Seven Slayers

By Paul Cain and Paul (pseudonym of George Carrol Sims).

Book Overview

Seven brutally ingenius tales of murder passionate and cold-blooded, written by a poet of the hard-boiled. There's Black, a stranger in town, who gets drafted into a gang war just because he had the bad luck to trip over a corpse on his way from the station.??There's the glamorous Bella, whose boyfriends have the distressing habit of stabbing one another while she naps in the next room.??And of course there's Johnny Doolin, who hires himself out as a bodyguard--only to find that his client has no interest in staying alive. The men and women inSeven Slayersare exactly what the title promises:??people who kill for love or money or for the sheer, perverse joy of homicide.??And this riveting collection is one of the few surviving books by Paul Cain (aka Peter Ruric, aka George Sims), a hard-drinking, enigmatic writer of the 1930s who had as many pseudonyms as he had wives and of whom Raymond Chandler wrote that he had reached in his fiction "a high point in the hard-boiled manner."

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0679751858
• ISBN13: 9780679751854
• Release Date: March 1994
• Publisher: Vintage Books USA
• Length: 147 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.2" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Makes most other noir writing seem pallid

Absolutely the most brutal, riveting crime stories I've ever read....the characters live in a remorseless, alternate universe which makes ordinary reality seem like a respite...I liked these better than his novel, FAST ONE...the closest literary equivalent to the toughest crime radio of the 40's, as well..oh, yeah..

Seven tough stories by long-neglected Black Mask contributor

If you're a fan of Hammett, Chandler, Thompson, Goodis, et al, you owe it to yourself to read anything you can get your hands on by Paul Cain. His characters live outside the law and in the depths of the Depression, and are invariably without hope or anything resembling a future. Someone always ends up dead, and deservedly so. These are not random or remorseless killings, though, they are full of passion and betrayal, and when some mug gets a belly full of lead you understand only too well why he had it coming. James M. Cain (no relation) was a powder puff compared to this guy. Highly recommended