Fast Company (Paperback or Softback)

A hardboiled rare book detective seeks a literate killer to clear an innocent man.

Joel Crisp knows the dark side of the rare book market. A private detective for an insurer of valuable tomes, he makes his living (and his own book allowance) hunting down pilfered volumes and exposing the dealers that traffic them. But when one of the most reviled of these unscrupulous salesmen is found bludgeoned with a bust of Dante and suspicion falls on an innocent kid, Joel finds himself investigating his first murder.

Aided by his clever wife Garda, Joel is led on a perilous tour of a bookish underworld, a place of forbidden texts, contraband, and desire; a place with secrets to die for. If he’s going to survive, he’ll need quick wit and a whole lot of literary expertise to interpret the clues and discover whodunit. 

Pseudonymously written by screenwriter, playwright, and novelist Harry Kurnitz, Fast Company is a memorable and entertaining detective novel with a unique setting, reissued for the first time this century. In 1938, the novel was adapted for the MGM film of the same name, the first of three that featured Joel and Garda investigating murders in the rare book world.

Marco Page (1908–1968) was the mystery pseudonym of novelist, playwright, and screenwriter Harry Kurnitz. His first book, Fast Company, won the Dodd, Mead Red Badge Prize for Best First Mystery Novel. He wrote only a few more novels but is credited with over forty screenplays, including Witness for the Prosecution, several Thin Man pictures, and William Wyler’s How to Steal a Million.

Nicholas A. Basbanes is the author of nine works of cultural history, with a particular emphasis on various aspects of books, book history, and book culture. In addition to his books, Basbanes has written for numerous newspapers, magazines, and journals, including The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Washington Post, and lectures widely on a variety of cultural subjects. Among his most well-known titles are A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books and On Paper: The Everything of Its Two Thousand Year History.