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.
