«Si j'avais dit à ma soeur que j'étais mourant, elle serait peut-être encore en vie.» L'homme qui parle à Matt Scudder est condamné par un virus. Il a l'intime conviction que son beau-frère a massacré sa femme et l'idée même qu'il puisse s'en sortir lui est inconcevable. Il est également sûr qu'il recommencera. Lui ou ses complices, ces autres fous à l'apparence si banale. Vertus publiques, vices cachés... Matt Scudder, lors de son enquête, croisera le geste d'un homme recoiffant tendrement les cheveux de son fils. Ce geste, il l'a déjà vu... Lorsque les circonstances de la scène lui reviendront brutalement en mémoire, il basculera vers l'indicible.

Une danse aux abattoirs : une enquête de Matt Scudder

Résumer un roman policier, c'est un peu comme montrer une stripteaseuse nue avant son numéro d'effeuillage. Alors, mieux vaut ne donner que des indices. Avec ça on pourra recoller les morceaux (en refermant le livre, le lecteur comprendra ce que ça veut dire).
Francine Khoury, la crème des femmes, se fait enlever et ça se passe mal. Si mal que son mari Kenan Khoury, trafiquant de drogue, fait appel à un privé, Matt Scudder, un ancien flic, qui a décroché de la police et de l'alcool et qui renonce à aller avec sa petite amie call-girl en Irlande rejoindre son copain en cavale pour s'occuper de l'affaire. Il est honnête comme pas un, mais plein de ressources. Et puis il a  T.J., jeune black de 15-16 ans, toujours à court de quarters mais jamais d'idées, les Kong, à savoir Jimmy Hong et David King, capables de bidouiller n'importe quel système informatique plus quelques vieux collèges.
Ca n'est pas de trop quand on est face à des ravisseurs particulièrement ignobles et qui n'en sont pas à leur premier coup.
Pour qu'un trafiquant de drogue de Brooklyn engage un Alcoolique anonyme, c'est qu'il n'a pas le choix. Pour qu'un privé s'émeuve, c'est que l'affaire est moche. Si moche que Matt Scudder est sûr que les ravisseurs de Mme Khoury n'en sont pas à leur premier coup. Ni au dernier.

Cendrillon mon amour

Un soir d'avril, dans le quartier de " la cuisine de l'enfer ", glenn holtzmann, cadre dans une maison d'édition new-yorkaise, est abattu alors qu'il téléphonait d'une cabine publique.
 Meurtre mafieux ? tout le dit jusqu'au jour oú george sadecki, un clochard, est arrêté.  indigné, son frère demande à matt scudder de se charger de l'enquête.  le détective privé, vieil habitué des réunions d'alcooliques anonymes, a plus d'une raison de s'intéresser à l'affaire.  il entretenait avec la victime des relations d'amitié oú la méfiance, pourtant, avait son mot à dire : et la femme de glenn, lisa, ne lui est pas indifférente.
 Mais les bonnes intentions ne font pas toujours les bons conseils, surtout en matière de meurtre.

Le diable t'attend

Après Michael Connelly ou James Ellroy, c'est au tour d'Harlan Coben d'être invité par l'éditeur Otto Penzler à faire sa sélection des meilleures nouvelles policières américaines parues en 2013 dans la presse. Un voyage en vingt étapes mené à un rythme d'enfer par les routiers confirmés du polar et de jeunes seconds couteaux au talent prometteur. Au programme : des détectives privés sur le retour, des tueurs à gage sanguinaires, des escrocs à la petite semaine, des héros malgré eux et des histoires où se succèdent arnaques, meurtres froidement prémédités, coups de sang, vengeances… Insomniaques, s'abstenir.

Insomnies en noir - Les meilleures nouvelles policières américaines 2013

Shadows, which was not only the debut of Jill Emerson but my own very first novel, is the story of a young woman, Jan Marlowe, who comes to New York fresh out of college, takes an apartment in the Bohemian neighborhood of Greenwich Village, and seeks to find herself-and specifically to come to terms with the puzzling question of sexual identity. Well then... One morning in the spring of 1958 I woke up in my room at the Hotel Alexandria with a paralyzing hangover (which was not unusual) and an idea for a book (which was). I sat in front of my typewriter, and within a few hours I had produced a chapter-by-chapter outline of a novel. I had all the characters sketched out and knew how they'd relate to one another, and how the rather elementary storyline would resolve itself. I even had a title: Shadows. At the time I was working as an editor at a shady literary agency, but I'd already arranged for my departure, as come fall I'd be resuming college in Ohio. Sometime in May I gave up my room at the Alexandria and went home to Buffalo, where I turned that outline into a book. My agent sent it to Crest Books, then the country's premier publisher of lesbian fiction. They spent a couple of months reading it and thinking it over, during which time I wrote and sold several lesser books to Harry Shorten's Midwood Books. Then, a couple of months after I'd returned to Antioch and gone through a lot of sturm und drang that needn't concern us here, Crest accepted Shadows. They changed my title to Strange Are the Ways of Love. They also changed my pen name. I'd known a lesbian novel ought to have a woman's name on it, and I picked one. They decided on Leslie Evans instead, so it could be gender-neutral, and then switched it to Lesley Evans, which made it more specifically female. Welcome to publishing, young man. It's clear to me now, some 60 years later, that the book ought to set sail under its original title, and since I'm republishing it myself, that's a decision I get to make. It's also clear to me that Shadows is in fact Jill Emerson's very first novel, as it's far more of a piece with Warm And Willing and Enough of Sorrow than with anything else I've written. So that's how I'll publish it, right? As Shadows, dammit, by Lawrence Block writing as Jill Emerson. You got a problem with that?

