Dressed to Kill - Ozaki, Milton

. .

Résumé :
The car was hot, and so was the blonde who drove it. A smart shamus like Rusty Forbes should have known better than to hole up with her in a tourist cabin. By the time that little picnic was over, he found himself custodian of a corpse-and on the trail of enough loot to stock a department store. Too bad for Rusty that some of Chicago's rougher citizens viewed the situation with alarm. It wasn't enough that the corpse brought the cops down on him. He also had to battle a horde of hoodlums... Fortunately, the hot blonde had a cool friend-even bigger and blonder. She gave Rusty, among other things, a tip on how to come out of the deal with a buck or two. Whereupon he quit being a fugitive from justice and dished it out instead-with the aid of his pet .38 equalizer! First published in 1954.

Biographie:
Milton Ozaki was an American writer of mystery, crime, and suspense fiction whose novels belong to the energetic world of mid-twentieth-century paperback crime publishing. Working in a period when hard-boiled mysteries, noir-tinged thrillers, and compact murder novels found a large audience through inexpensive paperbacks and magazine-style storytelling, Ozaki wrote fiction designed for speed, atmosphere, danger, and immediate reader involvement. His work often features crime, deception, investigation, violence, and the tense moral uncertainty that gives vintage noir and hard-boiled fiction its lasting appeal.Ozaki's books remain of interest to readers who enjoy forgotten and rediscovered crime writers, mid-century American mystery fiction, vintage paperback originals, and the darker side of popular fiction. Though less famous than the major canonical names of the genre, he represents the strong second line of crime writers who helped fill the racks with murder, menace, and suspense during the classic paperback era. His novels continue to appeal to readers looking for compact, atmospheric, fast-paced crime fiction beyond the usual familiar names....

Sommaire:
Dressed to Kill is a fast-moving vintage crime novel of murder, suspicion, and danger dressed in the sharp clothes of mid-century noir. Milton Ozaki gives readers the kind of lean, hard-edged mystery that made paperback crime fiction irresistible: desperate motives, sudden violence, uneasy glamour, and a world where appearances are often the first lie. The title promises style, but the story moves through darker territory, where beauty, fear, money, and murder are never far apart. Ozaki's fiction belongs to the tough, compact world of classic American crime writing, where the pace is quick, the stakes are personal, and every clue may point toward another betrayal. Dressed to Kill offers the pleasures of the form: menace, investigation, atmosphere, dangerous attraction, and the sense that no one is quite as innocent as they look. For readers who enjoy vintage mysteries and noir-leaning crime novels, Ozaki delivers a brisk story built for momentum. This Black Curtain Books edition is suited to readers of classic crime fiction, hard-boiled mystery, vintage paperback noir, mid-century suspense, murder mysteries, and forgotten crime writers of the 1940s and 1950s. Dressed to Kill is a strong fit for fans of compact, atmospheric crime novels where style conceals violence and the truth waits behind a carefully arranged surface....