Ordering a book called SCOUTS IN BONDAGE might land you on an FBI red-flag database. Luckily for you and your arrest record, SCOUTS IN BONDAGE AND OTHER VIOLATIONS OF LITERARY PROPERTY will get you into no such trouble.

Edited by UK secondhand bookseller Michael Bell, this slim volume is an impressive collection of questionably impressive tomes from simpler times, when one thing meant something entirely different than it does today. Thus, we get covers for meant-to-be-totally-innocent books like 50 FAGGOTS and INVISIBLE DICK.

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The fine folks over at Black Lizard/Vintage Crime are reissuing some of Ross Macdonald’s harder-to-find titles, slapping a nice new coat of paint on some truly great noir. First and foremost, their covers are a huge improvement over the other Macdonald books they have put out … or maybe I’m just a sucker for black-and-white photos of girls smoking.

From 1951, THE WAY SOME PEOPLE DIE is the third of Macdonald’s Lew Archer detective novels, and one of the more bloody ones, racking up a nice-sized body count by the end. What starts out as just a case of finding an adult daughter for a woman who won’t let go turns into double-crosses and drug-running.

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One thing I took away from reading SHOWCASE PRESENTS BATGIRL: VOLUME 1, featuring the first adventures of Barbara Gordon, librarian turned superheroine: It’s amazing how many criminals frequent the library. Daughter of Gotham City’s Commissioner Gordon, Barbara makes her own costume to step in to help Batman and Robin out with the lawless element every now and then.

But it’s amazing how little respect she gets, just because she’s smoking hot. Even after Barbara gets herself elected to the U.S. Congress – Congress! – Batman refers to her as “a cute, sunshiny little redhead.” Some battles you just can’t win, but then again, you’re making the hill ever steeper when you deliberately tear your tights to distract crooks.

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“Oh, no,” you groan, upon learning of the release of THE HORROR IN THE MUSEUM. “Not another repackaging of H.P. Lovecraft stories we’ve already read and already own.”

“That’s right,” we say. “It’s not repackaging of H.P. Lovecraft stories you’ve already read and already own.”

I’ve read a lot of Lovecraft over the past five years, but even I wasn’t aware that he made more money as a short-story editor and collaborator than he did as an author of same. This new collection from Del Rey finds those rare weird tales that he wrote with amateur writers, completely rewrote, ghostwrote or tweaked. To be honest, you could’ve told me these were 100 percent Lovecraft, and I would’ve believed it, because that’s how they all come off.

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The difficulty with pastiche is when authors attempt to use well-loved characters created by another author. We always are conscious of the differences between how the originating author created his or her world, and how the successors create new stories within that world. This is nowhere more prevalent than with Sherlock Holmes. Few authors ever have been able to recreate the magic conjured by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, but many have tried.

This is why it often seems a wiser move for an author, if they wish to write a Victorian mystery novel featuring two strong characters – one an enigmatic superman and the other a brave and doughty lad – simply to start from scratch and come up with entirely new characters. This is what Will Thomas has done with Cyrus Barker and Thomas Llewelyn in his series, the newest novel of which is THE HELLFIRE CONSPIRACY.

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One wonders if in writing SLIDE, coauthors Ken Bruen and Jason Starr had set out to pen a novel with zero boring parts. Because that’s what it reads like, and that’s what it is. This crime number pulls the cord on page 1 and takes off whether you’re ready or not. “Can you keep up?” it laughs in your face, as it spits in it.

A sequel to last year’s BUST, this rollicking tale of sex, drugs and serial killers begins when disgraced New York computer exec Max Fisher wakes up in Alabama, not remembering anything from the last couple of days. Desperate times call for desperate measures, leading Max to befriend Kyle, the farmboy motel employee who fancies smoking crack every now and then. With promise of a threesome with big-boobed whores, Max wins Kyle over as his right-hand man.

