Showing results by narrator "Mike Dennis" in All Categories

In 1955, novelist Jack Kerouac detoured from his cross-country American travels to Mexico City, where a group of junkie expatriates he had known from the New York City post-war scene had gone for the cheap and plentiful supply of heroin and morphine. Fellow beat writer William S. Burroughs, who had been a part of the Mexican expatriate community, had introduced Kerouac to Bill Garver (named Old Bull Gaines in the novel), a much-older, long-term addict who had in turn introduced Kerouac to Esperanza Villanueva, whom Kerouac named Tristessa in the novel.

Unlike many advice-givers, Block doesn't tell you what book to write, or the one and only way to write it. He holds that every novel is different, and so is every novelist; his aim is to give you the tools to enable you to find your own way.

This classic best-selling novel about a man who encounters a woman whose power to destroy is as strong as her power to love evokes Hemingway in its naturalistic portrayal of elemental forces in both nature and humanity. Ellen's beauty was radiant, and Harland had been so struck with her personality and the strength of her character that he knew he could never leave her. When he found that she returned his adoration, he could marry her with joy, bothered just momentarily by a strange premonition.

A young and ambitious writer named Jerome David Salinger set his goals very high very early in his career. He almost desperately wished to publish his early stories in The New Yorker magazine, the pinnacle, he felt, of America’s literary world. But such was not to be for several long years and the length of one long world war. But other magazines were quick to recognize a new talent, a fresh voice at a time when the world verged on madness....

Here's Mickey Spillane and Mike Hammer in their roughest and readiest—a double-strength shot of sex, violence, and action that is vintage Spillane all the way. It's a tough-guy mystery to please even the most bloodthirsty of fans!

Florida private eye Doak Miller agreed to help the local cops by posing as a hit man to catch a woman looking to get rid of her husband. But then he met the wife - and fell, hard. Now he's plotting with her to commit a murder that could net them millions of dollars and the chance to be together. But to pull it off under the watchful eyes of the police, it'll have to be the perfect crime....

The story follows the exploits of three desperate escaped convicts. They rob banks and have a string of successes. They buy guns, nice clothes, and fast cars and read about themselves in the newspapers. Bowie, the central figure of the three thieves, had been serving time for a murder he committed when only 16. Bowie falls in love with Keechie, the cousin of one of his partners, and she joins him on the run.

Film star Sylvia Shoreham is wowing the dusty gambling town and is hell-bent on divorcing her conniving user of a husband, a foreigner with a slick tongue and a heavy accent. But the husband has other ideas, threatening to marry Miss Shoreham's neurotic sister if she divorces him. Hollywood bigwigs want to keep the movie star making the pictures that make them millions. And then there's a gun in the room and a dead husband. Did Sylvia do it? Or was it an elaborate suicide?

Maggie Cassidy is one of Kerouac's most nostalgic recollections of his past, focusing on his first true love when he was a high school senior and a local star athlete. Filled with the sweet innocence of youth and the daily heartbreak of quarrels and unfulfilled sexual yearnings, Kerouac employs his stylishly Beat observations toward the bygone era of pre-World War II Lowell, Massachusetts, when he was torn between the companionship of his gang of buddies and the sirens' call of the opposite sex.

On the border between El Paso, Texas and Juarez, Mexico, five lives are about to collide - with fatal results. This is MWA Grand Master Lawrence Block at his rawest and most visceral, a bloody, bawdy, brutal story of passion and punishment - and of lines that were never meant to be crossed - available for the first time in 50 years!

The boys said it couldn't be done - knocking over a racetrack. Too much security. Too much money to handle. Too many obstacles. But Johnny Clay knew, if anyone did, how to mastermind a daring robbery. You just had to have the right people to work with, a few ringers on the inside who could keep their mouths shut, and a diversion. A big diversion. Like taking out the favorite horse on the most anticipated race with a high-powered rifle.

Scarface is a powerful, stylized commentary on violence, materialism, excess, corruption and crime in America. Set during the drug-driven decadence of Miami in the 1980s, it is a rags to riches story about the rise and fall of an illegal immigrant from dishwasher to narcotics kingpin who is undone by greed and delusions of grandeur triggered by cocaine psychosis. It is both thrilling entertainment and a wicked, nightmarish parody of the American dream.

In this novel, Thompson's first major success as a pulp fiction writer, Joe Wilmot, trying to go straight after a stretch in the pen, finds a movie house in a small crossroads that can use a helping hand and someone with half a brain for business. The theater's owner, Elizabeth, isn't the smartest operator around - or is she? Joe and the plain Jane Elizabeth decide maybe it would be better for business if they got married. Why not?

When PI Quint Mitchell volunteered to help with an archaeological survey in St. Augustine, he didn't count on digging up a murder victim. In the nation's oldest city, Mitchell discovers links to ancient sins, comes face to face with his own past, and unleashes powerful forces that will do anything to keep their secrets--even if it means taking his life.

Nineteen-year-old Tommy Carver desperately wants to make something of himself, but he's got some mighty tall odds stacked against him - a brutal sharecropper father, a secret love affair with his wealthy landowner's daughter, a step-mother devoid of maternal instincts, and even his own short-tempered, prideful ways. The odds only get worse when Tommy is fingered for murder in this shocking, twisting tale that explores sex, American Indian rituals, simmering race politics in mid-20th century Oklahoma and, of course, crime.

Friend to those who have no friend! Enemy to those who would make him an enemy! It's Boston Blackie, safecracker supreme and inspiration for countless Hollywood films as well as radio and TV shows. Jack Boyle's crime fiction short stories and novellas, set in San Francisco, featuring this timeless character were originally published in magazines in 1915 then compiled into this suspense collection in 1919. The stories, however, link from one to the next, so there is continuity throughout the audiobook.

To escape punishment for a murder he didn't mean to commit, insurance man Don Barshter has to take on a new identity: Nathaniel Crowley, ferocious up-and-comer in the New York mob. But can he find safety in the skin of another man...a worse man...a sinner man?

Nick McCarty decides after ten years of black ops assassinations it's time for a change. Against the wishes of his shadow government bosses he has inexplicably managed to become a best-selling author. The novels have made him world famous and provided a cover for his overseas sanctions. But Nick feels something's missing. An employer orders the death of a woman in the witness protection program. Nick sees something in the woman's picture reminding him of someone he knew long ago.

In David Goodis's bruising crime novel The Secret Squad, Corey Bradford is on the skids and on a quick trip to boozeland. He was a plainclothes cop who got caught with his hands in pockets where they didn't belong and he was pushed out the precinct door. But he was still just as fast with his mitts as he was his wits, and others took notice. Such as mob kingpin Walter Grogan, a man who didn't take no for an answer. But Bradford is also recruited by the notorious Night Squad, a secret arm of the police that doesn't knock before entering. And they don't take no for an answer either.

1938. Alexander Roth is hitchhiking from New York to Los Angeles, hoping to reconnect with his self-absorbed, cutesy-poo girlfriend. A car stops to pick him up and he is soon plunged into a nightmare from which there may be no escape. This is a forgotten noir masterpiece that has languished for decades in the swamps of neglected crime fiction. Movie director Edgar G Ulmer cranked out the movie version in less than a month on a microscopic budget for one of the "poverty row" studios in Hollywood, and it is now widely recognized as one of the greatest in the film noir genre. The novel is its equal in every way.