Photo: Brad Kemp / AP Photo / TT (2001)
Sample of authors
Burke, James Lee
James Lee Burke is an American author of Irish descent born in Houston, Texas, and brought up on the Texas-Louisiana Gulf Coast. His father died in a road accident when James Lee Burke was eighteen years old. Burke enrolled at the University of Southwestern Louisiana, Lafayette, in 1955 and transferred to the University of Missouri, Columbia, in 1957, where he read journalism and graduated with...
Literary figures
Johnny Métal
Gender: Male
Hardboiled crime reporter, based in New York, where he is also busy infiltrating organised crime. He usually acts more as a private detective than as a journalist. Métal is the main character in half a dozen detective stories packed with cliches and written by Frank Harding, a pseudonym of the French author Léo Malet, who was strongly inspired by Dashiell Hammett when he wrote the novels.