In the toughest corners of Magna City, Detective Dal Prentice knows that every "routine" call can blow up into a war. Party Murder: The Complete Black Mask Cases of Dal Prentice, Volume 2, concludes Roger Torrey's hard-hitting series about one of the pulpiest cops to stalk the pages of Black Mask magazine. These stories deliver everything readers expect from the legendary detective pulp: clipped dialogue, sudden violence, crooked operators, and a city that never stays clean for long. Prentice and his fellow officers push back against rackets, political pressure, and the kind of backroom deals that get men killed, all in Torrey's lean, driving prose. Long unavailable, the Dal Prentice stories are once again in print, preserving a crucial chapter in the history of hardboiled crime fiction and the magazine that helped define it.
In the toughest corners of Magna City, Detective Dal Prentice knows that every "routine" call can blow up into a war. Party Murder: The Complete Black Mask Cases of Dal Prentice, Volume 2, concludes Roger Torrey's hard-hitting series about one of the pulpiest cops to stalk the pages of Black Mask magazine. These stories deliver everything readers expect from the legendary detective pulp: clipped dialogue, sudden violence, crooked operators, and a city that never stays clean for long. Prentice and his fellow officers push back against rackets, political pressure, and the kind of backroom deals that get men killed, all in Torrey's lean, driving prose. Long unavailable, the Dal Prentice stories are once again in print, preserving a crucial chapter in the history of hardboiled crime fiction and the magazine that helped define it.
Über den Autor
Roger Torrey (1901-1946), sometimes identified as Roger Denzel Torrey, was an American pulp writer best known for hardboiled crime and detective fiction. He published extensively in the detective magazines of the 1930s and 1940s, including Black Mask, where his tough, fast-moving stories placed him among the writers who helped define the private-eye and hardboiled tradition. The Thrilling Detective site describes him as one of the "Black Mask Boys" and notes that, despite writing only one novel, he produced a substantial body of pulp crime fiction that has remained under-reprinted and under-recognised.Torrey's fiction is rooted in the working materials of Depression-era crime writing: private detectives, grifters, crooked police, cheap rooms, violence, rackets, sex, liquor, money, and men trying to survive in dirty systems. 42 Days for Murder, first published in 1938, is his only novel and features Shean Connell, a nightclub pianist turned private detective operating in a Reno where divorce law, gambling, vice, and organised crime all cross paths. For readers of classic hardboiled fiction, Black Mask writers, pulp private eyes, noir, and neglected American crime novels, Torrey is a strong rediscovery.
