In 1929, they published Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon. In 1939, they unleashed Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep. In 1949, they released Ross Macdonald's The Moving Target.
Published: Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald. Does it matter who else they published?
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Fawcett
Gold MedalThe kings of the PBO! Until Fawcett unleashed its Gold Medal imprint in 1950, almost all paperbacks were reprints of previously-published hardcovers, with a big chunk of the profits going, not to the paperback publishers, or even the authors, but to the hardcover publishers. For writers whose books sold mostly in paperback (like, say, mysteries, it must have been extremely frustrating to see all that money going to a publisher who didn't seem to be doing much more than collecting royalties. So Fawcett started sniffing around for original material, with the radical idea of publishing paperback originals. It was the first serious challenge to the hardcover's domination of the book industry, and an idea whose time had come. Within a few years, Avon, Graphic, Lion and Dell (with their First Edition line), were all trying to make a mark with PBO's. In the next ten years, it wasn't uncommon for those funky yellow-spined Gold Medal books to sell over a million copies of one title. Fawcett was evenbtually sold to CBS and later to Random House. It's still around, but Fawcett and Gold Medal are just imprints now of a giant publishing empire.
Published: Richard Prather, Stephen Marlowe, John D. MacDonald, Dan Marlowe, Peter Rabe, Charles Williams, Vin Packer, Jim Thompson, David Goodis, Wade Miller, Gil Brewer, Lionel White, Bruno Fischer, Harry Whittington, Peter Corris, Janet Dawson, and about a zillion P.I. and crime one-shots and stand-alones.
Related Links: The Gold Medal Home Page
Eddie Stevenson's in-depth salute to the primo PBO publisher, with over 450 Authors, 200 author pages, 1500 Titles and over 1000 Cover Scans!
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Founded by Martin Goodman. A small paperback imprint, that published between 1949 and 1955, that sprang up in the wake of Gold Medal's tremendous success with paperback originals. It was eventually bought out by New Amercan Library. They published reprints, but also commissioned originals by writers such as Jim Thompson, David Goodis, Robert Bloch and Richard Matheson. They also employed some pretty spiffy cover artists, including Earle K. Bergey, Robert Maguire and Rudolph Belarski.
Published: Jim Thompson, David Goodis, Robert Bloch, Russell Gray (Bruno Fischer), Richard Matheson, Ken Millar, Day Keene, Richard Prather, Frank Gruber (westerns).
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Particularly their "mapback" paperbacks, eagerly sought by collectors, and recently so lovingly parodied by Uglytown's Benjamin Drake series. Published between 1943 and 1953, Dell's Scene of the Crime series, as they were officially called, were smallish paperbacks featuring excellent cover art in vibrant colors, a distinctive keyhole logo, and a clever map on the back cover that illustrated the scene of the action detailed on the pages within. Writers featured in the series included Agatha Christie, George Harmon Coxe, John Dickson Carr, Brett Halliday, A.A. Fair, and even John Steinbeck.
Headed by legendary editor, Knox Burger, the Dell First Editions imprint began in 1953, and were probably the only real rival Gold Medal had, as far as PBO's went. Dell continues to be a major reprinter of hardcover mysteries to this day.
Published: Dashiell Hammett, David Goodis, Donald Hamilton, Brett Halliday, Henry Kane, Frank Kane, A.A. Fair, Charles Williams, Robert Kyle, David Dodge, Thomas B. Dewey (the Pete Schoefield series), Robert Dietrich (AKA E. Howard Hunt), David Markson, Robert B. Parker, Jonathan Valin, Janet Dawson
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Another of the great paperback publishers.
Published: Ed McBain's 87th Precint, Wade Miller, Carter Brown, Mike Roscoe,
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A remarkably successful and influential publishing venture, the "Lizard" rescued classic pulp fiction originally published from the late 40sto the early 60s for a whole new generation of readers in the eighties, and were largely responsible for rescuing the likes of Jim Thompson, David Goodis and a host of others from obscurity. An imprint of Creative Arts Book Company of Berkeley, California, Black Lizard was the inspiration of novelist Barry Gifford, who chose the titles, and did the paperwork, dealing with the authors or their agents. Random House bought out Black Lizard in the early 90s. Later known as Vintage/Black lizard, and sometimes just Vintage, they continue to mine the past, releasing classy paperback reprints of some of the masters.
Published: Jim Thompson, David Goodis, James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Ross Macdonald.
Maxim Jakubowskifirst entered hard-boiled and noir publishing with this series of thriller reprints for Zomba. Each omnibus volume would reprint three or four novels by classic American authors.
Published: Jim Thompson, David Goodis, Cornell Woolrich, Horace McCoy & W. R. Burnett.
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Part of the eighties revival in the UK of classic noir and hard-boiled, Allison & Busby published several books by authors such as Chester Himes, Richard Stark, Lawrence Block, Wade Miller, Ross Macdonald and even Ted Lewis (of Get Carter fame).
Published: Chester Himes, Richard Stark, Lawrence Block, Wade Miller, Ross Macdonald, Ted Lewis
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Blue Murder (no relation to the pivotal hard-boiled ezine) was responsible for a slew of classic reprints of again mostly (but not exclusively) American hard-boiled classics, back in the late eighties/early nineties, and exposed a whole generation of readers to books that had long been out of print, including Leigh Brackett and Delores Hitchens. Blue murder was an imprint of Simon & Schuster, and later Xandadu. Maxim Jakubowski, who got his start with Black Box Thrillers, was the series editor for this pivotal series of books..
Published: Leigh Brackett, Gil Brewer, David Goodis, Davis Grubb, Geoffrey Homes, Newton Thornburg, Charles Williams, Cornell Woolrich, Dolores Hitchens, Jonathan Latimer, Jim Thompson, L. A. Morse.
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Otto Penzler's imprint treated mysteries of all kinds with the respect they deserved, releasing new and reprinted fiction and non-fiction.
Published: James Ellroy, David Pierce, Stuart Kamisky, Marcia Muller, Parnell Hall, collections of pulpsters such as Carroll John Daly, Norbert Davis, Erle Stanley Gardner; non-fiction by Bill Pronzini
They've published a ton of P.I. books over the years, and have shown their committment to the genre by co-sponsoring the Private Eye Writer's of America on their Best First P.I. Novel Contest.
Published: Les Roberts, Jerry Kenealy
This publisher's ambitious mission was to bring back into print all of the mystery fiction of pulp author Fredric Brown. And they kicked it off right, reprinting the entire Ed and Am Hunter series. And the site was to die for, full of attractive graphics, biographical and bibliographical info, and even a message board or two. But it all came to naught when founder and editor Stewart Masters passed away.
