Bogus Lover (Paperback or Softback)

A vintage sleaze-noir classic, back in print for the first time in over 60 years, with a new introduction by Bill Pronzini, a Mystery Writers of America Grand Master and recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Private Eye Writers of America.

Ex-cop Anthony Ceaser sells and services pinball machines in San Francisco...but still packs a .45 to protect himself. He's clumsily framed murdering a man who is carrying some cash with serial numbers that match a half-a-million dollars in unrecovered loot from a deadly armoned car heist years ago. All but one of the robbers were caught, jailed and executed for their crimes...but the money was never found. Now the marked bills are showing up in Ceaser's neighborhood. Who is trying to frame him... and why? Ceaser is determined to find out, pitting himself against ruthless women, crooked cops, corrupt lawyers, and vicious thugs.

"In the spring of 1960, when I was still an impressionable teenager, a middle-aged Petaluma chicken rancher named Hy Silver published his first and only mystery novel. It caused quite a stir locally – a bigger stink in certain circles than all of Hy’s chickens combined. What fueled the flap was the presence in the novel of four elements: homosexuality and transvestitism, four-letter words (this was 1960, remember), Mike Hammer-type violence, and steamy sex (heterosexual). Bogus Lover has its fair share of all four, though all are tame by today’s standards. If, from the foregoing, you deduce that Bogus Lover is a dog, you are so right. It is in fact a woofer of Alternative Classic dimensions. Be that as it may, the uncritical 17-year-old fledgling writer was captivated by every word of it..." -- Bill Pronzini, from his introduction.