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I think THE SOPRANOS was one of the most overrated TV shows ever. I think the year that they killed off Christopher’s girlfriend, it felt like it was going nowhere fast. From what I understand with how it ended, I was right in my assumption. But enough about that – I still love a good mob movie or series dealing with organized crime, so this week we feature three books with one thing in common: the Cosa Nostra, aka “the Outfit,” the bent-nose bunch. So put away your copy of GOODFELLAS for a minute and take a look at these three under-the-radar titles.

MAFIA: OPERATION HIT MAN by Don Romano – This 1974 book was part of the MAFIA: OPERATION series, but it doesn’t have any sort of continuity, that’s for sure, other than dealing with the mob. This one involves the recruiting and work of the title character: a hit man named Dom Caressimo, a former Vietnam vet who is woken by a group of men in complete darkness, making him a job offer he can’t refuse.

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In the new-in-paperback THE LOOKING GLASS WARS, Frank Beddon has created a genius concept, resulting in one of the more imaginative fantasies in recent memory. A modern-day, action-packed version of Lewis Carroll’s ALICE IN WONDERLAND, Beddon’s conceit is that the fiction was anything but, and the truth was much deadlier and of higher stakes.

His Alice is Alyss Heart, an 8-year-old princess whose good-queen mother rules Wonderland. The girl has the ability to will things to happen – a power she uses for wholly innocent mischief – and all is well in life until her evil, power-hungry Aunt Redd makes a bloody bid for the throne … and gets it.

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Lawrence Block is best known for his crime novels, but luckily for the spy fans, he did not leave us out in the cold, as being reissued all this year is the Evan Tanner series. Tanner is a spy with a weird condition that makes him more special than any kind of agent: During the Korean War, he had a piece of shrapnel hit a part of his brain that affects his sleeping. Actually, it totally knocked out his need for sleep at all.

TANNER’S TWELVE SWINGERS is the third in the series and still a fine introduction to this unusual character. It starts simple enough for him: A friend who is part of a Latvian army living in exile in New York City wants Tanner to bring his sweetheart out of Russia. But what starts out as a somewhat hard job just gets harder as Tanner moves along.

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Mike Resnick is one of the few American writers who really knows how to write about Africa. His “Kirinyaga” stories earned Resnick his first Hugo award in 1989, and while it might be a mistake to say that anyone truly understands a place he isn’t native to, he writes about it as if he grasps some of the subtleties of the hugely diverse and multifaceted continent. IVORY, which was first published in 1988, demonstrates this, along with a Resnick’s flair for solid speculation.

IVORY’s centerpiece is a wonderful imagining of the last days of the Kilimanjaro elephant, a beast whose gigantic tusks – weighing a combined 462 pounds – now reside in the bowels of the British Museum of Natural History. Very little is known about the elephant’s demise, and Resnick’s explanation is as good – if not better – than any.

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Quick takes and capsule reviews from the dark suspense master himself, Ed Gorman!

I often talk about writers who seem to do their best work late in their careers. I’d like to say that about Richard Lupoff’s magnificent, stunning, overwhelming MARBLEHEAD: A NOVEL OF H.P. LOVECRAFT, but even though it was only recently published in its original form, it actually was completed around 1970. But that doesn’t matter. Whenever it was written and published, it’s Lupoff’s masterpiece.

MARBLEHEAD is a faux biography, speculative fiction in the real sense of the term. A good deal of it is actual-factual, which is to say that Lovecraft was just about as loopy as his stories: an old-fashioned New Englander whom God or actually the dark gods chose to plunk down in a century he loathed.

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Perhaps Nancy O. Greene’s PORTRAITS IN THE DARK is about what you don’t see in the darkness. Her short vignettes try to shine some light on what we’re quick to dismiss, ignore, or avoid, and her slim collection of short stories provides a wonderful road map to the damaged psyche.

