Annotation: Before achieving critical acclaim as a novelist, David Markson paid
the rent by writing several crime novels, including two featuring the private de
tective Harry Fannin. Together here in one volume, these works are now available
to a new generation of readers.
In "Epitaph for a Tramp, " Fannin isn't calle
d out to investigate a murder -- it happens on his doorstop. In the sweltering h
eat of a New York August night, he answers the buzzer at his door to find his pr
omiscuous ex-wife dying from a knife wound. To find her killer, Fannin plies his
trade with classic hard-boiled aplomb. In the second novel, "Epitaph for a Dead
Beat, " Fannin finds himself knee-deep in murder among the beatniks and bohemia
ns of the early 1960s, where blood seems to flow as readily as cheap Chianti.
