The Colorado Kid

Hard Case Crime began publishing original novels and reprints in September 2004. After releasing titles by literary kings including Lawrence Block, Max Allan Collins, Day Keene, Donald Westlake and Erle Stanley Gardner, the publisher's first year was remarkable. After just one year of publishing, Hard Case Crime struck gold by landing the publication rights to an original novel by horror megaseller Stephen King. The Colorado Kid was published in October 2005.

Like most of King's novels and short-stories, The Colorado Kid is set in a coastal Maine town, this one called Moose-Look. The author's narrative is fairly simple, three characters simply sit in a diner and talk about a mystery that has haunted the idyllic community for 25-years. The “Colorado Kid” is the nickname for a dead body that was found on the coast by two teens. The mysterious circumstances around his death is that the man seemingly appeared from parts unknown. No identity, no agenda, no murder. He simply died while eating.

While the narrative is rudimentary, King's signature storytelling makes it a compelling, pleasurable reading experience. In his conversational style, King makes you love these three characters with their witty charm and small-town mannerisms. Like any good crime-noir, there has to be an average character placed in extreme or unusual circumstances. That's the path the author takes only this character is dead. Learning how he arrived in this condition is a bit like the old locked-room puzzles. In fact, Stephen King's infatuation with Hard Case Crime comes from his love of crime-fiction, old mysteries and hardboiled novels. King name drops Rex Stout, Agatha Christie and even Murder She Wrote and dedicates the book to Dan J. Marlowe, an author King claims to be the “hardest of the hardboiled”.

The Colorado Kid is a quick, easy read but doesn't offer a traditional ending. Not to ruin it for you, but nothing is solved. It's the essence of the mystery, minus the mask being pulled from the killer's face. The novel would go on to loosely inspire the SyFy channel's television show Haven. Eight years later, Stephen King and Hard Case Crime collaborated again with Joyland, a superior novel that actually has an ending (although arguably not a very good one). At the time of this review, the publisher just announced a third King publication, an original novel called Later that is scheduled for March 2021.

Buy a copy of this book HERE

Paperback Warrior Podcast - Episode 61

Would you believe that there are series characters from Lawrence Block, Donald Westlake, John D. MacDonald and others that you know nothing about? We drop some serious knowledge bombs on Episode 61 of the Paperback Warrior Podcast with reviews of The Best of Manhunt 2 and A Great Day for Dying plus a special bonus unmasking of T.C. Lewellen. Listen on your favorite podcast app, stream below or download HERE:

Listen to "Episode 61: Hidden Series Characters" on Spreaker.

A Ticket to Hell

Independent publishing company 280 Steps opened their doors in 2014. The upstart publisher acquired the rights to many out-of-print pulp classics and crime-noir as well as original novels by newer authors. Unfortunately, like many independents, the publisher closed their doors in 2017 and their back catalogue was extinguished from the internet. The company’s short-lived existence led me to several out-of-print Harry Whittington novels including Any Woman He Wanted, You'll Die Next, A Night for Screaming and a 1959 novel titled A Ticket to Hell. It was originally published by Fawcett Gold Medal and was reprinted in 1987 by Black Lizard. With a strong recommendation from my Paperback Warrior colleague, I decided to check the book out.

The novel begins with one of the best opening scenes I've read. The main character, Ric, is speeding down a dusty, rural stretch of New Mexico highway in a Porsche. He just picked up a hitchhiker, but after the young man pulls a gun on him, Ric casually slows the car to 35-mph and boots the kid onto the burning pavement. After a full day of driving, Ric stops at a dingy roadside motel to wait for a mysterious phone call.

The reader soon learns that Ric is running from someone and has a mysterious appointment  scheduled with a man he's never met. The problem is that the time and date are unknown to Ric, so he's held hostage by simply waiting for the bedside phone to ring. In doing so, he's visited by the motel owner's wife who's itching to get laid. Ric declines twice, but later becomes mesmerized by a beautiful young woman across the motel's parking lot. When the woman's male companion attempts to kill her, Ric intervenes. By doing so, he complicates his own agenda at the motel.

