Jack Trumane is a 1930s-era private detective constantly struggling to make ends meet. A beat cop, in any US city, who feels his career as a police detective was taken from him by Irish immigrants who filled a majority of law enforcement rolls during the early 1900s. Through this lighthearted yet intriguing book, you will meet Ethel, who is Jack’s love interest; Mildred, who works behind the lunch counter at Woolworths and has a soft spot for Jack; Bruce, the pawnshop owner who enjoys a love/hate relationship with our protagonist; and many other characters that contribute to each Jack Trumane, Private Dick novella. Jack occasionally has “flash-forwards” to the late 1990s early 2000s via musical interludes. If you’re paying attention, you will notice that while the story has a specific running timeline of a few days or weeks, references are made to holidays and months that could not possibly fit the time frame. Sexual overtones abound. These are all for comedic value. Relax and enjoy the world of Jack Trumane—Private Dick!

A new, revolutionary look into the brilliant life of Pat Nixon. In America’s collective consciousness, Pat Nixon has long been perceived as enigmatic. She was voted “Most Admired Woman in the World” in 1972 and made Gallup Poll’s top ten list of most admired women fourteen times. She survived the turmoil of the Watergate scandal with her popularity and dignity intact. The real Pat Nixon, however, bore little resemblance to the woman so often described as elusive, mysterious and “plastic” in the press. Pat married Richard Nixon in June of 1940. As the couple rose to prominence, Pat became Second Lady from 1953-1961 and then First Lady from 1969-1974, forging her own graceful path between the protocols of the strait-laced mid-century and the bra-burning Sixties and Seventies. Pat was a highly travelled First Lady, visiting eighty-three countries during her tenure. After a devastating earthquake in Peru in 1970, she personally flew in medical supplies and food to hard-hit areas, meeting one-on-one with victims of the tragedy. The First Lady’s 1972 trips with her husband to China and to Russia were critical to the detente that resulted. Back in the US, Pat greatly expanded upon previous preservation efforts in the White House, obtaining more art and antique objects than any other First Lady. In the domestic arena, she was progressive on women’s issues, favoring the Equal Rights Amendment and backing a targeted effort to get more women into high level government jobs. Pat strongly supported nominating a woman for the Supreme Court. She was pro-choice, supporting women’s reproductive rights publicly even before the landmark Roe v. Wade case in 1973. When asked to define her “signature” First Lady agenda, she defied being put into a box, often saying: “People are my project.” The Mysterious Mrs. Nixon, Heath Hardage Lee presents readers with the essential nature of this First Lady, an empathetic, adventurous, self-made woman who wanted no power or influence, but who connected warmly with both ordinary Americans and people from different cultures she encountered world-wide.

The hard-boiled style of detective fiction emerged in America in the years after the First World War. In the late 1940s, following the Depression, the New Deal, and the Second World War, a new generation of young writers revisited the conventions governing the fictional private eye, and began to move him (the tough detective was still always male) and his world in new directions. This book examines the work of the four most important writers of this second generation of hard-boiled fiction. It offers the first substantial literary analysis of the Max Thursday novels of Wade Miller and the Carney Wilde novels of Bart Spicer, and it develops new perspectives on the well-known Mike Hammer novels of Mickey Spillane and the Lew Archer novels of Ross Macdonald. A particular focus is upon the theme of the detective's status as a loner who succeeds in discovering truth and achieving justice because he works outside organized social structures.

It seemed that a good many people wanted to find out the identity of Ralph Johnston’s wife. Among them was the woman’s own husband...

The New York Times Bestseller A New York Times Notable Book of 2022 Named one of Vanity Fair's “Best Books of 2022” “Not since Robert Caro’s Years of Lyndon Johnson have I been so riveted by a work of history. Secret City is not gay history. It is American history.” —George Stephanopoulos Washington, D.C., has always been a city of secrets. Few have been more dramatic than the ones revealed in James Kirchick’s Secret City. For decades, the specter of homosexuality haunted Washington. The mere suggestion that a person might be gay destroyed reputations, ended careers, and ruined lives. At the height of the Cold War, fear of homosexuality became intertwined with the growing threat of international communism, leading to a purge of gay men and lesbians from the federal government. In the fevered atmosphere of political Washington, the secret “too loathsome to mention” held enormous, terrifying power. Utilizing thousands of pages of declassified documents, interviews with over one hundred people, and material unearthed from presidential libraries and archives around the country, Secret City is a chronicle of American politics like no other. Beginning with the tragic story of Sumner Welles, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s brilliant diplomatic advisor and the man at the center of “the greatest national scandal since the existence of the United States,” James Kirchick illuminates how homosexuality shaped each successive presidential administration through the end of the twentieth century. Cultural and political anxiety over gay people sparked a decades-long witch hunt, impacting everything from the rivalry between the CIA and the FBI to the ascent of Joseph McCarthy, the struggle for Black civil rights, and the rise of the conservative movement. Among other revelations, Kirchick tells of the World War II–era gay spymaster who pioneered seduction as a tool of American espionage, the devoted aide whom Lyndon Johnson treated as a son yet abandoned once his homosexuality was discovered, and how allegations of a “homosexual ring” controlling Ronald Reagan nearly derailed his 1980 election victory. Magisterial in scope and intimate in detail, Secret City will forever transform our understanding of American history.

Modern biographies of Richard Nixon have been consumed with Watergate. All have missed arguably the most important perspective on Nixon as California's native son, the only U.S. president born and raised in California. In addition, Nixon was also a son, brother, friend, husband, father, uncle, and grandfather. By shifting the focus from Watergate and Washington to Nixon's deep, defining roots in California, Paul Carter boldly challenges common conceptions of the thirty-seventh president of the United States. More biographies have been written on Nixon than any other U.S. politician. Yet the territory traversed by Carter is unexplored, revealing for the first time the people, places, and experiences that shaped Richard Nixon and the qualities that garnered him respect from those who knew him well. Born in Yorba Linda and raised in Whittier, California, Nixon succeeded early in life, excelling in academics while enjoying athletics through high school. At Whittier College he graduated at the top of his class and was voted Best Man on Campus. During his career at Whittier's oldest law firm, he was respected professionally and became a chief trial attorney. As a military man in the South Pacific during World War II, he was admired by his fellow servicemen. Returning to his Quaker roots after the war, he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, the Senate, and the vice presidency, all within six short years. After losing to John Kennedy in the 1960 presidential campaign, Nixon returned to Southern California to practice law. After losing his gubernatorial race he reinvented himself: he moved to New York and was elected president of the United States in 1968. He returned to Southern California after Watergate and his resignation to heal before once again taking a place on the world stage. Richard Nixon: California's Native Son is the story of Nixon's Southern California journey from his birth in Yorba Linda to his final resting place just a few yards from the home in which he was born.

Although Truman Capote's last novel was unfinished at the time of his death, its surviving portions offer a devastating group portrait of the high and low society of his time. • Includes the story La Cote Basque featured in the major FX series Feud: Capote Vs. the Swans. "Prose that makes the heart sing and the narrative fly." —The New York Times Book Review Tracing the career of a writer of uncertain parentage and omnivorous erotic tastes, Answered Prayers careens from a louche bar in Tangiers to a banquette at La Côte Basque, from literary salons to high-priced whorehouses. It takes in calculating beauties and sadistic husbands along with such real-life supporting characters as Colette, the Duchess of Windsor, Montgomery Clift, and Tallulah Bankhead. Above all, this malevolently finny book displays Capote at his most relentlessly observant and murderously witty.