I have the hard-boiled fever ...

Got back on the noir crime novel train and knocked off Queenpin by Megan Abbot and One Fearful Yellow Eye by John D. MacDonald.

Queenpin rocked the old-school Vegas vibe and received the illustrious Edgar Award for Best Paperback Original as well as the Barry Award for the same. It was published in 2007. It is also unique in this hard-boiled crime genre as the protagonist is female.

A young woman hired to keep the books at a down-at-heel nightclub is taken under the wing of the infamous Gloria Denton, a mob luminary who reigned during the Golden Era of Bugsy Siegel and Lucky Luciano.

This was my first roll in the hay with Abbot, who has a couple other novels out there. I’ll definitely be picking them up.Goodreaders give it 3.8 out of 5. The Haugenomter hit 7 out of 10 with this one.

A couple quotes from the book:

“Because she was solid gold, fourteen-carat, barely burnished despite twenty years of hard molling. But beneath it, I knew, beneath that gold and stardust, she was all grit and sharp teeth gnashing, head twisting, talons out, tearing flesh. She was all open mouth, tunneling into an awful nothing.” 

“You have to decide who you are, little girl, she told me once. Once you know that, everyone else will too.”

One Fearful Yellow Eye is the eighth novel in the Travis McGee series. I'm reading them out of order which doesn't seem to be a problem of continuity with the novels but is wreaking havoc with my OCD. This book was published in 1966.

The plot revolves around McGee's attempts to aid his longtime friend Glory Doyle in her quest to uncover the truth about her late husband and the blackmail which made over half a million dollars of his fortune disappear. It is largely set in Chicago, rather than the usual McGee haunt of Florida.

It boasts one of the higher ratings I’ve ever seen on Goodreads, a 4.1. I didn’t go that high with it, actually enjoyed Queenpin more, but a 6+ isn’t chicken feed either.

How to you extort $600,000 from a dying man? Someone had done it very quietly and skilfully to the husband of Travis McGee's ex-girlfriend. McGee flies to Chicago to help untangle the mess and discovers that although Dr. Fortner Geis had led an exemplary life, there were those who'd take advantage of one "indiscretion" and bring down the whole family. McGee also discovers he likes a few members of the family far too much to let that happen.

A couple quotes from the book:

“Every day, no matter how you fight it, you learn a little more about yourself, and all most of it does is teach humility.” 

“If there was one sunset every twenty years, how would people react to them? If there were ten seashells in all the world, what would they be worth? If people could make love just once a year, how carefully would they pick their mates?”