42 Days for Murder - Torrey, Roger

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Résumé :
A nightclub piano player turned private detective has six weeks to find a missing woman in Reno, and every day pushes him deeper into corruption, vice, and murder. Shean Connell comes to town on what first looks like a domestic job: a wealthy man's wife has gone to Reno for a divorce, and he wants to know why. But Reno is no quiet refuge. Behind the city's easy-divorce business are gangsters, crooked officials, dope runners, prostitution rackets, blackmail, and men who know how to make trouble disappear. First published in 1938, 42 Days for Murder is Roger Torrey's only novel and a hardboiled private-eye story from one of the writers associated with Black Mask magazine. The title's forty-two days are the six weeks required for a Reno divorce, giving Connell a deadline and the plot a tightening clock. Review and bibliographic sources identify the novel as the first Shean Connell book, originally published by Hillman-Curl in 1938, and note Connell's role as a private detective drawn into the wife's disappearance and the city's criminal underworld. For readers of classic noir, hardboiled detective fiction, Reno crime novels, pulp private eyes, and Depression-era American crime writing, 42 Days for Murder is exactly the sort of tough, neglected Black Curtain title worth bringing back....

Biographie:
Roger Torrey (1901-1946), sometimes identified as Roger Denzel Torrey, was an American pulp writer best known for hardboiled crime and detective fiction. He published extensively in the detective magazines of the 1930s and 1940s, including Black Mask, where his tough, fast-moving stories placed him among the writers who helped define the private-eye and hardboiled tradition. The Thrilling Detective site describes him as one of the Black Mask Boys and notes that, despite writing only one novel, he produced a substantial body of pulp crime fiction that has remained under-reprinted and under-recognised.Torrey's fiction is rooted in the working materials of Depression-era crime writing: private detectives, grifters, crooked police, cheap rooms, violence, rackets, sex, liquor, money, and men trying to survive in dirty systems. 42 Days for Murder, first published in 1938, is his only novel and features Shean Connell, a nightclub pianist turned private detective operating in a Reno where divorce law, gambling, vice, and organised crime all cross paths. For readers of classic hardboiled fiction, Black Mask writers, pulp private eyes, noir, and neglected American crime novels, Torrey is a strong rediscovery....