an essay on textual selection."

Whenever I need a quality read I always turn to Library of America. In particular their selection of crime novels can not be beat.

A great cross-section of early-1960s crime thrillers, speaking as someone who likes the genre but isn't so knowledgeable about it (especially that far before I was born). I have heard of "Richard Stark"'s Parker novels so I knew to look forward to that one but the others were all pretty good too. I particularly liked the breadth of plot setups, to wit:

- The Murderers - a down-on-his-luck actor concocting a murder plot (as an amateur)
- The Name of the Game is Death - a bank robber hunting down his missing partner (and the take from their latest hit)
- Dead Calm - hardly even a crime novel in the conventional sense (more a thriller), a couple on a boat encountering a survivor from a crippled yacht whose story seems suspicious
- The Expendable Man - a "wrongfully accused man trying to find the real killer" plot, set against the racial backdrop of 1960s Arizona
- The Score - a heist novel full of professional criminals

Each has a different and unique angle on what might be a "crime novel", and I really enjoyed the variety. I'm very interested to see if the other volume of this set (covering 1964-1969) has any duplicate angles, and how that compares overall.

The book has definitely inspired me to go hunt down some more Parker novels, and to a lesser extent Dorothy B. Hughes, Charles Williams, and Dan J. Marlowe. <i>The Murderers</i> was the closest thing to a dud in the whole collection - not because it was bad, per se, and reading it first in the collection I quite liked it. It was just that I thought each of the other stories was so much better in one way or another that it looks weak in retrospect. It's unfortunate for Fredric Brown that crime writers tend to be so prolific - if I start adding more of them to my TBR list that adds up FAST so I have to be really picky, and I think he gets bumped off the list based on just these selections.

My thanks to both NetGalley and the publisher Library of America for an advance copy of this collection of crime stories from the early part of the 1960's that showcase many of the problems that were prevalent in the American society, and the rage that was just boiling under the surface.

The Mystery novel had started with the best of intentions. Clever crimes being solved by clever people, the bad guys arrested the good guys and gals going on with their lives untouched by the violence that they had been a part of, looking forward to another murder, hopefully in a nice house with fine drinks. Then private eyes showed up, dealing with seedy things like divorce and infidelity, mobsters, drugs and dirty blackmail, turning over rocks Americans didn't want to deal with, but still enjoyed for all the punching, drinking and womanizing that went on. There were others but this seemed to be the popular trend, aired on that new fangled television, and gradually causing mystery novels to start to fade from consciousness. However in this vaccum came the crime novels. Nasty books about about crime, shooting people for kicks, running over dogs and other nasty deals. Was this an answer to the idea of Raymond Chandler's knight errant private detective, or the fact that Eisenhower's America was not the future that a war had been fought for, and while America was good for those with the right breeding, there were plenty that were left out. And angry. Crime Novels: Five Classic Thrillers 1961-1964 (LOA #370) edited and introduced by Geoffrey O'Brien is a look at stories from the first four years of the decade, from seasoned writers and some new blood, looking into the abyss that was America and writing what they saw looking back.

The book starts with a very good introduction to the state of mysteries and where the genre was going, and failing. O'Brien also adds very good notes to the stories, lists why changes were made to the stories, mostly typographical, and biographies on the authors, which in many cases ended quite sadly. The first story is by Fredric Brown, The Murders. This is a story of cool cats and want-to-be actors trying to make their way in life, with the least amount of work, until an offer comes up, that is too good to pass up. Dan J. Marlowe’s The Name of the Game Is Death is probably one of the strongest stories a nasty story about a career criminal who was born bad, looking for the loot from his last job, leaving a very large swath of destruction. Dead Calm by Charles Williams will probably be familiar to movie goers, is a claustrophobic tale of anger and obsession on the open sea. The book is even more tense than the move. The Expendable Man is the lone story by a woman, Dorothy B. Hughes writing her final novel, and probably why its story of alienation and paranoia rings so true and powerfully. And finally but definitely not least is Richard Stark's The Score featuring Stark's series character Parker taking down his largest job, robbing an entire town, a job only a true professional like Parker could take on.

All five stories are really very good, very tense, and different. What seems familiar to us in the writing is that much of what these authors have been written have been imitated, on page and on film. Most of these characters have given up on society, realizing not that they are better than their fellow man, they just don't care. The rules of society, 9-5 jobs, putting up with people lording things over you, killing dogs, are limits. The rules these characters live for are don't mess with mine. Don't touch my dog, don't touch my stuff, and don't mess with me. Mine, to a few characters might include money in banks or that rich people have, but that is there mindset. These stories are very psychological from psychopaths, to damaged people trying to just be left alone. Most end like one expects, but the story along the way is exceptional, and in many cases not easy to put down.

A great collection of stories. As I write this I am about halfway through the second collection, and these stories really do stand the test of time. The emotion, the feeling that are put on the page really reflect what the county was feeling. Studying a countries mystery stories is a very good way to get a grasp on what the people were feeling and thinking at the time. These stories tell quite a bit.

By the time the crime novels collected here first appeared in the early 1960s, the popularity of the type of crime fiction pioneered by Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and others had already peaked. Now, as Geoffrey O'Brien points out in his introduction to the collection, "the best crime writers reinvented the genre." That was probably the only way the genre had much of a chance, according to O'Brien of competing with powerful competition from a burst in popularity of science fiction novels, fantasy novels, spy novels, and political thrillers.

Represented in this volume of Crime Novels are five very different writers, writers who found varying degrees of success during their lifetimes. Whether or not all of them lived to enjoy the success and respect they deserved, all five are recognized today as some of the best crime fiction writers of their day.

