Enter Without Desire - Lacy, Ed

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Résumé :
I sat there, waiting in this dull Bronx back yard, the gun in my right pocket, safety off. It was simple... wait till he was on top of me, one shot in the heart... then run across the lot to the car. Sid had an ordinary looking heap; nobody would notice it, or the license number. The license number-that was one of the chances I had to take-one of the too-many chances. But this would work, if my luck held out. IF... IF... Damn, I hoped to hell he didn't have a wife and kids, looked too young for that, but even if he did-I had a wife and kid, too. God knows I didn't want to kill this detective, but I was caught in this web, had to do it. Had to... No point in thinking about that-more important to think of some way of disposing of the gun. Couldn't pull the same gag about losing it on Tony again. Well, have to work that out, somehow. Sloppy thinking on my part not to plan.... Hell with plans, no time for it. Not like the other one. Marshal Jameson, the promising young sculptor, sitting on his butt in a strange Bronx back yard on a sunny afternoon... carefully planning his second murder. I grinned, a sour, nervous grin-I was damn near bawling. Me, who'd never hurt a fly, waiting with a gun for a... I heard a car stop in front of the house. It was five to three. The dick was on time. I stood up and peered around the corner of the alley. He was alone. I waited: no running from this, no backing out. Or was killing the easy way out for me?

Biographie:
Ed Lacy was the principal pseudonym of Leonard S. Zinberg (1911-1968), an American writer of crime, mystery, and suspense fiction. Working largely in the paperback-original marketplace, Lacy wrote fast, direct, socially alert crime novels that drew on urban pressure, violence, class tension, moral compromise, and the ways ordinary people can be driven into dangerous choices. His fiction belongs to the hard-boiled and noir tradition, but it often carries a sharper social awareness than the formula might suggest.Lacy's best-known novel, Room to Swing, introduced private detective Toussaint Moore and won the 1958 Edgar Award for Best Novel. That book remains especially important for its use of a Black private investigator at a time when American detective fiction rarely gave such a role serious treatment. Alongside Room to Swing, Lacy produced a substantial body of paperback crime fiction, including Sin in Their Blood, Strip for Violence, Enter Without Desire, Go for the Body, and Blonde Bait. Enter Without Desire, first published by Avon in 1954, stands among his earlier paperback originals and shows the lean, unsparing crime style that made his work a natural fit for mid-century noir readers....

Sommaire:
A tough, fast-moving noir novel of temptation, pressure, and bad choices, Enter Without Desire shows Ed Lacy working in the lean paperback-original tradition of mid-century American crime fiction. In Enter Without Desire, ordinary life gives way to danger, suspicion, and moral compromise. Lacy's world is one where desire is rarely innocent, money sharpens every weakness, and men and women under pressure discover how quickly caution can collapse. The novel moves with the blunt speed of 1950s paperback crime: direct prose, hard choices, emotional heat, and the steady sense that one wrong move may close every exit. First published by Avon in 1954, Enter Without Desire belongs to the early run of Ed Lacy's paperback originals, written before his Edgar-winning Room to Swing brought wider recognition. It is the kind of compact crime novel that made the paperback era so commercially powerful: short, sharp, unsentimental, and built around people who are already too deep in trouble before they understand the cost. This Black Curtain Books edition is suited to readers of vintage noir, hard-boiled crime fiction, paperback originals, mid-century American suspense, and the darker tradition of crime novels driven by appetite, fear, and consequence....