Bet Your Own Man

His streets are mean--indeed the meanest! Twenty years ago, The Drood Review wrote the statement above, citing that if "hardboiled" was intended to represent alienation, cynicism, and violence, that no one did it better than C.J. Henderson. They were not the only one. The Armchair Detective, Ellery Queen, Mystery Detective Monthly, Mean Streets, Locus and hundreds of venues like them, have praised Henderson as one of the greatest hardboiled writers of all time. They understood hardboiled is not a genre, but an attitude--one that involves viewing the world through a brutally honest lens and being unafraid to report what one sees. It is this unflinching attitude, coupled with an undeniably rhythmic style and sense of story-telling that caused New Mystery to "If, as some argue, the hardboiled private eye mystery story is a literary form on a par with the Japanese haiku or Irish ballad, then Mr. Henderson deserves the mantle of literary master." Inside this one-of-a-kind volume, you will find tales of war, lust, revenge, hate and madness, stories of ordinary men and women in extraordinary circumstances, all of them forced to make the hardest choices life has to offer. These twenty classic tales--whether mystery, fantasy, horror or science fiction--edited by and with accompanying commentary from Jack Dolphin, comprise the best of C.J. Henderson's hardboiled tales. And friend, that's saying a lot!