Lynd introduces Dan Fortune, the protagonist-narrator, living in the slums of the Chelsea district of New York which creates the characters of this mystery with social implications as well as excitement.

Con artists and call girls, hoods and hippies, and New York City’s untouchably wealthy populate this smashing tale of a small-time crook wanted for a murder he swears he didn’t commit. The problem lands with an ominous thud in the office of Dan Fortune, Private Investigator, when the crook, Sammy Weiss, comes begging Fortune for an alibi. But the alibi Sammy needs is for a beating, not for the murder for which he’ll soon be charged. Fortune says no. The Brass Rainbow is the second novel featuring Dan Fortune, following the Edgar Award–winning Act of Fear. In this one, Fortune goes on the hunt when an uptown blueblood ends up dead and Sammy vanishes. Sammy had always been a loser, and a petty liar, and a magnet for hard luck. Still, Fortune doesn’t think he killed the guy. What else can a one-armed detective do, if not help his friends? And Sammy is a friend. Soon Fortune finds himself targeted, and the disappearance of Sammy becomes more puzzling. Is Sammy the killer – or the victim of a frame-up? Written in the crisp style he helped popularize, the legendary Lynds opens the floodgates to the bygone colorful era of ‘60s Chelsea – no pricey real estate then, just a teeming Petri dish of hustlers and pigeons and those trying to make a living any way they can. Lynds captures the richness and exposes the underbelly in a tale The New York Daily News called, “engrossing.” “The man who won the Mystery Writers of America award ... has given readers another exceptional story.” – Parade of Books “Skillfully plotted with finely honed suspense.” – New York Times “[Lynds] is a writer to watch and above all to read.” – Ross Macdonald “A master of crime fiction.” – Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine

“One of the Year’s Best Mysteries” – New York Times – The National Observer It’s the 1970s, and the edgy metropolis of New York attracts waves of newly liberated young women. Like most of them, Francesca Crawford finds an apartment and a job, and she begins dating. She’s making a life. She’s just twenty years old. When she’s stabbed to death, a man twenty-five years older than she appears in the office of private investigator Dan Fortune and offers $2,000 – much more than Fortune charges even on his best day; he’ll tell you that himself – to find out who murdered her. The man, a salesman, insists that no one can know he’s the guy who hired Fortune. As curious about the salesman as about the victim, Fortune soon discovers the young woman ran away from home three months earlier. Her father is the prominent mayor of an upstate city, from an old, aristocratic Dutch family. Still, in New York City she had been working for tips as a cocktail waitress under an assumed name for the two months before her death. Why had she been using a made-up name, and where had she been in that first month after she left home? Fortune hits the streets to find out. Violence follows him as he heads north. Then, oddly, the trail takes an abrupt turn southwest, to a desolate Arizona Indian reservation. When Fortune uncovers what happened during the missing month, he reveals the terrible secret of why Francesca slammed the door on her past. Swift and passion-filled, the much-lauded Walk a Black Wind is a tale of half truths and lies that erupt in murder. “In the American private-eye tradition of Chandler, Hammett, and Macdonald.” – The New York Times Book Review “A master of crime fiction.” – Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine “[Lynds] writes tales distinguished by a strong personal flavor and originality ... enriched because of Dan Fortune, the compassionate and philosophical private investigator.” – Crime and Mystery “This is an admirable specimen of the hard-boiled but literate detective novel whose intricately conceived puzzle is matched by its well-paced narrative style.” – The Armchair Detective

New York Times: “One of the year’s Best Mysteries.” It’s summer in New York, 1972, and the city is steaming. Actress Martine Adair can’t stand it any longer. She sends her lover off to pawn the diamond ring he gave her, so they can spend the next month cooling off at the beach. Her lover is private detective Dan Fortune, who works the worn high rises and dangerous alleys of the edgy Chelsea district. At the neighborhood pawnshop, Fortune not only picks up cash, he meets Claude Marais and his wife, Li Marais. Claude is a retired soldier who fought on the losing side during France’s humiliating defeats at Dien Bien Phu and Algiers. Convinced someone is trying to kill him, Li asks Fortune to stand guard outside their hotel room that night. Fortune agrees – the money will be enough to redeem Marty’s ring and still take her to the beach. In the morning Claude is fine, but his brother – Fortune’s friend, the gentle pawnbroker – is dead, his skull bashed in. The police think it’s a robbery gone bad, but Fortune disagrees – why would a robber leave $300 untouched in the cash drawer, and besides, how could the thief have gotten into the highly secure shop, unless the pawnbroker himself let him in? It had to be an inside job, yet the pawnbroker apparently had no enemies, no dark secrets. Foreign adventurers, vicious gang members, an exotic beauty from Thailand, and an alcoholic Chinese populate this riveting tale, leading Fortune to a hair-raising ending and revelations of a tortured past no one wanted to remember but just wouldn’t die. New York Times: “One of the year’s Best Mysteries.” “First-class ... suspenseful, character-rich, and absorbing.” – Kirkus Reviews “Some of the rawest, most unencumbered mystery writing extant in the genre.” – American Library Association “Subtle undercurrents, handled with perception and realism ... a logical conclusion of force and stunning power.” – Utica Observer-Dispatch “[His novels are] filled with as much closely observed incident and detail as John O’Hara’s short stories ...” – Wall Street Journal

