Manning Up

While there are scads of books worth your paying attention to in 2019, two of the potentially most interesting are due out this coming summer. The first of those is Sticking It to the Man: Revolution and Counterculture in Pulp and Popular Fiction, 1950 to 1980, edited by Andrew Nette and Iain McIntyre (PM Press), a couple of Australian writers who also gave us 2017’s Girl Gangs, Biker Boys, and Real Cool Cats: Pulp Fiction and Youth Culture, 1950 to 1980. Amazon says Sticking It to the Man “tracks the changing politics and culture of the period and how it was reflected in pulp and popular fiction in the U.S., UK, and Australia.

Featuring 400 full-color covers, the book includes in-depth author interviews, illustrated biographies, articles, and reviews from more than 30 popular culture critics and scholars. Works by street-level hustlers turned best-selling black writers Iceberg Slim, Nathan Heard and Donald Goines, crime heavyweights Chester Himes, Ernest Tidyman and Brian Garfield, Yippies Anita Hoffman and Ed Sanders, and best-selling authors such as Alice Walker, Patricia Nell Warren and Rita Mae-Brown, plus a myriad of lesser-known novelists ripe for rediscovery, are explored, celebrated, and analyzed.

Among the contributors to this 336-page volume are Gary Phillips, Woody Haut, Steve Aldous, and yours truly (though I am misidentified on Amazon as “J. Kingston Smith”—Nette assures me that my byline is correct in the finished book). My article in Sticking It to the Man is a significant expansion of a piece I wrote for Killer Covers about songwriter-composer Joseph Perkins Greene, who published half a dozen novels starring Richard Abraham Spade, a particularly seductive troubleshooter nicknamed Superspade. As I explain, Greene’s Spade—introduced in Death of a Blue-Eyed Soul Brother (1970)—“briefly rivaled Ernest Tidyman’s better-known fictional private eye, John Shaft, as the baddest, blackest, and most beautiful crime solver of the 1970s.”

Sticking It to the Man is due out on August 1.

The other work I’m most looking forward to getting my hands on this summer is The Best of Manhunt, edited by Jeff Vorzimmer (Stark House Press). Again from Amazon comes this description:

First appearing on newsstands in late 1952, Manhunt was the acknowledged successor to Black Mask, which had ceased publication the year before, as the venue for high-quality crime fiction. By April of 1956 it was being billed as the World’s Best-Selling Crime-Fiction Magazine. On its pages, over its 14-year run, appeared a veritable Who s Who of the world s greatest mystery writers including: Ed McBain, Mickey Spillane, Richard Deming, Jonathan Craig, Hal Ellison, Robert Turner, Jack Ritchie, Frank Kane, Craig Rice, Fletcher Flora, Talmage Powell, Richard S. Prather, David Alexander, Harold Q. Masur, Gil Brewer, Helen Nielsen, Erskine Caldwell, Henry Slesar, David Goodis, Lawrence Block, John D. MacDonald, Clark Howard, Fredric Brown, Donald E. Westlake, Harlan Ellison, Harry Whittington and Steve Frazee. The Best of Manhunt includes 39 of the original stories …

None other than Lawrence Block himself penned the foreword to The Best of Manhunt (which should not be confused with this much earlier book); Barry N. Malzberg concocted an afterword. Vorzimmer’s introduction to “the tortured history of the magazine” was just posted in the Mystery*File blog, and its sure to draw some attention to the 392-page book in advance of its July 29 release.