Additional information
by Bill Pronzini (Author)
John Frederick Quincannon, a former United States Secret Service agent, and Sabina Carpenter, one of the first female Pinkerton operatives, joined forces to form the firm of CARPENTER AND QUINCANNON, PROFESSIONAL DETECTIVE SERVICES. Their various cases take them all over the American West in the 1890s. Now they're back in four new adventures. In "The Bughouse Caper," Quincannon matches wits with Sherlock Holmes to solve a series of burglaries and a baffling locked-room murder. "The Cloud Cracker" finds Quincannon called to a small California town to expose an itinerant rainmaker as a charlatan and confidence man, only to run into an unexpected murder. "Medium Rare" has Quincannon and Sabina attend a s ance, but more is involved than showing an array of psychic phenomena to be fakery, since they are witnesses to a murder that seems to have been supernatural. "Quincannon in Paradise" is set in the Hawaiian Islands with the detective on the trail of a pair of swindlers.
Author Biography
Bill Pronzini is simply one of the masters. He seems to have taken a crack at just about every genre: mysteries, noirish thrillers, historicals, locked-room mysteries, adventure novels, spy capers, men's action, westerns, and, of course, his masterful, long-running Nameless private detective series, now entering its fourth decade, with no signs of creative flagging. He's also ghosted several Brett Halliday short stories as Michael Shayne for Mike Shayne's Mystery Magazine, and has managed to collaborate with such fellow writers as John Lutz, Barry Wahlberg, Collin Wilcox and Marcia Muller. Still, if he never ventured into fiction writing, his non-fiction work, as both writer and editor, would still earn him a place in the P.I. genre's Hall of Fame. Besides his two tributes to some of the very worst in crime fiction (what he calls "alternative classics"), Gun in Cheek and Son of Gun in Cheek, and one on western fiction (entitled Six Gun in Cheek, naturally), he's the co-author (with Marcia Muller) of 1001 Midnights. The Mystery Writers of America have nominated him for Edgar Awards several times and his work has been translated into numerous languages and he's published in almost thirty countries. He was the very first president of the Private Eye Writers of America, and he's received three Shamus Awards from them, as well as its Lifetime Achievement Award in 1987. His passion for the old crime pulps is largely responsible for keeping them in the public's eye. He's amassed a huge collection of books and magazines and has always been an omnivorous reader; all of which made him a natural when it came to editing various anthologies. He admits "it was a pleasure tracking down good stories to fit a particular anthology theme." But after editing 80 or so of them over a period of twenty-some years, he decided it was "more than enough."
