Author: Max Phillips
Pages: 220
From the cover: “She Was A Little Taste Of Heaven… And A One-Way Ticket to Hell!”

A few years ago Terry Gross interviewed Charles Ardai, the founder of Hard Case Crime, a publisher that reprints old pulp novels as some new works in the genre. The big selling point for these books is that they are all sold in paperback and many have original artwork designed in the styles from the mid last century. I started buying them up wherever I could find them (and in typical OCD fashion, trying to do so in the order in which they were published). I currently have a shelf with 14 of them on it. Fade To Blonde was the first new book Hard Case Crime released. Perhaps the best thing I could say about it is that I had no idea until I read about it after the fact. The pages drip with that great early 60s LA imagery. Hot cars, diners, night clubs, of course the blondes, the whole package. The plot is hardly a consideration: there’s a mysterious girl who may or may not be who she says she is; there’s a tough wanna-be screenwriter working construction and looking for money; crime bosses; stag films; violence, sex and nudity; and sentences like these:

A slim brunette with a neck like a gazelle appeared at my shoulder, wearing about as much cloth of gold as you’d need to keep the chill off a canary. She set a fresh gimlet in front of me as if she were kissing her baby goodnight. Burri watched me taste it and looked pleased when I nodded. It was as good as the first.

I love that shit. For the first book of my 2010 reading marathon, I think I picked a good place to start.