Hard-boiled…

Two recent events brought back fond memories. I downloaded Theodore P. Druch’s Pure Gold, a collection of three novellas inspired by hard-boiled crime fiction, and ABC News decided to revisit the Robert Blake case. Although I have written hard-boiled crime stories myself, the fond memories were about a childhood where I “graduated” from reading one Hardy Boys story (The Secret of Wildcat Swamp) to books by authors who comprised the hard-boiled movement.

Pure Gold and Blake AKA Beretta are unr...