Black Lace

New York: Vantage Press, Inc.. Near Fine in Very Good+ dj. (c.1952). First Edition. Hardcover. [nice tight clean copy, minor wear to cloth at spine ends; jacket similarly nice, with a touch of wear and a tiny hole at top of spine]. Hard-boiled vanity press gangster novel, which opens in Las Vegas but moves along to Chicago pretty quickly and stays there. Per the jacket blurb, it's "a swiftly-paced, expertly-told tale of guys and dolls in the mid 1930s, when depression and prohibition played a game with loaded dice for the souls of ordinary, decent people." (Somebody should've mentioned to the copywriter that Prohibition was well over and done with by the "mid 1930s.") It might have actually been a more interesting book if the whole thing had taken place in pre-war Vegas, which was a radically different place than it became after the major development of the Strip began in the 1940s. The author was a Louisville native who started writing stories in his spare time when serving with the U.S. Army in Sicily during World War II; "his stories proved popular with his buddies and one of these stories he expanded into 'Black Lace.'" In his photo on the rear jacket panel, he's going for the full Hammettesque shamus look: slouch hat, cigarette dangling from his lips, posed in front of a brick wall, every inch the aspiring tough guy. .