Have A Very Noir Halloween

More than 20 years ago, Pete Hamill interrupted his rise through the higher ranks of journalism and tried his hand at crime fiction with three books about a reporter named Sam Briscoe. The Guns of Heaven is about terrorism, of the IRA variety, including vivid and credible threats to New York – a city Hamill knows as well as a child knows its parents.

David Dodge, the other half of Hard Case Crime’s shapely noir package this month, is best known as the author of To Catch A Thief – although you might be forgiven for thinking “Cary Grant” or “Grace Kelly” or even “Alfred Hitchcock” when that title flashes. Dodge died in 1974; the typescript of his last book sat in an archive until recently, when a librarian discovered it and sent it on its way to Hard Case – who by now have performed enough resurrections to qualify as a religion.