Shadows - The Jill Emerson Novels, #1

Broadway Can Be Murder started out to be a novel based on Johnny Midnight, a TV series which everyone has long since forgotten. Except, of course, that nothing manages to be forgotten in the Internet Age. I, whose job it was to knock out 50, 000 words of Johnny Midnightish prose and dialogue, had forgotten when it ran and who was in it, but Google took no time at all to remind me that the title role was played by Edmund O'Brien, and that the series ran during the first nine months of 1960. And if you want to know more about it, well, Google and Wikipedia are there to enlighten you. I was in New York, newly married, living at 110 West 69th Street. I was writing short stories for crime fiction magazines, erotic novels for Midwood and Nightstand, and fielding assignments that my agent steered in my direction. Two of these were from paperback publishers who had acquired the book rights to a TV drama and wanted to hire someone to write a book. First up for me was a show called Markham, which starred Ray Milland. Belmont was to be the publisher, and I had to write that book twice.  My first effort turned out to be too good to waste its fragrance on Belmont's desert air, and my agent had me change the title and the names of the characters and sold the thing to Gold Medal. So I had to write it again, and I did, and they liked it okay and published it. Next up was Beacon Books, with "Johnny Midnight" as both the book's inspiration and its title. I wrote it, but by the time Beacon was preparing it for publication, the series had been canceled. The publisher saw no reason to pay a licensing fee for a moribund show, and accordingly changed names: Johnny Midnight became Johnny Lane, and his trusty servant morphed from Uki to Ito. And Lawrence Block became Ben Christopher for the occasion. I don't know what kept me from using my own name, the book was crime fiction rather than the erotica that seemed to call for a pen name, but I do remember that my great friend Donald E. Westlake had recently done some sort of tie-in novel and hung the name Ben Christopher on it, telling me it would be his pen name for tie-ins he was anxious to forget. I horned in on the name, and if Don found this irksome he kept it to himself. Someone at Beacon picked the title. Strange Embrace. Well, there's a lesbian element in the book, and I guess they wanted to play it up, and "strange" was a useful code word toward that end. It retained that title when Subterranean Press put it in a splendid double volume with 69 Barrow Street, and when I first reissued it in the Classic Crime Library. But it doesn't really fit the book at all, making a hard-edged crime novel set in the world of New York theater look like a bt of Beacon erotica. Thus it's new title: Broadway Can Be Murder it now is and shall be. Ray Milland I should add, had no better luck than Edmund O'Brien; his show Markham was canceled after a single season. Belmont evidently didn't get the news in time to act on it, and they dutifully published the book as Markham: The Case of the Pornographic Photos. When I okayed a reissue years later by another publisher I changed the title to You Could Call It Murder-and it's available now with that title, in paperback or ebook, as Classic Crime Library #12. (And the book it was written to replace, which Gold Medal called Death Pulls a Doublecross, is now #13 in the Classic Crime Library with my original title restored: Coward's Kiss.) And here's CCL #19, Broadway Can Be Murder. Enjoy it!

Broadway Can Be Murder - The Classic Crime Library, #17

La balade entre les tombes

En appeler à la justice populaire est dangereux, matt scudder le comprend un soir en recevant un coup de fil d'un grand avocat de new york, adrian whitfeld.
 Pour avoir évité la peine capitale à un assassin d'enfants, celui-ci vient en effet d'être " condamné à mort" par un certain will, " la volonté du peuple ", terrible justicier qui exécute ses victimes après leur avoir signifié leur sentence dans les colonnes du daily news, journal à sensation oú sévit le célèbre marty mcgraw.  sceptique au début, scudder conseille à whitfield d'engager des gardes du corps, puis, intrigué par l'attitude de l'avocat, finit par accepter le combat avec will.

Même les scélérats...

The Cold War's boiling over. Global tensions are near the breaking point. So what's the perfect assignment for a super-spy who hasn't slept since the Korean conflict? A fun-filled trip to the Montreal World's Fair!The adorable little girl he's escorting-who, under different circumstances, would be sitting on the Lithuanian throne-can hardly contain her excitement, but it isn't all playtime for Evan Tanner. Some mysterious disappearances, apparently linked to the fair's Cuban exhibition, need to be looked into. Keeping his mind on business, however, won't be easy after an insatiable lovely in a tiger skin falls into Tanner's arms, and a mother lode of dangerous drugs falls into his lap. But the biggest, deadliest suprise is the terrorist plot Tanner's tumbling into, and he'll have to think and act quickly to prevent the visiting queen of England from being blown to smithereens.

Une danse aux abattoirs : une enquête de Matt Scudder

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