Greene is a writer in bloom. Crisp and vivid – like old black-and-white photographs you find in a drawer you were never meant to look into – each story sets up an interesting scenario, often leaving you with more questions than answers … and wanting more. The only drawback with her stories is that they’re too short. If the fascinating tales in PORTRAITS IN THE DARK are any indication what we can expect, her full-length work will be something to read.

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Ever wonder what THE FOUNTAINHEAD would have been like if it were written by Aleister Crowley? Of course you have. We all have! But where would one even start to find a book like that?

Let’s all take a collective breath and pick up a copy of THE ARCHITECT, a highly entertaining one-shot, prestige-format graphic novel written by comics legend Mike Baron (NEXUS) with art by Andie Tong.

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Don’t believe the back-cover blurb that pegs Jeff Somers’ THE ELECTRIC CHURCH as “BLADE RUNNER meets KILL BILL.” They got one of the movies wrong, in my opinion. It should read “BLADE RUNNER meets THE DIRTY DOZEN, with a dash of Sergio Leone.” As in many future-set sci-fi novels, the world is a nothing but a dystopian nightmare, where the rich stay that way while everyone else is poor and struggling. Is there any other kind?

Avery Cates is a gunner, hired killer and criminal, taking a nod from the mold that Richard Stark built. He’s drinking in some makeshift bar until the police force turns up. It seem the last job Cates pulled, he killed a undercover officer, under false pretenses. If Cates only had to hide from the cops, that would be easy enough. But in this future, you also have to deal with the monks.

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I almost gave up on Brian Keene’s DEAD SEA, intending to cite the BOOKGASM 100-page rule, to whit: If a book hasn’t engaged and/or maintained your interest by page 100, fugetaboutit. Having read and enjoyed the author’s first two zombie novels – THE RISING and CITY OF THE DEAD – I grabbed this one up with Keene anticipation.

First sentence, bingo: “I didn’t shoot the bitch until she started eating Alan’s face.”

What promise! I mean, what more do you want in a thriller than a bitchy woman, violence, food, friendship and the pleasurable anxiety that accompanies delayed gratification?

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Because time isn’t always kind: economic reviews in a world full of waste!

GOD’S DEMON is by well-known artist Wayne Barlowe, of whom I am a huge fan. He’s a man of fantastic imagination, famous for his portrayals of alien life and landscapes. This time, he sets his sights on Hell and eternal damnation. The war for Heaven has just ended, the losers are banished to Hell, and what follows is a rather complex tale of treachery and – to a certain degree – redemption. I was skeptical at first, but hardcore fans can rest assured that Barlowe writes with the same imagination and passion as he illustrates. GOD’S DEMON is the closest thing we have to a modern-day version of Milton’s PARADISE LOST, which served as inspiration for Barlowe’s latest work of genius. But if you’re like me and fascinated by the man’s imaginative drawings, you also will want to hold out for an illustrated version. –Matt Adder

Don’t be fooled by the subtitle of Stephen Fried’s HUSBANDRY: SEX, LOVE & DIRTY LAUNDRY – INSIDE THE MINDS OF MARRIED MEN. This is no dirty, dishy book of filth; it’s a compilation of columns from Ladies’ Home Journal. Certainly that will hold appeal to many women the world over, but probably not the kind visiting this site. However, it’s not revolutionary by any means; for the most part and albeit with better-crafted sentences, Fried spews the same kind of stereotypes that standup comedians have hashed and rehashed tiredly for years: Men snore! Men like to control the remote! Men like to leave the seat up! (Cue Tim Allen gorilla grunt.) As a journalist, Fried has done some excellent, insightful work both in books and magazines, but this is not one of them.

On the opposite end, Vicki Vantoch’s THE THREESOME HANDBOOK: A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO SLEEPING WITH THREE is that dirty, dishy book of filth. It’s a how-to guide on landing a third person for your bedroom games. Happily monogamous and not much up for sharing, I can’t say I’m the target market for this one, but it’s nice to see Vantoch addresses the jealousy issues upfront before getting into the nitty gritty of illustrated sexual positions like “Puppy Pile” and “Greased Lightning,” each coded with bizarre combo initials that look like scientific formulas: “(B)F2M.” Pay attention to her safe-sex tips, and if you’re still interested by the end, Vantoch provides a list of Internet swing clubs to help get you started.

