Schemers by Bill Pronzini

Schemers by Bill Pronzini

Nameless wasn t supposed to come into the office on Mondays; he wasn t supposed to answer the phone. On this Monday, he did both. The call was from Barney Rivera once a friend, now despised at Great Western Insurance. Against his better judgment, Nameless agreed to meet with him. The investigation was relatively simple: a multimillionaire rare books collector had reported the theft of eight volumes, worth a half million dollars. From a locked library. To which he has the only key. The books were all crime fiction and suspense a locked-room mystery about mysteries. This ordinary Monday brought a second oddball case: The Henderson brothers were being stalked. Someone had dug up the ashes of their late father and poured acid over them, then destroyed the headstone the same way, and left a sign warning that this was just the beginning. Searching for peace of mind and the distraction of work, Jake Runyon is more than happy to bring an end to the brothers terror.

Bill Pronzini is simply one of the masters. He seems to have taken a crack at just about every genre: mysteries, noirish thrillers, historicals, locked-room mysteries, adventure novels, spy capers, men's action, westerns, and, of course, his masterful, long-running Nameless private detective series, now entering its fourth decade, with no signs of creative flagging. He's also ghosted several Brett Halliday short stories as Michael Shayne for Mike Shayne's Mystery Magazine, and has managed to collaborate with such fellow writers as John Lutz, Barry Wahlberg, Collin Wilcox and Marcia Muller. Still, if he never ventured into fiction writing, his non-fiction work, as both writer and editor, would still earn him a place in the P.I. genre's Hall of Fame. Besides his two tributes to some of the very worst in crime fiction (what he calls alternative classics), Gun in Cheek and Son of Gun in Cheek, and one on western fiction (entitled Six Gun in Cheek, naturally), he's the co-author (with Marcia Muller) of 1001 Midnights. The Mystery Writers of America have nominated him for Edgar Awards several times and his work has been translated into numerous languages and he's published in almost thirty countries. He was the very first president of the Private Eye Writers of America, and he's received three Shamus Awards from them, as well as its Lifetime Achievement Award in 1987. His passion for the old crime pulps is largely responsible for keeping them in the public's eye. He's amassed a huge collection of books and magazines and has always been an omnivorous reader; all of which made him a natural when it came to editing various anthologies. He admits it was a pleasure tracking down good stories to fit a particular anthology theme. But after editing 80 or so of them over a period of twenty-some years, he decided it was more than enough.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781410415691
ISBN 10	1410415694
Title	Schemers
Author	Bill Pronzini
Series	Nameless Detective Novels
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Thorndike Press
Year published	2009-06-01
Number of pages	355
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.