L. A. Morse

L. A. Morse is best known for his Edgar Award–winning novel, The Old Dick, about a long-retired private eye who gets up for one last case. Morse’s first book, The Flesh Eaters, is based on a legendary family of cannibals in fifteenth-century Scotland. This horrific and graphic account is not for the squeamish.

Later, Morse did another take on the private-eye genre with The Big Enchilada and Sleaze. These novels’ hero, an ultratough detective named Sam Hunter, is a cross between Sam Spade and Conan the Barbarian. Filled with bad language, sex, and violence, the books alternately scandalized readers (“this book is gratuitous”) and blew them away (“Morse has written a book that is at once in the genre of the old-fashioned pulp magazine detective years and a send-up of the genre, and it works on both levels”).

Lastly, Morse was instrumental in the publication of An Old-Fashioned Mystery by the reclusive author Runa Fairleigh. A spoof on the cozy mystery, the book, called “the mystery to end all mysteries,” fooled (almost) everyone.