Photo: Louis Monier/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images (1999)
Sample of authors
Crumley, James
The American author and teacher James Arthur Crumley never reached bestseller status. However, he was instrumental in the development of hardboiled crime fiction from the 1970s onwards.
Crumley was born at Three Rivers, southern Texas. His father was an oil field foreman and his mother a waitress. The family was poor; his mother forced her son to attend church, but she never went herself since...
Literary figures
Leonidas Witherall
Gender: Male
He is often called William or Bill by his friends, since in appearance he is extremely like the portrait of William Shakespeare. However, Leonidas Witherall is not a man of the theatre: he is an unmarried former headmaster who was ruined during the depression in the 1930s and now supports himself by writing pulp detective fiction in Boston. There he also solves mysterious cases in eight books by...