What If...All the Rumors Were True by Liz Ruckdeschel

She’s trying to seduce hard-boiled detective Mike Hammer. McMurtry analyzes the cover of “I, the Jury,” the crime writer’s 1947 pulp novel, with the zeal of an anthropologist exploring a lost culture: In the gritty paperback’s original illustration, a knockout blond is peeling off her clothes. Although most know him as a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist (“Terms of Endearment,” “Lonesome Dove”) and an Academy Award-winning screenwriter (“Brokeback Mountain”), McMurtry’s fascination with book collecting takes center stage in this wry and often whimsical account.īut let’s get back to Spillane. That’s just one of the observations in “Books” (Simon & Schuster), Larry McMurtry’s memoir about his life as a writer, reader, seller and collector of antiquarian books.

And while you’re at it, be sure to pick up his latest paperback at the corner drugstore. The moral rot, the sexual permissiveness, the disintegration of ethics in our modern world. A weekly column looking at notable new and re-released titles arriving in bookstores.īlame it all on Mickey Spillane.