PAPERBACK JACK - Loren D. Estleman
Jacob Heppleman is back on U.S. soil after fighting for Uncle Sam in Europe in the Second World War. Heppleman finds a different world, one that he needs to get a grip on, fast, if he's going to survive. Before the war, Heppleman eked out a living as a hack writer, supplying stories to the pulp magazines, but now the pulps have been going out of business, with direct-to-paperback books taking their place. Heppleman can't scrape together enough dough to buy a pawnshop typewriter, so he steals one instead, but without the pulps, his paycheck before the war, who will he write for? The head of a new publishing company, Blue Devil Books, assures Jacob that there's a hot market in the drugstore racks for tawdry crime novels - sold as much (or more) for their covers as for the stories - and that Jacob should be one of the primary in-house writers. Jacob becomes the unlikely best-selling author who takes great pride in his authenticity - which comes from his befriending several un...