Showing results by author "Loren Estleman" in All Categories

Few writers recount tales of the old West as deftly as Pulitzer Prize-nominee and two-time winner of the Western Writers of America Spur Award Loren D. Estleman. Now, some of Estleman's finest work comes to life in this collection of vivid and richly detailed Western short stories.

Included are "The Pilgrim", a colorfully detailed historical tale of one Easterner's experience in the untamed wilds of the West, and "Hell on the Draw", an unsettling combination of frontier living and the supernatural.

Everyone knows the Frankenstein monster was played by Boris Karloff. But before Karloff’s memorable portrayal, another famous 1930s Hollywood icon, Bela Lugosi, tested for the part of the monster. The screen test footage was lost for decades, until Valentino, the never-say-die film archivist, gets a hot tip about the whereabouts of the incriminating (for really bad, heavily accented acting) footage. But it comes with a price far greater than the money he’ll have to pay.

Who is Gilia Cristobal? On first appearance, Gilia Cristobal seems to be exactly what she claims: a bright, talented, blonde-bombshell Latina singer who has worked hard to rise to the pinnacle of popular acclaim while maintaining her artistic integrity and ideals. Amos Walker ought to know better. There's nobody that perfect and Gilia is just too good to be true. For starters, she's not really Gilia, and that's just the tip of a deadly iceberg of lies that threatens to sink him.

In You Know Who Killed Me, by multiple award-winning author Loren D. Estleman, Amos Walker is at low ebb. Just released from a rehab clinic, the Detroit private detective has to marshal his energies to help solve a murder in Iroquois Heights, his least favorite town. The area is flooded with billboards rented by the widow of Donald Gates, an ordinary suburbanite found shot to death in his basement on New Year's Eve: "You know who killed me!"

In Burning Midnight, master of the hard-boiled detective novel Loren D. Estleman gives listeners a hot new Amos Walker mystery.Amos Walker knows Detroit, from the highest to the lowest, and that includes the gangs of Mexicantown. When a friend asks Walker to get his son's brother-in-law out of one of two feuding gangs, Walker gets in trouble fast. First, dead bodies start to pile up; then come suspicious fires and the bottle bombs. Walker is caught in the middle of a gang war.

Johns Davis has just left the Alamo when he feels the garrote wrap around his neck. The bookie slams his foot on the gas, sending the car into oncoming traffic. It bounces off a van, hops the curb, and crashes into a hotel, knocking Davis unconscious and breaking the neck of his would-be assassin. Davis can breathe again, but just for a moment. When the mob wants you dead, they'll always send another killer.

Amos Walker doesn't mean to walk into trouble. But sometimes it finds him, regardless. The missing woman has left a handwritten note that said, "Don't look for me." Any P.I. would take that as a challenge, especially when he found out that she'd left the same message once before, when having an illicit affair. But this time it's different. The trail leads Walker to an herbal remedies store, where the beautiful young clerk knows nothing about the dead body in the basement…or about any illegal activity that might be connected to the corpse.

The tabloids were full of it. Constance Thayer, after a night of clubbing, drinks, and drugs, had taken an automatic pistol from the collection of her industrialist husband Doyle Thayer Jr. and emptied it into his back, as he lay naked and unconscious in their Iroquois Heights home. The news of Constance Thayer's X-rated past breathed new life into the scandal for another month. Walker's job was to gather enough dirt on the late Mr. Thayer to make his widow look clean by comparison. What he found was a monstrous magnate, a dubious corpse, and a gang of country-style gunrunners.

This suspenseful courtroom drama is based on the actual historical trial of Jack McCall, who shot James Butler Hickok from that most dishonorable position - behind.

At a gala party held in memory of screen legend Greta Garbo, Hollywood film detective Valentino is having fun until the host, a hotshot developer named Rankin, tells Valentino about a certain letter from Garbo to his late wife. She and Garbo had been…close. Such a letter is of great interest to a film archivist like Valentino, but the plot thickens when Rankin tells Val that his assistant, Akers, is using this letter to blackmail him.

