The beauty of the Hard Case Crime series is that it is shining a light on a lot of great work by a lot of authors who have toiled in the dark -- if they're still with us at all -- for a long time. Case in point: Robert Bloch. I'd seen the name, mostly because his stuff is shelved very near personal favorite Lawrence Block on the library shelves, but had never read him. Thanks to Hard Case, I've read enough to want to see out more.The imprint put out a double book, back-to-back in paperback, just like in the old days of classic pulp. The books -- Shooting Star and Spiderweb -- are two of the five books he wrote before the one for which he'll be remembered: Psycho. I tackled Shooting Star first and liked it a great deal. It's dated -- marijuana is written about as a great societal evil in a way that makes "Reefer Madness" seem well reasoned -- but it has a gripping plot and Bloch's way with words is spellbinding.

His excellence seems to come so easily that it is at times lost in its casual deployment. In the space of five pages, he drops the term “brachycephalic,” describes the lights of Los Angeles as “that gaudy old whore of a city, (who) was putting on her jewels for a big night,” references Orpheus and Eurydice, slips in the phrase “de mortuis nil nisi bonum” and offers this sharp line about a comely actress: “Polly Foster in the flesh was quite something else again. Nor is that ‘in the flesh’ merely a figure of speech. The figure she cut had nothing to do with speech.”

In the story, former agent Mark Clayburn, a man who has turned to private eye work after losing an eye in an accident. Sure, that sounds a little hamfisted, the one-eyed man as private eye, but it isn't obtrusive. He's asked by a producer who just bought a batch of films to clear the name of the recently deceased star, a man caught up in talk of drugs and death.

The second book, Spiderweb, deals with charlatan mystics and mediums, and is also set in Hollywood. Tackling my second Bloch book of the month, I've fallen behind, eager to read the new one, The Murderer's Vine by Shepard Rifkin that just showed up in the mailbox. The story, loosely based on the real-life incidents that inspired the film "Mississippi Burning" feels weightier than most Hard Case fare, and I'm curious to see how Rifkin weaves the real violence surrounding the civil rights struggle together with a crime tale.

Labels: crime fiction