Tuesday, September 18, 2012

PimPage: An Occasional Feature in Which I Call Attention to Books of Interest

Redheads Die Quickly and Other Stories
I provided a blurb for this collection, and it's well worth picking up.  I'm a fan of Brewer's paperback novels, but I didn't know a thing about his short fiction.  Fortunately David Rachels did.  He's located it and published the best of it here.  You get twenty-five stories, Rachels' excellent introduction, a bibliography of Brewer's short fiction, and a short note on the texts.  You just can't go wrong.

Redheads Die Quickly and Other Stories: Gil Brewer,David Rachels: 9780813044064: Amazon.com: Books: Brewer revolutionized the availability of reading-as-entertainment for the American people by helping to exploit a new market: the paperback original. Many of his novels, including the bestselling 13 French Street, have recently been reissued for a new audience. However, Redheads Die Quickly and Other Stories is the first collection of his short fiction. 

 Because his work was published in a large number of pulp magazines, and because he regularly didn’t publish stories under his own name, Brewer’s fans—and fans of hard-boiled noir fiction in general—have often been frustrated in their efforts to find the work of this mid-century American crime writer. David Rachels has sifted through the Brewer papers at the University of Wyoming, thumbed thousands of publications, and tracked down rare pulp magazines on eBay, to create the first-ever authoritative list of Brewer’s short stories, with the best featured in a single volume.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

My copy is on the way. Sounds great.


Jeff

Mike Dennis said...

I have a copy and I can say it's what Gil Brewer fans have been waiting for.