The collection opens with Fredric Brown's The Murderers, a story about a group of sociopaths in Los Angeles who will do just about anything to keep themselves financially comfortable. When two frustrated actors decide to swap murders that will benefit both their careers, innocent people will die but nobody really seems to care. Brown's novel is a scary look inside the mind of a true sociopath.

Next comes The Name of the Game Is Death by Dan J. Marlowe, another psychological novel that follows a bank robbery gone bad after one of the three robbers is shot dead, one escapes with the all the cash, and the narrator goes into hiding until it's safe for him to rejoin the other surviving gang member. But after the man with the money suddenly cuts off all contact with the main character, all bets are off. Much of the character development in this one occurs through flashbacks that illustrate just what a pure sociopath our hero is.

Third in the collection is probably the best known of the group, Dead Calm. Some twenty-six years (1989) after Charles Williams published the novel in 1963, Dead Calm was turned into a successful movie starring Nicole Kidman, Sam Neill, and Billy Zane. The novel tells the story of a young couple alone on their yacht who pick up what appears to be the only survivor of a sinking vessel on which the survivor claims everyone on board has died of food poisoning but him. It's easy to imagine the tension that will build over time as the stranger's story begins to unravel.

Then we have The Expendable Man by Dorothy B. Hughes, the only novel in the collection written by a woman. Hughes is largely ignored today, but Geoffrey O'Brien's introduction calls her "one of the most important crime writers of her era." Hughes dared to tackle racism in the heat of the racially turbulent 1960s by making her message a major factor governing the behavior of her main character, a young black doctor who happens to have picked up a young female hitchhiker who is later found dead.

The last novel in the collection is Richard Stark's (Richard Stark is a pen name used by Donald Westlake at times) The Score. This one is actually the fifth book in Stark's twenty-three book "Parker" series. The most unusual thing about the series is that Parker is not a cop or a detective; he is a successful criminal. The Score serves as a reminder that even the best mind can become a little overconfident and overambitious. The caper-gone-wrong here is one in which Parker and his gang decide to simultaneously rob multiple locations in one small town.

This volume of Crime Novels is the first of two volumes soon to be published by Library of America. The second collection will feature similar fiction written in the second half of the decade.

Library of America has assembled a worthy and captivating quintet of noir fiction specimens depicting the yeasty era of the early 1960s. (This is a companion volume to a LoA release gathering similar works from the late-‘60s, reviewed separately.) The selections are deftly arranged and juxtaposed by editor Geoffrey O’Brien, who contributes useful background and biographic notes. He bookends intriguing works by Fredric Brown and Donald Westlake writing as “Richard Stark,” ensuring that the compendium opens and closes with authors familiar to many readers. Brown’s amusing tale of a scrappy Hollywood D-list actor attempting to make manifest the plot of “Strangers on a Train” is a lovely introduction to the decade of the sixties — as well as to this book. Stark’s “The Score” also features a rascally actor who is an occasional sidekick to Parker, celebrated protagonist of a long-running series of crime novels. Sandwiched in the middle are three very fine novels by lesser-known writers. Dan J. Marlowe’s “The Name of the Game is Death” is a hard boiled treasure, and I’ll certainly seek out more of his work. Charles Williams’ “Dead Calm” seems like a work by Patricia Highsmith in a nautical setting, with deep psychological asides. The unexpected find in this collection is Dorothy B. Hughes’ “The Expendable Man,” which is concerned with themes of race and class in the USA in ways that might be 60 years ahead of its time. Taken in sequence, this intelligently curated collection will entertain and inform readers as to how we arrived at our current point in American life. Strongly recommended.

#CrimeNovelsFiveClassicThrillers19611964LOA370 #NetGalley

LOA follows up their previous collections of crime fiction of the 1930s-1950s with one focused on the early years of the 1960s. This volume contains a quintet of excellent novels, all of them short but still brimming with suspense and psychological insight.

Things get off to a wild start with Fredric Brown's THE MURDERERS. It's the classic noir set-up - lovers conspire to bump off an inconvenient spouse - only it unfolds in Beat-era Los Angeles, so the lazy couple of Hollywood hangers-on in question might not have their hearts in the plan. But they back into mayhem anyway. Tremendous atmosphere, Brown's usual sly sense of humor, and a doozy of an ending.

Author Dan J. Marlowe's life is something out of pulp fiction. (It's recounted by editor Geoffrey O'Brien in the thorough biographical section.) But in THE NAME OF THE GAME IS DEATH, Marlowe wrote the quintessential Gold Medal paperback. As a criminal sets out after the loot from a bank job, he flashes back to incidents from his life that made him the way he is. The result is a slow-burn revenge yarn in the wilds of Florida that's also a hardboiled case study. Marlowe later rewrote the book to turn his unnamed protagonist into a series character. LOA serves up the original text in all its gut-punch glory.

Charles Williams's nautical thriller DEAD CALM is the best known title in the collection, adapted into the 1989 film starring Sam Neill and Nicole Kidman. The book is stronger than the movie, drawing on Williams's extensive experience as a sailor.

A young Black doctor driving to a family wedding in the Southwest picks up a hitchhiking girl and comes to regret his act of kindness in THE EXPENDABLE MAN by Dorothy B. Hughes. With a plot touching on race and abortion, it's a hot-button novel with a cool and steady pulse, its protagonist inexorably plunged into a nightmare.

You can never go wrong with any of the novels by Richard Stark (aka Donald E. Westlake) about the icy professional thief Parker. In THE SCORE, Parker assembles a crew to knock over an irresistible target: an entire town.