Fracas in the Foothills, first published in 1940, is a rollicking, fast-paced action – western – mystery – adventure story set in the 1930s and moving from Paris to the American West (especially in the lower Yellowstone River valley Montana). The book features scholar-sleuth Homer Evans, the subject of several books by author Elliot Paul, and a host of additional, often wacky characters including his French cohorts, gangsters, Native Americans, ranchers, rustlers, and even rattlesnakes. Evans and his group return to Montana to solve a murder but the plot takes many often humorous twists along the way.

Bruce Murphy's Encyclopedia of Murder and Mystery is a comprehensive guide to the genre of the murder mystery that catalogues thousands of items in a broad range of categories: authors, titles, plots, characters, weapons, methods of killing, movie and theatrical adaptations. What distinguishes this encyclopedia from the others in the field is its critical stance.

Serious detection meets madcap adventure in this stylish whodunit, which unfolds in 1930s Paris and features a colorful cast that includes a concert violinist, his eccentric accompanist, and a notorious gang member.

Waiting at the Shore chronicles the extraordinary life of the Spanish artist Luis Quintanilla, championed by Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Elliot Paul, and many other American and European writers and artists. In 1912, at the age of 18, he ran off to Montmartre where, under the influence of his fellow countryman Juan Gris, he began his artistic career as a Cubist. Returning to Madrid before the war he befriended prominent Spaniards, including Juan Negrin, the Premier during the Spanish Civil War. In April 1931 he and Negrin participated in the peaceful revolution which ousted the monarchy and installed the Second Spanish Republic. When civil war broke out Quintanilla helped lead troops on Madrid's Montana Barracks, which saved the capital for the Republic. "Because great painters," as Hemingway put it, "are scarcer than good soldiers," the Spanish government [Negrin] ordered Quintanilla out of the army after the fascists were stopped outside Madrid. The artist completed 140 drawings of the various fronts of the war which were exhibited at New York's Museum of Modern Art, with a catalogue by Hemingway. After the Republic lost the war Quintanilla was forced into an exile which lasted several decades. Living in New York and in Paris he strove to perfect his art, shunning the modernist vogues of the time. Although a celebrity when he first arrived in the United States he eventually fell into obscurity. This volume, which is heavily illustrated, brings him out of the shadows of neglect, and provides the compelling story of an artist who led not just an extraordinary life but left a legacy of paintings and drawings which, in both their skill and great imaginative variety, should be known to all art lovers.

This book focuses on the distinctive role that artists have played in detective fiction--as detectives, as villains and victims, and as bystanders. With a few significant exceptions, literary detectives have always identified themselves as essentially the deconstructors of the artful crimes of others. They may use various methods--ratiocinative, scientific, or hard-boiled--but they always unravel the threads that the villains have woven into deceptive covers for their crimes. The detective does, in the end, produce a work of art: a narrative that explains everything that needs explanation. But the detective's moral work is often juxtaposed to the aesthetic work of the painters, poets, and writers that the detective encounters during an investigation. The author surveys this juxtaposition in works by important authors from the early development of the genre (Poe, Conan Doyle), the golden age (Bentley, Christie, Sayers, James, et al.), and the hard-boiled era (Hammett, Chandler, Macdonald, Spicer et al.).

Guns were illegal. Unless you were a member of Category Military, no one on Earth could own a gun. So who was shooting at Joe Mauser? And why? He'd been a mercenary, but he'd been thrown out when he saved Field Marshal Cogswell's life. Whose enemies were after him now—his own, or Cogswell's? In a world where the computers kept track of you, Mauser had to disappear...and stay alive long enough to reach the Field Marshal!