Created by Max Phillips
“Well, maybe she wasn’t all that blonde, but it’d be a crime to call hair like that light brown. It was more sort of lion-colored.”
One of the first books released under the Hard Case Crime imprint, co-founder Max Phillips‘ Fade to Blonde immediately set the standard for the feisty paperback imprint. It’s a tough, unapologetically raunchy and deliberately retro pastiche about an ex-pug and ex-screenwriter turned construction worker, and the pulp is slathered on thick.
RAY CORSON is a rough-and-tumble guy in freefall, always on the lookout for a little extra geetus. But when failed actress-turned-hat check girl Rebecca LaFontaine (don’t you just dig that name?) asks Ray to protect her from a former boyfriend (a failed actor who’s now a pornographer and mobster wannabe), things take a decided turn toward the nasty.
Of course, it’s shouldn’t come as a shock to discover that Rebecca is more than a little truth-challenged (and, it turns out, more than a little twisted) and that things promptly go to hell. But Phillips manages to bring some real spirit and spit to these proceedings, dishing out great sexually charged banter and at least one scene of violence that’s delivered so matter-of-factly, I swear I read the same sentence over and over, not believing my eyes.
Phillips’ 50s-era Hollywood may be a seedy maelstrom of broken dreams and desperate losers, but this taut, hard novel is a winner.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Although he’s probably best known for his poetry and literary fiction (The Artist’s Wife, etc.), Max Phillips is also the co-founder, along with Charles Ardai (aka Richard Aleas), of Hard Case Crime imprint, an upstart publishing imprint launched in 2004 that promised to bring you “the best in hard-boiled crime fiction, ranging from lost noir masterpieces to new novels by today’s most powerful writers, featuring stunning original cover art in the grand pulp style.” They’ve succeeded.
UNDER OATH
- “Phillips contributes to a new crime imprint a hard-boiled whodunit sure to thrill fans of such Golden Age masters as James M. Cain… Especially graceful is the way Phillips lightens the plot’s noir darkness with delightfully breezy dialogue. The convincingly understated, witty repartee between guy and gal—and their gangster pals—prevents the book from descending, for even a paragraph, into period pulp parody. They do write ’em like they used to.”
— Publishers Weekly
NOVELS
- Fade to Blonde (2004) | Buy this book | Kindle it!
Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith. Partially adapted from the January Magazine Rap Sheet review. Used with permission.
