The Snatch: Nameless Detective

＂A skilled writer working at the top of his ability.＂-Denver Post

In his first chronicled adventure, the Nameless detective hires on to handle the ransom payoff in a kidnapping case. Financier Louis Martinetti doesn’t trust the police to deal with the man who snatched his 9-year-old son from his military prep school, nor is it clear that he trusts the members of his own household. On the appointed evening, Nameless takes a briefcase that contains ＄300,000 in cash to a secluded location chosen by the kidnapper. Then all hell breaks loose.

Bill Pronzini is simply one of the masters. He seems to have taken a crack at just about every genre: mysteries, noirish thrillers, historicals, locked-room mysteries, adventure novels, spy capers, men’s action, westerns, and, of course, his masterful, long-running Nameless private detective series, now entering its fourth decade, with no signs of creative flagging. He’s also ghosted several Brett Halliday short stories as Michael Shayne for Mike Shayne’s Mystery Magazine, and has managed to collaborate with such fellow writers as John Lutz, Barry Wahlberg, Collin Wilcox and Marcia Muller. Still, if he never ventured into fiction writing, his non-fiction work, as both writer and editor, would still earn him a place in the P.I. genre’s Hall of Fame. Besides his two tributes to some of the very worst in crime fiction (what he calls ＂alternative classics＂), Gun in Cheek and Son of Gun in Cheek, and one on western fiction (entitled Six Gun in Cheek, naturally), he’s the co-author (with Marcia Muller) of 1001 Midnights. The Mystery Writers of America have nominated him for Edgar Awards several times and his work has been translated into numerous languages and he’s published in almost thirty countries. He was the very first president of the Private Eye Writers of America, and he’s received three Shamus Awards from them, as well as its Lifetime Achievement Award in 1987.