Charles Boeckman fuses pulp fiction and jazz in these pulsating stories, drawing heavily on the author’s music background. Twenty-four stories culled from the pulps and classic crime digests, featuring sad people trying to escape dreary lives. Shifty con-artists, embittered detectives, hen-pecked losers, and more.
This collection features "I'll Make the Arrest" — originally published in the premiere issue of Manhunt, and adapted to television as a Celebrity Playhouse episode, starred Philip Carey, Jan Sterling and Virginia Vincent. [This story appears in Pulp Adventures #17, illustrated by Ed Coutts, with an editorial devoted to the search for this missing episode.]
Boeckman left home in the early 1940s and traveled the country as a musician, kicking around from New York City to New Orleans. In between gigs, he pounded out hardboiled stories on his second-hand typewriter. His stories appeared in Dime Detective, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, Manhunt, and many others.
When Boeckman combines his love of jazz with hardboiled pulp prose, his fiction reaches a two-fisted crescendo.
Cover by Robert A. Maguire
Stories
- Strictly Poison
- Should a Tear Be Shed?
- Watch Him Die
- The G String Corpse
- Prophetic the Portrait Painter
- The Last Trumpet
- Mr. Banjo
- Mind Over Murder
- Class Reunion
- Blind Date
- The Pinata
- I’ll Make the Arrest
- Ybor City
- In Memoriam
- Dixieland Dirge
- A Hot Lick For Doc
- How to Kill a Corpse
- Run, Cat, Run
- Blackmail Is a Boomerang
- Speak of the Dead
- Afraid to Live
- Die-Die, Baby
- Home for Killers
- Eddie Builds His Mousetrap
