No, it's not time to renegotiate my contract. I'm talking about a paperback imprint of St. Martin's that I just stumbled across today in a used bookstore. Seems that before Minotaur, and a few years before Dead Letter, there was an SMP imprint called "Mean Streets," which billed itself as "the tough new breed of crime novel." Writes included Eugene Izzi, Tom Kakonis, Bruce Cook, Ken Grissom and Les Roberts, among others. The book I picked up was Izzi's The Booster. I've read other Izzi novels, and really dug 'em, so this was a real find.But even if The Booster is pure crime gold, it is doomed to pale in comparison to the awesome ad copy in the back pages, which lay out the "Mean Streets" mission. For instance:
"Come walk these MEAN STREETS and find cheap lowlife, brutal murder... and great reading!"Cheap lowlife? As opposed to the expensive shit? Anyway, here's another:
"The measure of a man is how well he survives life's MEAN STREETS. Bold new crime novels by today's hottest talents."And then there's my favorite:
"Hey! Whatza matta wi'chu? You betta read MEAN STREETS or you're gonna pay."There's a real nice Ah, Shaddupa You Face vibe going on there. Something you don't see too often these days.
I am now on a mission to find every single goddamned book in this series.
Duane,
ReplyDeleteYeah, I got into Izzy as well. In fact I have one or two still sitting in my to be read pile. Booster is one of his best.
BTW -- do you know the mysterious circumstances of his death?
Craig: I read a few pieces about it. Very strange stuff.
ReplyDeleteI miss Izzi. He was great.
ReplyDeleteMy favorite Izzis are those early St Martins novels. And one of the early Bantam pb originals. His bad guys reminded me of the criminals I grew up with. If there was a way they could fuck things up they'd find it within half an hour. I always believed Izzis version of the Street because he played against the melodrama and bombast of lesser writers who toured the place but had never lived there.
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