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
William Tobin
Gender: Male
A police detective in New York with a university education – he graduated from Princetown in 1918 – and the main character in three novels by Dorothy B. Hughes. William ‘Toby’ Tobin is small of stature, with a thin face. Yet he acts with considerable poise, and he speaks so sharply that the words ‘fall like hailstones’. Little is known about his private life, but he smokes heavily and does not lik...