Los Angeles, 1921: Ex-Pinkerton agent Charlie Siringo is living in quiet retirement when Wyatt Earp knocks on his door and asks him to track down Earp’s missing horse. What begins as horse thievery turns into a deeper mystery as Siringo and another ex-Pinkerton, the young Dashiell Hammett, follow clues that take them from the streets of Los Angeles to Jack London’s farm. There they discover a conspiracy masterminded by the notorious and powerful Joseph P. Kennedy.

Locked in a deadly feud, cowboys Randy Locke and Frank Farmer have spent decades attempting to annihilate each other any time they are within shooting distance. So far, the men are even. One of Frank's bullets has given Randy a permanent limp. Vain Frank wears a prosthetic ear, his own lost to Randy's assault. If either of them remembers the original reason for the feud, it seems moot now.

A Crow Indian, two Mexican bandits, a libidinous preacher, and a Pinkerton agent join St. John’s posse to bring in an imaginative con artist who has done his best to scam the entire breadth of the Old West. St. John and his crew are at their boisterous best on this manhunt, and they're riding toward the wildest showdown the West has ever seen....

It has been said of five-time Spur Award winner Loren D. Estleman that even “Louis L’Amour looks down with envy” ( Kirkus Reviews). Here Estleman applies his incomparable narrative panache to this novelization of a real-life romance that never was. Judge Roy Bean is an infamous arbiter of Old West justice.

In Burning Midnight, master of the hard-boiled detective novel Loren D. Estleman gives readers a hot new Amos Walker mystery. Amos Walker knows Detroit, from the highest to the lowest, and that includes the gangs of Mexican town. When a friend asks Walker to get his son's brother-in-law out of one of two feuding gangs, Walker gets in trouble fast. First, dead bodies start to pile up; then come suspicious fires and the bottle bombs. Walker is caught in the middle of a gang war. Whether or not a middle-aged gringo like him can cool things off between the Maldados and the Zapatistas, he's got to try; he did promise his friend.

In 1944, after Al Capone has been released from prison, J. Edgar Hoover assigns an FBI junior agent to insinuate himself into Capone's life and gain his trust so that Hoover can nail as many of Capone's Mob confederates as possible. Capone, suffering from the neurological effects of syphilis, is alternately lucid, full of the passion and energy that fueled his rise to the pinnacle of American crime... and rambling or ranting, the broken shell of a man released from prison so he could die at home with his family.

Bela Lugosi's Frankenstein screen test puts Valentino in the picture for murder.... Everyone knows Frankenstein's monster was played by Boris Karloff. His portrayal is so famous that the play Arsenic and Old Lace was filled with Karloff/monster jokes - even when the part of the deformed villain was played by another actor. But before Karloff's memorable portrayal, another 1930s Hollywood icon, Bela Lugosi, tested for the part of the monster. The test footage was lost for decades, until Valentino, that never-say-die film archivist, gets a hot tip about the whereabouts of the incriminating (for really bad, heavily accented acting) footage.

Enter Valentino, a mild-mannered UCLA film archivist, who buys a decrepit movie palace and uncovers a skeleton in the secret Prohibition basement. He then makes a second discovery: long-lost, priceless, reels of film: Erich von Stroheim's infamous Greed. The LAPD wants to take the reels as evidence, jeopardising the precious old film.

The second wacky comedic murder romp for Hollywood film detective Valentino. Valentino wants to keep The Oracle, his beloved run-down movie palace, from being condemned before it even reopens, but murder keeps intruding into his otherwise quiet life. At a gala party held in memory of screen legend Greta Garbo, he's having fun until the host, a hotshot developer named Rankin, tells Valentino about a certain letter from Garbo to his late wife. She and Garbo had been...close. Such a letter is of great interest to a film archivist like Valentino. But the plot thickens when Rankin tells Val that his assistant, Akers, is using this letter to blackmail him.