Crime Novels: Four Classic Thrillers 1964-1969 (Loa #371): The Fiend / Doll / Run Man Run / The Tremor of Forgery

In the 1960s a number of gifted writers--some at the peak of their careers, others newcomers--reimagined American crime fiction through formal experimentation and the exploration of audacious new subjects and themes. This is the second of two volumes gathering the best of their work, nine novels of astonishing variety and inventiveness that pulse with the energies of that turbulent, transformative decade. In Margaret Millar's The Fiend (1964) a nine-year-old girl disappears and a local sex offender comes under suspicion. So begins a suspenseful investigation of an apparently tranquil California suburb that will expose a hidden tangle of fear and animosity, jealousy and desperation. Ed McBain (a pen name of Evan Hunter) pioneered the multi-protagonist police procedural in his long-running series of 87th Precinct novels, set in a parallel Manhattan called Isola. Doll (1965) opens at a pitch of extreme violence and careens with breakneck speed through a tale that mixes murder, drugs, the modeling business, and psychotherapy with the everyday professionalism of McBain's harried cops. The racial paranoia of a drunken police detective in Run Man Run (1966) leads to a double murder and the relentless pursuit of the young Black college student who witnessed it. In Chester Himes's breathless narrative, New York City is a place with no safe havens for a fugitive whom no one wants to believe. In Patricia Highsmith's The Tremor of Forgery (1969) a man whose personality is disintegrating is writing a book called The Tremor of Forgery about a man whose personality is disintegrating, "like a mountain collapsing from within." Stranded unexpectedly in Tunisia, Howard Ingham struggles to hold on to himself in a strange locale, while a slightly damaged typewriter may be the only trace of a killing committed almost by accident.