January Publications

Mexico City cop Carlos Hernandez has a wife, a mistress and a new girlfriend waiting behind every door in Rolo Diez's fine homage to the noir novels of old, Tequila Blue (1992), translated from the Spanish by Nick Caistor. Though he has to supplement his minuscule paycheck with some private crime—gun running, money laundering, the odd drug deal—Carlos values the idea of justice highly. When a foreign visitor with a taste for blue movies starring Mexican teenage girls is murdered in his hotel room, Carlos puts all his energies into trying to track down the killer. (Bitter Lemon [www.bitterlemonpress.com], $13.95 paper 167p ISBN 1-904738-04-4)

Crime fiction doesn't get much weirder than Duane Swierczynski's debut mystery, Secret Dead Men. Deceased detective Del Farmer, who has somehow learned to collect souls (and house them inside himself in a "Brain Hotel" complete with lobby, swimming pool and pub), engages in a postmortem quest to expose the group of gangsters he dubs "the Association." Unfortunately, the muddled execution doesn't measure up to the highly unusual concept. (Point Blank [www.pointblankpress.com], $31.95 204p ISBN 1-930997-59-0; $15.95 paper ISBN 1-930997-58-2)

Byline: Mickey Spillane, edited by Max Allan Collins and Lynn F. Myers Jr., offers a wealth of rare Spillane material: two Mike Hammer cases in short story form that later appeared as novels, the transcript of a Mike Hammer playlet, 14 articles by Spillane and more. The cloth collector's edition includes an audio CD with three Mike Hammer adventures, one of which features Spillane himself in the role of Hammer. (Crippen & Landru [www.crippenlandru.com], $48 224p ISBN 1-885941-98-6; $20 paper ISBN 1-885941-99-4)