Lead With Your Left - Lacy, Ed

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Résumé :
It was a few minutes before eleven when I unlocked our door. The dumb lamp we had in the two-by-four foyer was on. The lamp looked like a drippy flower and cost fifty-seven bucks strictly because it was imported from Denmark. If all their lamps are like this job they must be blind over there. I could just about make out the couch opened as a bed, was surprised Mary was in the hay so early. I called out softly, Babes? She didn't answer.

Biographie:
Ed Lacy was the pen name of Leonard Zinberg (1911-1968), an American novelist and crime writer best known for hardboiled, noir, and socially alert mystery fiction. He wrote a substantial body of mid-century crime novels, including Lead With Your Left, The Best That Ever Did It, Room to Swing, Breathe No More, My Lady, and other works that combined speed, urban detail, violence, and moral unease. His fiction often moves through police work, private investigation, political pressure, race, class, and the compromises of American city life.Lacy's best-known novel, Room to Swing, won the Edgar Award and helped distinguish him from many paperback-era crime writers by combining hardboiled momentum with social observation and a willingness to confront American racism more directly than much crime fiction of its period. In Lead With Your Left, Lacy brings that same practical toughness to the police procedural, following a young detective through the detail work, danger, and uncertainty of a murder case. For readers of classic noir, hardboiled mystery, vintage police novels, and mid-century American crime fiction, Ed Lacy remains a strong and under-read name....

Sommaire:
Lead With Your Left is Ed Lacy's hardboiled police novel of murder, pressure, and dogged investigation in mid-century New York. David Wintino, a young NYPD detective, is drawn into the killing of a former policeman, a case that refuses to stay simple as it opens onto old grudges, hidden motives, and the difficult work behind every apparently straightforward crime. Lacy gives the police procedural a hardboiled edge: street detail, bruised humour, stubborn digging, and a world where violence leaves more questions than answers. First published in 1957, Lead With Your Left introduced David Wintino and belongs naturally beside Lacy's other crime novels, including Room to Swing, The Best That Ever Did It, and Breathe No More, My Lady. Contemporary catalogue descriptions identify the book as a classic hardboiled crime novel following a young NYPD detective over the course of a week in his hunt for the killer of two retired policemen. Lacy's fiction is lean, urban, and socially alert, with crime treated less as a puzzle than as pressure applied to ordinary people, institutions, and loyalties. For readers of hardboiled detective fiction, vintage police procedurals, New York crime novels, paperback noir, and mid-century American mystery, Lead With Your Left is a sharp, compact example of Ed Lacy's crime writing: tough, observant, and built around the slow, unglamorous labour of finding what the killer tried to hide....