The Instant Enemy

Generations of murder, greed and deception come home to roost in time for the most shocking conclusion ever in a Lew Archer novel. At first glance, it's an open-and-shut missing persons case: a headstrong daughter has run off to be with her hothead juvenile delinquent boyfriend. That is until this bush-league Bonnie & Clyde kidnap Stephen Hackett, a local millionaire industrialist. Now, Archer is offered a cool 100 Gs for his safe return by his coquettish heiress mother who has her own mysterious ties to this disturbed duo. But the deeper Archer digs, the more he realizes that nothing is as it seems and everything is questionable. Is the boyfriend a psycho ex-con with murder on the brain or a damaged youngster trying to straighten out his twisted family tree? And is the daughter simply his nympho sex-kitten companion in crime or really a fragile kid, trying to block out horrific memories of bad acid and an unspeakable sex crime?

Since their inception, detective novels have been a wildly successful genre of American fiction, featuring a uniquely American belief in rugged individualism. This book focuses on Raymond Chandler’s creation of Philip Marlowe, a detective whose feeling for community and willingness to compromise radically changed the genre’s vigilantism and violence. It compares Chandler’s work to early and mid–20th century American detective novels, particularly those by John Carroll Daly, Mickey Spillane, Dashiell Hammett and Ross Macdonald, as well as contemporary British detective fiction, highlighting Chandler’s contribution to the American genre.

Contributions by Jacob Agner, Sarah Gilbreath Ford, Katie Berry Frye, Michael Kreyling, Andrew B. Leiter, Rebecca Mark, Suzanne Marrs, Tom Nolan, Michael Pickard, Harriet Pollack, and Victoria Richard Eudora Welty’s ingenious play with readers’ expectations made her a cunning writer, a paramount modernist, a short story artist of the first rank, and a remarkable literary innovator. In her signature puzzle-texts, she habitually engages with familiar genres and then delights readers with her transformations and nonfulfillment of conventions. Eudora Welty and Mystery: Hidden in Plain Sight reveals how often that play is with mystery, crime, and detective fiction genres, popular fiction forms often condescended to in literary studies, but unabashedly beloved by Welty throughout her lifetime. Put another way, Welty often creates her stories’ secrets by both evoking and displacing crime fiction conventions. Instead of restoring order with a culminating reveal, her story-puzzles characteristically allow mystery to linger and thicken. The mystery pursued becomes mystery elsewhere. The essays in this collection shift attention from narratives, characters, and plots as they have previously been understood by unearthing enigmas hidden within those constructions. Some of these new readings continue Welty’s investigation of hegemonic whiteness and southern narratives of race—outlining these in chalk as outright crime stories. Other essays show how Welty anticipated the regendering of the form now so characteristic of contemporary women mystery writers. Her tender and widely ranging personal correspondence with the hard-boiled American crime writer Ross Macdonald is also discussed. Together these essays make the case that across her career, Eudora Welty was arguably one of the genre’s greatest double agents, and, to apply the titles of Macdonald’s novels to her inventiveness with the form, she is its “underground woman,” its unexpected “sleeping beauty.”

From his vantage point in Southern California—and through the eyes of his great creation, private eye Lew Archer—Ross Macdonald (the pseudonymn of Kenneth Millar) fashions a haunting, startlingly immediate vision of modern America: a swirling mix of sexual exploitation, intergenerational conflict, racial animosities, and ecological disaster. In Black Money, Archer is hired to find a wealthy man gone missing and soon finds himself investigating a suspicious seven-year-old suicide. The case becomes a peeling away of many levels of deception, delusion, and false identity. Exploring themes of immigration and border-crossing central to Macdonald’s own life, Black Money also pays homage to The Great Gatsby, one of his favorite books. The Instant Enemy begins with Archer’s search for a runaway teenage daughter and her troubled, possibly murderous boyfriend, a search that uncovers a morass of hidden wrongs. In an emotionally intense work that reflects the chaos and conflicts of his family’s troubled past, Macdonald gives indelible and ultimately tragic expression to the generational conflict and drug culture of the DJHCs. An investigation into “a rather peculiar burglary” takes a drastic turn with the discovery of a body in an abandoned car on a beach in The Goodbye Look, the book that sealed Macdonald’s reputation as the preeminent crime novelist of his time. Tracking a stolen heirloom, Archer follows a trail of violence that lays bare a miasma of buried secrets and unforgotten traumas. “In our day,” wrote Eudora Welty, “it is for such a novel as The Underground Man that the detective form exists.” A raging wildfire stirred by the Santa Ana winds serves as prelude to a chain of kidnapping and murder. Youthful rebellion is pitted against the hypocrisies of the older generation in a novel, in Welty’s estimation, “not only exhilaratingly well done; it is also very moving.” LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

If you thought The Manchurian Candidate was fiction or John Farris's The Fury, which featured a CIA mind-control program run amok, was the stuff of an overheated imagination, you were sorely mistaken. From behind the cloak of U.S. military secrecy comes the story of Star Gate, the project that for nearly a quarter of a century trained soldiers and civilian spies in extra-sensory perception (ESP). Their objective: To search out the secrets of America's cold war enemies using a skill called "remote viewing." Paul H. Smith, a U.S. Army Major, was one of these viewers. Assigned to the remote viewing unit in 1983 at a pivotal time in its history, Smith served for the rest of the decade, witnessing and taking part in many of the seminal national-security crises of the twentieth century. With the Star Gate secrets declassified and the program mothballed by the Central Intelligence Agency, the story can now be told of the ordinary soldiers drafted onto the battlefield of human consciousness. Using hundreds of interviews with the key players in the Star Gate program, and gathering thousands of pages of documents, Smith opens the records on this remarkable chapter in American military, scientific, and cultural history. He reveals many secrets about how remote viewing works and how it was used against enemy targets. Among these stories are the search for hostages in Lebanon; spying on Soviet directed energy weapons; investigating the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland; tracking foreign testing of weapons of mass destruction; combating narco-trafficking off America's coasts; aiding in the Iranian hostage situation; finding KGB moles in the CIA; pursuing Middle East terrorists; and more. Between the lines in the official records are revelations about unrelenting attempts from within and without to destroy the remote viewing program, and the efforts that kept Star Gate going for more than two decades in spite of its enemies. This is a story for the believer and the skeptic---a rare look at the innards of a top secret program and an eye-opening treatise on the power of the human mind to transcend the limitations of space and time. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

The streets of Anchorage, Alaska are just as grimy as any other major city in the United States. Where young men are made or broken. In this suspense-thriller about Faizon and Myron, two young men who get dumped in Alaska by circumstance. They are forced to become friends and move their way up the ladder of street success finally peaking out as hired goons for a big time dopeman Money Mike. On this thrill-ride no one is spared. Snitches, pimps, crooked cops, and dirty politicians are all victims to there street level justice. It will all come to an end when a series of twisted events sends a childhood friendship into a pit of burning fire. Faizon will try to put things back together the only way he knows how but when the smoke clears he will see who really is the enemy of his enemy.