Showing results for "Ace" in Noir

First published in 1931, this mob-based mystery story follows a young girl who takes a job as a dancer and falls in with a dangerous crowd. While at a party, she gets pinned for the murder of another girl and now must clear her name. This pulpy action/drama was one of Stuart Palmer's first efforts.

When crime-fighting attorney Albert Patterson is gunned down in a Phenix City, Alabama, alley in the spring of 1954, the entire town seems to pause for just a moment—and when it starts up again, there is something different about it. A small group of men meet and decide they have had enough, but what that means and where it will take them is something they could not have foreseen.

A modern, Southern reinvention of The Maltese Falcon, Crossroad Blues won noir fans with its nod to the masters and thrilled readers with a wild ride along Highway 61. It’s here that we first meet Nick Travers, an ex-New Orleans Saint turned Tulane University blues historian. Nick searches for the lost recordings of 1930s bluesman Robert Johnson—and a missing colleague—and finds trouble at every turn.

1955: Tampa, Florida, is a city pulsing with Sicilian and Cuban gangsters, cigar factories, sweet rum, and violence. The death of retired kingpin Charlie Wall—the White Shadow—has shocked the city, sending cops, reporters, and associates scrambling to find those responsible. As the trail winds through neighborhoods rich and poor, enmeshing the innocent and corrupt alike all the way down to the streets and casinos of Havana, an extraordinary story of revenge, honor, and greed emerges.

San Francisco, September 1921: Silent-screen comedy star Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle is throwing a wild party in his suite at the St. Francis Hotel-girls, jazz, bootleg hooch...and a dead actress named Virginia Rappe. The D.A. says it was Arbuckle who killed her—crushed her under his weight—and brings him up on manslaughter charges. William Randolph Hearst's newspapers stir up the public and demand a guilty verdict.

In July 1933, a gangster staged the kidnapping-for-ransom of an Oklahoma oilman. He would live to regret it. What started clean soon turns messy as two of “Machine Gun” Kelly’s partners cut themselves into the action, a determined former Texas Ranger makes tracking Kelly his mission, and his wife, ever alert to her own self-interest, starts playing both sides. Set in the first days of the modern FBI, Infamous is a blend of historical novel and crime story featuring an unexpected hero, some of the most colorful supporting characters in recent crime fiction, and femme fatale Kathryn Kelly.