With four decades of overwhelming commercial success, Richard Prather's Shell Scott series is unquestionably one of the best private-...

Richard Prather built a career on his 'Shell Scott' character with around 35 novels spanning from 1950 to 1987. Countless short st...

In 1956, Harry Whittington wrote a manuscript called “The Crooked Window” that went unsold for a decade until March 1966 when it was adapt...

Between 1959 and 1961, Charles E. Fritch (1927-2012) wrote a quasi-series of five private eye paperbacks in which the main character’s nam...

Jack Lynn was a pen name for a writer named Max Van DerVeer who authored 22 books starring a diminutive private eye named Tokey Wedge betwee...

In the Stark House Press reprint of One is a Lonely Number , my review stated, “This is a book that could never have been published in toda...

Robert B. Parker authored a whopping 40 installments of his Spenser series of private-eye novels. The series was adapted for television i...

Parallel to crime-fiction staples like  Mike Shayne and Shell Scott ,  Johnny Liddell was a no-nonsense private-eye operating under the ...

William Fuller was a merchant seaman, an infantryman and a drifter before becoming a full-time novelist in the 1950s. His claim to fame is t...

Before experimental, avant-garde novelist David Markson (1927-2010) became a highly-regarded Greenwich Village literary figure, he wrote t...

Many authors thrived off of the stand-alone mid-20th century paperback novels, but it was the creation of a recurring or series character th...

Milton Lesser (better known as Stephen Marlowe, 1928-2008) authored over 20 stand-alone novels including a number of respected science-fic...

While writing over 150 teleplays, Bill S. Ballinger (1912-1980) still had the opportunity to author nearly 30 novels. His crime-noir and de...

Carroll John Daly (1889-1958) invented the hardboiled detective genre in Black Mask Magazine with his May 1923 story “Three Gun Terry.” He ...

Crime-fiction author John D. MacDonald began the Travis McGee series with three novels, including  The Deep Blue Good-by , originally publ...

Before his untimely death at the age of 38 in 1960, William Ard was on a roll writing popular mystery fiction under his own name as well a...

Robert Terrall (1914-2009) served in WWII and later wrote for Time and the Saturday Evening Post . After becoming a full-time writer, Terra...

The Burns Bannion series about a Karate-loving American private eye in Japan lasted for eight installments between 1958 and 1967. The autho...

It's no secret that Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer series was an empire. It's like the KISS of crime-fiction and by the late 1...

Using the pseudonym Carter Brown , Alan Geoffrey Yates (1923-1985) authored 215 novels and 75 novellas and counted U.S. President John F. Ke...