Amphetamines and Pearls & the Geranium Kiss

Two novels introduce the violent mysteries of Scott Mitchell, the toughest detective in London, who taught the British Isles what it means to be hardboiled.

Amphetamines and Pearls marked the debut of Scott Mitchell, a down-on-his-luck London PI who ventures to Nottingham for the sake of an old friend, iconic singer Candi Carter. Mitchell finds Carter dead in her living room, a trickle of blood coming from her mouth and a bullet hole in her chest. Her body is still warm. But before he can get out of there, he’s blackjacked, and when he comes to, he’s picked up by a pair of cops who beat him senseless and drag him to the nearest cell. Mitchell is having a hell of a day--and things will only get worse from here.

In The Geranium Kiss, Mitchell takes a job from Crosby Blake, one of the most powerful men in London--and one of the most dangerous. Blake’s niece, Cathy, has been kidnapped, and he wants Mitchell to handle the ransom payment. The kidnappers want 20,000, and about 20,000 things will go wrong before this case is finished. To bring Cathy home alive, Mitchell will have to untangle a web of deadly lies that threaten to bind him tighter with every question he asks.

Written in the hardboiled spirit of Raymond Chandler and John D. MacDonald, the Scott Mitchell novels are a unique hybrid of American and British mysteries. Created by John Harvey, who would later create the legendary sleuth Charlie Resnick, these novels are as tough as they come.

John Harvey (b. 1938) is an incredibly prolific British mystery writer. The author of more than one hundred books, as well as poetry and scripts for television and radio, Harvey did not begin writing professionally until 1975. Until then he was a teacher, educated at Goldsmiths College, London, who taught literature, drama, and film at colleges across England. After cutting his teeth on paperback fiction, Harvey debuted his most famous character, Charlie Resnick, in 1989’s Lonely Hearts, which the English Times called one of the finest crime novels of the century.

A police inspector noted for his love of both sandwiches and jazz, Resnick has starred in eleven novels and one volume of short stories. The BBC has adapted two of the Resnick novels, Lonely Hearts and Rough Treatment (1990), for television movies. Both starred Academy Award-nominated actor Tom Wilkinson and had screenplays written by Harvey. Besides writing fiction, Harvey spent over twenty years as the head of Slow Dancer Press. He continues to live and write in London.