Bücher von David Markson

Before achieving critical acclaim as a novelist, David Markson paid the rent by writing several crime novels, including two featuring the private detective 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 called out to investigate a murder ? it happens on his doorstop. In the sweltering heat of a New York August night, he answers the buzzer at his door to find his promiscuous 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 bohemians of the early 1960s, where blood seems to flow as readily as cheap Chianti.Intricately plotted and rife with wisecracks, David Markson offers suspenseful and literary crime novels.

Although best known today for his singular, stunning "anti-novels" dazzlingly conjured from anecdotes, quotes, and small thoughts, in his early days David Markson paid the rent by writing punchy, highly dramatic fictions. On the heels of a new double edition of his steamy noirs "Epitaph for a Tramp" and "Epitaph for a Deadbeat" comes a new edition of his 1965 classic "The Ballad of Dingus Magee, " whose subtitle -- "Immortal True Saga of the Most Notorious and Desperate Bad Man of the Olden Days, his Blood-Shedding, his Ruination of Poor Helpless Females, & Cetera" -- gives readers a hint of the raucous sensibility at work here. Brimming with blasphemy, bullets, and bordellos, this hilarious tale, which inspired the Frank Sinatra movie "Dirty Dingus McGee, " shows the early Markson at his outrageous best, taking down, as "Playboy" put it, "the breeches of the Old West and blast[ing] what's exposed with buckshot."

Unlike David Markson's most recent works in experimental writing, Going Down is a more traditional effort, a dark and masterfully plotted narrative of passion and violence set in Mexico in the 1960s. Three Americans, a man and two women, are living together in obvious intimacy. Their habits, strange to the Mexicans, are strangest of all to themselves.When Fern Winters' attention is caught by movement behind a window in a run-down Greenwich Village apartment building, she can't suspect that her encounter with the apartment's occupant will eventually lead her to an abandoned chapel, in a tiny mountain village-clutching the bloody machete with which one of the three has been murdered.Going Down is a rarity among novels-brilliantly and poetically written, faultlessly constructed, centered on fully realized people-completely uninhibited in its depiction of startling eroticism.