Twospot: The Nameless Detective

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 Born in Detroit, Michigan, his first book was The Black Door (1967) featuring a sleuth possessing extrasensory perception. His major series of novels was about Lieutenant Frank Hastings of the San Francisco Police Department. Titles in the Hastings series included Hire a Hangman, Dead Aim, Hiding Place, Long Way Down and Stalking Horse. Two of his last books, Full Circle and Find Her a Grave, featured a new hero-sleuth, Alan Bernhardt, an eccentric theater director. Wilcox also published under the pseudonym ＂Carter Wick＂. Wilcox’s most famous series-detective was the television character Sam McCloud, a New Mexico deputy solving New York crime. The ＂urban cowboy＂ was played by Dennis Weaver in the 1970-1977 TV series McCloud. Wilcox wrote three novelizations based on scripts from the series: McCloud (1973), The New Mexican Connection (1974), and The Park Avenue Executioner (1975).