A Ticket to Hell is a smart and multi-layered paperback that finds Harry Whittington excelling within his familiar storytelling – person on the run, rural small town, sex and murder. Whittington mostly sticks to the formula, even borrowing some elements of his western writing and injecting it into this full-throttled crime-noir. I was really invested in Ric's murky past and the mysteries that he harbored. I found myself quickly flipping the pages in a mad dash to learn Ric's full story. The end result was expected, but the pleasure lies in the journey. A Ticket to Hell was yet another top-notch thriller penned by the king of the paperbacks.

Buy a copy of this book HERE

Encounter with Evil

Aside from the seven-book series of Abbie Harris mysteries, Amber Dean authored ten stand-alone crime-noir and mystery novels between 1944-1973. My first experience with the author was 1959's Bullet Proof, a novel that was well-written but poorly executed. After acquiring a copy of her Pocket Books paperback Encounter with Evil from 1961, I found the chilling synopsis just too inviting to pass up.

The book's opening pages finds David, his wife, and their 15-year old daughter Lauren traveling by car through a rural stretch of Ontario, Canada. At 2:00AM, with their daughter safely tucked away in the backseat, the couple walk into a diner for some early morning coffee. Oddly, ten men file in sporadically over the course of twenty minutes followed by the awakened teenage Lauren. After locating her parents, Lauren announces that she’s returning to the car to get some more sleep. David and his wife pay for their meal, get back in their car and drive 45-minutes down the road before glancing into the backseat to discover that Lauren is gone.

Like a Twilight Zone episode, the couple head back to the diner and find that it's mostly closed with a couple of men still sitting inside. The customers claim that they never saw the family and maintain that the diner didn't have a female waitress when they were there. After disputing their side of the story, the couple head to the local police station where they are surprised to learn that the diner would have been closed for business at 11PM and the waitress they claim served them left town with her husband the day before. The Canadian cops show some anti-American bias by accusing David of lying about the whole thing.

I'm not ruining anything for you that you won't read on the back cover. Encounter with Evil is a riveting suspense story that thrusts the parents into extraordinary circumstances. Lauren's fate is eventually revealed to the reader, but we are along for the ride as her frustrated mom and dad attempt to buck the system of small-town injustice in their attempts to find her. The narrative switches between Lauren’s experience, the parental nightmare, and a few surprising characters with unclear roles that aren’t fully explained until well into the novel.

While not perfect, Amber Dean is a terrific writer. Like Bullet Proof, I found that some elements weren't perfectly executed but generally well enough to satisfy readers. I wish her writing style had a more gritty flavor, perhaps with more violence and death. Instead, this is a pretty tame novel and not a far-stretch from modern young adult fiction. Nevertheless, I read it in nearly one sitting and thoroughly enjoyed it. I hope to find and read more of Dean's vintage paperbacks in the future.

Buy a copy of this book HERE

The Billikin Courier

Ted C. Lewellen (1940-2006) was a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Richmond and the author of several scholarly works about the effects of globalization on third-world economies. He also published two genre novels for dum-dums like me. His first book was a Fawcett Gold Medal western paperback called The Ruthless Gun from 1964 that people really seem to love. However, I’m starting with his 1968 espionage paperback, The Billikin Courier.

The novel’s first-person narration is presented by a San Francisco whiskey bum named Robert Chessick. Ex-Army, divorced, homeless, drunk. He’s always one panhandled dollar away from his next drink like a character from a David Goodis story. Chessick isn’t the kind of guy anybody really cares about. That being the case, why is someone following him?

Chessick’s shadow is a specific guy wearing a specific hat. One night, he decides to confront the follower and is knocked unconscious. Upon awakening, Chessick’s mysterious pursuer is lying dead on the ground, and Chessick is covered in his blood. Problems, problems, problems.

