Black Black Noir

One is a Lonely Number / Black Wings Has My Angel by Bruce Elliot/Elliot Chaze
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Stark House has reprinted two traditionally hard-to-find, much-sought-after paperback originals in one volume--One is a Lonely Number by Bruce Elliot "(1952) and Black Wings Has Angel (1953) by Elliot Chaze. One is a Lonely Number was originally published by Lion (100) and is nearly impossible to find, but yet doesn't command the same high prices as Black Wings, a Gold Medal (296) original, which usually goes for hundreds of dollars.

If you like your hardboiled crime novels gritty and violent and have never read either of these, I highly recommend plunking down $19.95 for this volume. Black Wings Has My Angel has had a cult following for years, even, as it turns out, in the movie business where it's currently being filmed for a 2013 release.

View all my reviews

Shake Him Till He Rattles/It's Cold Out There by Malcolm Braly

Shake Him Till He Rattles/It's Cold Out There by Malcolm Braly
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Stark House continues to republish Gold Medal paperbacks in two-in-one volumes. With Malcolm Braly's Shake Him Till He Rattles and It's Cold Out There they've picked two of the best titles from the mid-1960s.

Shake Him Till He Rattles (1963) is a quintessentially beat novel which owes a lot to a previous Gold Medal PBO, North Beach Girl (1960) by John Trinian (Zekial Marko). It uses as a backdrop the coffee house and jazz club scene of North Beach and includes a lot of the same themes, particularly lesbian relationships. But Shake Him turns out to be a whole lot more than just an etching of the whole milieu, it questions the whole beat existence and suggests that it might be as much as a dead-end treadmill as its counterpoint "square" existence.

It's Cold Out There (1966) follows the first few months of character J.D. Bing's freedom following a long incarceration. He begins to realize that in the free world a lot of people live in prisons of their own making.

If you are a fan of Gold Medal PBOs from the 50s and 60s, this volume is a must. You might also want to check out some of the other volumes available from Stark House Press.

View all my reviews