“Moses Wine is a force to reckon with and to read with pleasure.” —Dick Lochte, Los Angeles Times Book Review “A fun detective novel you just don’t get enough of anymore...there is a certain style reminiscent of those 1950s Mickey Spillane novels when men were men and private investigators were ‘private dicks’...definitely recommended reading.” —West Coast Review of Books With a new introduction by Roger L. Simon A guided tour of the People’s Republic, Aunt Sonya had said: U.S.-China Friendship Study Tour Number Five, arranged by the China Friendship Society, an organization in which she was involved. Why not get away from it all? Moses Wine figured. At least it would get him away from personal injury cases, murder investigations, and the insistent feeling that boredom and alienation were about to become his constant companions in his middle age. But China has a way of springing surprises, and soon California's hippest ex-radical detective is chasing down the priceless Han Dynasty Peking Duck, falling for a gorgeous dragon lady in a Mao suit—and fighting for his life across a vast, mysterious land he barely knows...

Police Inspector Buck Safiotte is corrupt and cruel, ruthless and remorseless, ambitious and outrageous, ruling the streets of New York City like a monarch of the gutter. One early reader of Bodies Are Dust fretted that the book was too vicious for the library, but this almost-forgotten, impossible-to-find novel has become a classic, and noir fans consider their copies precious. Now, after more than 60 years out of print, Bodies Are Dust is available again, the first title from Staccato Crime, a new imprint of Stark House Press, which will resurrect noir classics, both novels and true crime, originally published 1899-1939.

Times have certainly changed for Moses Wine since the days of his first case in “The Big Fix”—he’s gone from cheap detective to respected private investigator in just twenty-five years. Add in a beautiful girlfriend and a lucrative business with a roster of corporate clients, and he should be feeling on top of the world. But he’s not. In fact, he feels as though he’s lost touch with his roots, now “living the kind or bourgeois live I once reviled,”’ as he notes. Moses Wine of the sixties has been pushed aside by the lure of vacations at Lake Tahoe, expensive meals, and unlimited access to courtside seats at Los Angeles Lakers games. Now the shadow of Wine’s radical days has come back to haunt him. His college-age son, Simon, a radical environmentalist, has been accused of killing a logger in Northern California. Allying himself with his hostile ex-wife, Wine heads off to find the real killer whether it’s Simon or not! Laced with Roger L. Simon’s mordant wit, California politics and not-so-casual sex, The Lost Coast is vintage Wine at its best. Ever restless, ROGER L. SIMON has spent his life moving between books and movies, gaining distinction in both. In books, he is best known for the seven Moses Wine detective novels, which have won prizes in the U.S. and Great Britain and been published in over a dozen languages. In film, most prominent among his six produced screenplays—including his adaptation of The Big Fix—is Enemies, A Love Story, for which Simon was nominated for an Academy Award.

Recently discovered and never before published, these two short novels were written in the early 1970s, at the beginning of Kathy Acker's writing career. Rip-off Red reads as a kind of Raymond Chandler for bad girls, as Acker's typical literary playfulness transforms the genre conventions of detective fiction into a book that is simultaneously a mystery and a personal, raunchy, and politically astute account of life in New York City. The Burning Bombing of America is a dystopian vision of the destruction of America, combining crypto-Socialist class critique with the visceral surreality of the Book of Revelation.

The Big Fix by Ed Lacy Author of the 1958 Edgar Award-winning novel Room to Swing! On the night Irish Tommy Cork's murder was planned, nothing very much out of the ordinary happened. Tommy was in the ring, taking a pasting-as usual. Back to the ropes, almost sitting on the second strand, Tommy crouched, gloved hands up in front of his face like a leather fence. He was fighting a strong youngster who was now whaling away with both hands in a moment of wild enthusiasm. Most of his blows were blocked, or ducked by Tommy's weaving head, but those few that didn't miss landed with loud thud sounds on the kidneys, head, or in the stomach, visibly shaking up the pale "old man."