Tightrope

Author: James Grant (aka Bruce Crowther)

Publisher: Muller

Date: 1979

Pages: 168

Cover illustration: Alun Hood 
Not currently available in Paperback or eBook format

 First off, I have to thank Bob Deis at MensPulpMags.com and publisher/editor of Men's Adventure Library and Mens Adventure Quartlery for pointing out to me that mysterious author James Grant from my previous blog entry had a profile on his Amazon.com author page informing everyone (expect me of course!) that it was the pen name of British writer Bruce Crowther. That knowlege set me off on the hunt for as much information as I could find about James Grant/Bruce Crowther. I am very pleased to be able to present below an update and fuller list of Crowther's work and history. Thanks Rob!

After being so impressed with The Ransom Commando, I have spent the last few weeks tracking down as many titles by Crowther as I can. The result is that I was driven to abandon my current read (The Chinese Bandit by Stephen Becker - I'm not too sure I'll ever get back to finishing that one?) in order to start reading Tightrope - a 1979 novel published under the James Grant name by Frederick Muller Limited in the UK in hardback format only it would seem. I don't believe there has ever been a mass market paperback edition, but there may have been a large-print paperback by Lynford Mystery Library put out at some point? 

Bruce Crowther (b.1933) was born and raised in Hull, England. He became an avid reader at a very young age and soon ran out of books to consume from the local library. He found himself turning to crime fiction and American literature; developing a passion for the books of Chandler, Cain and Woolrich. This interest accompanied his love of film noir that had begun in his youth. He began writing crime fiction as a way to escape the boredom he encountered in his working life in industry and accounting, and never looked back. All those years of consuming classic American noir fiction probably meant that it was inevitable he would take up crime fiction writing as an adult.

Marksman and Other Stories

Author: William Campbell Gault
Publisher:  Crippen & Landru
Date: Mar. 2003
Pages: 206

Not currently available in eBook format or paperback

Marksman contains a loving end-piece by Shelly Gault, daughter of William Campbell Gault. In it, she reminisces about how her father would proudly claim that from the moment he began writing up until the early 1980's, he had sold everything he had ever written.

It's no surprise. Gault could write exceptionally well, and was quick to spot opportunities. When he saw dwindling sales of mystery fiction in the 1960's he turned his attention to writing juvenile fiction exclusively and began a long and successful period of his career. As she adds he "loved it when he heard that his titles were among the most stolen from libraries"!

Crippen & Landru have been publishing a series of books in their The Lost Classics Series since 2002. These consist of uncollected stories by great mystery and detective writers of the past. Most are published in hardback, but if you look carefully you can find some in eBook format. This particular issue is currently not available in electronic format yet.

This collection of short literature from William Campbell Gault consists of twelve tales published between 1940 and 1957 in magazines such as Clues, S&S Dectective Story Magazine, Mercury Mystery Magazine and premier titles such as Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Blackmask and Manhunt (none of which made it into 2019's The Best of Manhunt if you are wondering). The first six are stories unrelated to each other, and cover the period from 1940 to the middle fifties. A few contain detectives, but most of them involve men-about-town who are involved in strange circumstance. The second half of Marksman contains the complete collection of short tales featuring one of Gault's most famous creations, Private Investigator, Joe Puma that appeared in 1956 and 1957.

Rough Trade

Author: Robert Silverberg
Publisher: PS Publishing
Date: Dec. 2017
Pages: 415

Not currently available in eBook format or paperback

In 2012, Hard Case Crime published Robert Silverberg's novelette Blood on the Mink, packaged together with a couple of short stories (Dangerous Doll and One Night of Violence). These stories had been written by Silverberg in the late fifties and early sixties for pulp magazines of the time. The success of the HCC paperback prompted a new interest in the authors crime back catalogue, and so in 2017, British independant publishing house PS Publishing release a limited run of his stories from the same period as Rough Trade.

This new collection contains 23 short stories (but does also include One Night of Violence from the HCC paperback) covering the years from 1957 to 1961. Most of the stories are around ten to twelve pages in length, with a few 10,000 worders increasing that to 30 page tales. All of them appeared in one of two pulp magazines that Silverberg was providing a constant stream of material too, Guilty and Trapped. As he says in one of the introductions that preface each story, for some reason Guilty was the more poular magazine despite it covering exactly the same type of crime/hardboiled/delinquent teenager type of content as its companion magazine. Both magazines were edited by the same man, W.W. Scott, to whom Harlan Ellison introduced Silverberg. Thus was born a period of his life where he supplemented his living by sending rapidly written shorts to Scott for consideration.

Silverberg left college and got married in 1956. He immediately began to write full-time - he had already started writing science fiction whilst in college, and wanted to continue to write for a living. Whilst his partner went to work, there was pressure on him to contribute to their living costs. At this time there were very few publishers issuing regular science fiction magazines, nowhere enough for Silverberg to earn good money. Needing to branch out, he began to write for many of the pulps inclinding submissions of Westerns, Sports and Mens Adventure tales. But crime was still king in the late fifties, and so he eventually began to churn out the sort of stories that he hoped would appear in Manhunt.