Josef Hoffmann: Two Crime Novels by RYERSON JOHNSON    Ryerson Johnson (1901-1995) is known primarily as an author of Westerns, but he also wrote numerous crime novels. Only two were published in his own name:          Naked in the Streets, Red Seal #10, Fawcett, 1952, cover art Carl Bobertz.          Lady in Dread, Gold Medal #459, Fawcett, 1955, [...]

BILL PRONZINI – Scattershot. St. Martin’s Press, hardcover, 1982; $10.95. PaperJacks, paperback reprint, 1987.    Business, as they say, is booming. For Bill Pronzini’s pulp-collecting detective, for one, and for readers of private-eye fiction, for hundreds, if not thousands of others.    Doomsayers to the contrary, the PI story is alive and — would you believe? — [...]

A REVIEW BY DOUG GREENE:     JONATHAN STAGGE - The Yellow Taxi. Popular Library 63, no date (ca. 1945). Originally published by Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1942.    I have commented previously in these pages about the works of the authors [Richard Webb and Hugh Wheeler] who used the pseudonyms Q. Patrick, Patrick Quentin and Jonathan [...]

REVIEWED BY DAN STUMPF: ANTHONY GILBERT – The Woman in Red. Collins Crime Club, UK, hardcover, 1941. Smith & Durrell, US, hardcover, 1943. Digest-sized paperback: Mercury Mystery #91. Also published as The Mystery of the Woman in Red: Handi-Books #29, paperback, 1944. Film: Columbia, 1945, as My Name Is Julia Ross. Film: MGM, 1987, as [...]

THE ARMCHAIR REVIEWER Allen J. Hubin LYDIA ADAMSON - A Cat in the Manger. Signet, paperback original, 1990.    A Cat in the Manger is the first in a series about sometime NYC actress and moretimes catsitter Alice Nestleton by the pseudonymous Lydia Adamson. This is a fanciful tale requiring hyperextension of disbelief, with a heroine [...]