Meanwhile, there’s a news story humming in the background that any astute reader knows will prove to be important later. A scientist working on a top-secret laser project commits suicide and his records and formulas are missing. The FBI and police are turning San Francisco upside-down to recover the secret materials. As you can imagine, the Russians would love to get their commie hands on the technology as well.

Eventually, Chessick is visited by an FBI man who explains how he fits into all this. Unfortunately, the cover blurbs on both the hardcover and paperback give away the game. The big plot reveal owes more than a little to 1959’s The Manchurian Candidate by Richard Condon, a similarity that probably helped The Billikin Courier get published in the first place. In any case, having one’s brain be used as an external hard drive for state secrets presents some danger for our hero.

Despite some derivative plot points, corny scenes and slow sections, The Billikin Courier is a well-written and mostly interesting espionage novel about a less-than-remarkable everyman thrust into extraordinary espionage intrigue. In that regard, William Goldman’s Marathon Man from 1974 is an apt comparison - although Marathon Man is a far superior novel. Overall, the book was a fine way to pass a few hours, but in the vast world of spy fiction, it really only merits a footnote.

Buy a copy of this book HERE

Wilderness

Sparked by the violent 1972 film Deliverance (based on the 1970 novel by James Dickey), the 1970s were filled with literary and film thrillers involving hunters or hikers encountering criminal activity in the remote wilderness. Author Robert B. Parker established his cash-cow character of Spenser in 1973 and decided to venture out with his first stand-alone novel in 1979, a Dell paperback aptly titled Wilderness that remains in-print today. The book is a deep-forest survival tale that pits the average citizen against hardened criminals in desolate Maine.

While jogging home from the gym, successful author Aaron Newman witnesses a woman being shot in the head. After talking with the police, he identifies the shooter as a notorious bad guy named Karl Randolph. Aaron agrees to testify against Karl in court with the police’s assurances that Aaron’s identity won't be revealed until the testimony begins. However, after returning home from the police station, Aaron finds his wife Janet nude and hogtied with the initials K.R. carved into her abdomen. Freeing her, Aaron receives a call saying that his family won't be murdered if he tells the cops that he fingered the wrong guy as the shooter.

Placed in a conundrum, Aaron takes the safe road and tells the police it was all a mistake. The cops, knowing that Aaron has been threatened, urge him to testify. Their warnings that Randolph never lets any witness live haunts Aaron and Janet. The two seek out their good friend Hood, a badass Korean War vet, to hunt down Randolph and kill him instead of prolonging the ongoing fear. After flunking a few attempts, the three decide the hit is best executed at Randolph's secluded mountain cabin in the Maine forest. But it's here where things get complicated and the three find themselves facing a group of armed men in the rugged wilderness.

Even though the “wilderness” aspect doesn't really come to fruition until halfway through the novel, the suspense leading up to the outdoor thrills is riveting. Oddly comical, the scenes where three civilians attempt to organize the murder of a vicious mobster over beer and steak were just so much fun to read. There's some action early on, the proverbial cat-and-mouse tactics and some interesting revelations about Aaron and his wife that add more depth to this action-thriller.

While the title Wilderness bluntly describes the book's eventual setting, I can't help but think that Parker was speaking of the savage human condition in all of us. When faced with the threat of death or family harm, Aaron and Janet delve into a dark, almost neanderthal state where survival of the fittest is the only thought. Whether it's an underlying subtext on humanity or just simply a twist on the western frontier tale, Wilderness excels as a pleasurable reading experience. I continue to find great things about Robert B. Parker's writing style, and Wilderness is just another fine example of his remarkable storytelling ability. 

Buy a copy of this book HERE

Paperback Warrior Podcast - Episode 60

On Episode 60 of the Paperback Warrior Podcast, we discuss the legacy of the Hard Case Crime paperback imprint with loads of reviews of the good, the bad, and the missteps from the popular publisher. Also, Tom preps for a Dallas book-hunting trip with advice from Eric, and a crazy story from 1987 you won’t believe. Listen on your favorite podcast app, stream below or download directly HERE:

Listen to "Episode 60: Hard Case Crime" on Spreaker.