My junior-high years were traumatic enough that I never want to revisit them. So I can identify with the new anthology THE WORST YEARS OF YOUR LIFE: STORIES FOR THE GEEKED-OUT, ANGST-RIDDEN, LUST-ADDLED, AND DEEPLY MISUNDERSTOOD ADOLESCENT IN ALL OF US, even if I didn’t want to – or at least not something this literary. Edited by Mark Jude Poirier, the book contains short stories by 20 writers I don’t think I’ve heard of (not that that matters), centered on the most painful parts of growing up. In other words, expect a lot of bullies, nerds, self-worth issues and sexual humiliation. The latter issue provides the book’s best – albeit potentially most disturbing – bits, including a kid lusting for Barbie in A.M. Homes’ “A Real Doll” and a guy seducing a mentally handicapped girl – and more than once – in Kevin Canty’s “Pretty Judy.” A little more humor could have gone a long way in making the more pretentious efforts more accessible. –Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

British comics of decades past are unique, serialized adventures with a sometimes painterly look, outrageous scenarios and colorful characters. ALBION – plotted by modern comics legend Alan Moore, and written by his daughter Leah Moore and her husband John Reppion – pays tribute to those graphic works gone by.

Suffice to say, if you are a fan of old IPC mags like WHAM! and TERRIFIC!, you’re going to be giddy with pleasure over this six-issue graphic novel. And if, like me, you’ve never even heard of them, you’ll probably have a little fun, yet also be way lost.

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Check your brains at the door for this column, all on junk-food reading. I’m talking staring-at-shiny-things appeal. That’s not to say these book aren’t enjoyable, but you wouldn’t want to be reading these at your coffeehouses, unless you like getting stared at from people who have INFINITE JEST on their shelves and think it’s absolutely brilliant. (It’s not.)

DEADLY DOUBLES by Nick Carter – When it comes to books big and stupid, none come larger or dumber then Nick Carter, Killmaster. I love these books no matter how ridiculous they get. There was a point where I was cranking through this series like a masturbator does tissue. I don’t remember much about them, except a few key moments that were so over-the-top, they fell into “you gotta be kidding me” territory.

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All the news that’s fit to capsulize!

GIVING ‘CHOPIN’ A LISTEN
Jeffrey Deaver, Lee Child, David Hewson, Lisa Scottoline and Joseph Finder are among the 15 authors who have created the first serialized audiobook thriller, titled THE CHOPIN MANUSCRIPT. Narrated by SPIDER-MAN 2 villain Alfred Molina, the book is now available through Audible.com. To learn more, you can listen to a free excerpt or watch a video of some of the authors discussing their involvement.

COMING SOON A LAP NEAR YOU
Book-trailers.net is a new site which – drumroll, please – posts video trailers for books, in a variety of genres. The service is free for authors, not to mention lots of fun for the YouTube-inclined.

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Joe Haldeman has nothing to prove as a science fiction writer. His bibliography includes enduring classics and multiple award winners, and his following and appeal is such that he could probably just phone in a book or two every year and make a decent living for himself. That’s one of the reasons his newest book, THE ACCIDENTAL TIME MACHINE is so great, because it didn’t have to be.

THE ACCIDENTAL TIME MACHINE follows MIT graduate student Matt Fuller. He’s got a semidetached geek’s-eye view of the world; he deals with problems in his life – from bringing food to his snowbound mom to dealing with his girlfriend breaking up with him – scientifically, breaking them into component parts and proceeding methodically. This is extremely lucky, because when a glitch in a calibration device leaves Fuller with a working time machine that goes further into the future with every jump, he decides to play around with it when most people would just freak out and call the newspaper.

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