It takes fear to make normal people reach out to a private detective, and that's how Dan Fortune knows his newest client, the icy Mia Morgan, isn't normal. For reasons she refuses to reveal, she offers to pay him far too much to investigate a lush blonde who frequents a nearby French restaurant. Dan's love life is in turmoil, and he needs a distraction. In the end, he takes the job. Soon events turn bizarre. A wizened old man warns him to run, a vicious Israeli pilot threatens to remove Dan's one good arm if he doesn't steer clear of Mia Morgan, and a patron at the blonde's favorite restaurant seems to know more about her than he lets on. Finding the blonde is easy, but probing her love life leads Dan into a no-man's-land of violence where he's hunted both by the law and the mafia. Gradually he fits together a jigsaw of passion, treachery, and greed that gives him a shocking picture of who the guilty are and what drove them to destroy their enemies. New York Times: "One of the year's Best Mysteries." "He combines superb characters and excellent plotting to produce an exciting mystery." - Booklist "He carries on the Hammett-Chandler-Macdonald tradition with skill and finesse." - Washington Post "He is a novelist as well as a writer of whodunits, with real insight into his characters and the ability to construct logical, coherent plots. His prose is lean and unpretentious, without the flights of self-pitying fancy that sometimes mar books even as well-written as the Ross Macdonald mysteries." - New York Times

Crease on edge of spine. Bookstore stamp on first page.

First Edition. Foxing to page edges. Plastic protective cover to DJ. Original price of $6.95 is intact. Pages are clean and binding is tight. Solid Book.

A Dan Fortune Detective Mystery. Dan Fortune gets a call from an old flame and becomes involved in the hunt for the feared Canyon Slasher.

A New York detective searches for missing newlyweds and discovers a murder and two strangers who want to find the couple as well

Hired to track down a missing kid bent on avenging the brutal murder of a beautiful Vietnamese refugee, Dan Fortune finds himself deep in a nasty network of white slavery, narcotics and hired killers. The bloody trail of bodies gets uglier and more complex by the minute. Fortune has to make it all add up—-before someone adds his name to the list.

One-armed detective Dan Fortune, searching for cowboy Frank Owen, finds Owen's dead coworker and the corpse of Owen's brother, and sets out cross-country to find the motive and the murderer.

Hired to track down Jack Price, a card shark forever in search of the one hand that will win him the jackpot, Dan Fortune enters a netherworld of small-time gamblers, wheeler-dealers, drug pushers, and murderers.

This is the last book in the award-winning Dan Fortune mystery series. In it, the private detective surprises himself and comes to some conclusions about his life – his relationship with model Kay Michaels has passed through the novelty stage, and they’ve settled down together into a committed relationship. “Love does strange things to middle-aged men,” he muses. “It can actually make you happy.” At the same time, his detective business is thriving. Based on an actual case that riveted Southern California, Cassandra in Red calls upon all of Fortune’s skills to find the real killers of Cassandra Reilly, a homeless woman who is brutally stabbed to death in a lovely Santa Barbara park at midnight in 1992. There are no witnesses, no evidence, and no suspects – but most of her belongings were taken. She was homeless, and the police believe she was killed in a robbery by some other homeless person. Fortune doesn’t buy it. As he probes Cassandra’s past and the widely varied strata of Southern California life, more and more people appear as suspects. Honored with the Private Eye Writers of America Lifetime Achievement Award, grandmaster Lynds is at his best in Cassandra in Red, delivering the fast-paced suspense and memorable characters that have inspired the praise of critics around the world. What sets Lynds’s work apart is his ability to humanize both the victims and the criminals – to dramatize the labyrinth of influences and childhood incidents that cement personalities, produce complex motives, cause behaviors, ennoble or destroy. Collins stretches the boundaries of the genre with Cassandra in Red – the action, the suspense, the characters – producing an unforgettable tale of those whose so-called goodness creates evil. “\[Lynds\] lifts the detective novel into the realm of art with this inquiry into homelessness, gang codes, and the underlying violence of prejudice.” – eNotes “\[Lynds’s\] tense, terse writing style is perfectly suited to the arid social landscape he has staked out.” – The Detroit News “\[Lynds\] is a skilled performer in the Hammett-Chandler-Macdonald tradition.” – The New York Times Book Review “The Dan Fortune series has embraced several pioneering risks throughout its durable and brisk run, attempting as it goes to lift the subgenre out of its moribund trenchcoat-and-flask-of-bourbon image. The social and psychological underpinnings have in no way diluted or distorted the spirit of hard-boiled fiction. In contrary fashion, they have added a deeper and updated human dimension to Dan Fortune as their leading character. In a careful reading of the entire series from start to finish, the voice of \[Lynds\] stays soulful and crisp, his dialogue pitched as perfectly as possible, and his actions unsparing but compassionate. Dan Fortune is the sort of guy you’d like to strike up a conversation with late at night or in a bus station. He stays a choice friend from book to book.” – Ed Lynskey, Mystery File “\[Lynds\] uses the private-eye format to fashion mystery novels that are also probing studies of character with a decided philosophical and sociological bent. \[He\] has produced a body of work impressive for its consistency and its humanity. By examining the issues of crime and violence from many angles, from the philosophical to the psychological, \[Lynds\] aims to offer a deeper understanding of what it means to be human, which is, after all, what good literature is really about.” – Professor David Geherin, The American Private Eye

Michael Collins presents a rich array of stories featuring his famous protagonist, one-armed private eye Dan Fortune. The newly conceived novella, "Resurrection", set in southern California and the steaming jungles of South America, is a riveting vision of madness and murder. Also includes a selection of classic as well as previously unpublished short stories of crime and punishment.