Bodies Are Dust

Buck Safiotte has just been promoted to police inspector and he’s not happy about it. As he tells readers, “The top was always my end, and I trampled everything underfoot for that.” And he does, in a sordid 1931 novel of ambition, lust, and implacable fate decades ahead of its time. Already a prolific reviver of unsung men and women crime writers, Stark House rolls out its new Staccato Imprint of early 20th century hardboiled and noir with a bona fide cult classic, until now all but impossible to find. As the title bluntly shows, Wolfson (1903–79) is haunted by flaws both psychological and physical: in addition to murder, suicide, and casual sex, there’s a burst appendix, a sudden heart attack, and the grim perils of childbirth and infancy. This casts a kind of cold, clammy inevitability across the more typical blend of grit, grift, and gangsterism comprising this stark slice of (low)life.