Case Pending - Softcover

Shannon, Dell

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0373630484 ISBN 13: 9780373630486

Publisher: Worldwide, 1982

Synopsis

Case Pending, first published in 1960, is author Dell Shannon's first book in the long-popular Lieutenant Luis Mendoza mystery series. Mendoza has the distinction of being one of the first portrayals of a Latino police officer as well as being an early example of a police procedural novel. The plot begins with the discovery of a murdered girl. From the book's dust-jacket: “The girl's battered body was found in an empty lot in a Southern California city. Though Detective-Sergeant Hackett disliked his superior on the case, Lieutenant Luis Mendoza, he had to respect the way Mendoza started out to find who had killed the girl. There were almost no clues, it seemed, even after the police had identified the victim—Elena Ramirez, whose hair was peroxided and who had been killed on her lonely way home from a roller-skating rink. Then later there was the doll—a large, expensive doll that seemed to have vanished. And, unknown to Mendoza, there was young Martin Lindstrom, big for his age, a good student, who found a spot of blood on the sleeve of his jacket and thought to himself miserably, not again, not again. But when he brought his worries to his strict, hard-working mother, she told him to be quiet, to forget it, to get on with his homework. Dell Shannon, whose first mystery this is, has written an engrossing, moving story of a most believable and horrible crime, and the people in the novel are people such as one might find in any Southern California town, people whose skins are varied in color and whose backgrounds are everyday poor and middle-class, respectable and less so. And she has created in Luis Mendoza a working policeman of real distinction.” Dell Shannon was a pseudonym for Elizabeth Linington (1921-1988), who wrote more than 80 crime fiction books.

About this title

About the Author

In her 67 years, California author Elizabeth Linington wrote 82 crime fiction novels, under her own name as well as the aliases Anne Blaisdell, Lesley Egan, Egan O'Neill and Dell Shannon. Her writing evolved from the early radio and stage dramas, via historical narratives, to her most celebrated novels - mysteries. She was nominated for Edgars in 1961, 1962 and 1963 for Case Pending, Nightmare and Knave of Hearts respectively. Her most successful creation, debonair LAPD Lieutenant Luis Mendoza, broke new ground in being one of the first Latino police officers in the procedural genre, and Linington herself was a pioneer in a male-dominated industry, earning the moniker 'Queen of the Procedurals'.

Edition details

• Publisher: Worldwide
• Publication date: 1982
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0373630484
• ISBN 13: 9780373630486
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 220