The Lady Has a Scar

When a successful but brutish playwright is stabbed to death in the aftermath of a wild party, there is no shortage of suspects but which is the killer? In his latest assignment, Chicago Chronicle crime reporter Hank Janson finds himself participating in a striptease party game, being roughed up by the police investigators and dodging the attentions of a determined nymphomaniac, while he desperately tries to separate the clues from the red herrings.

With their erotic pin-up covers and hardboiled crime tales, the Hank Janson pulp paperbacks were a British publishing sensation in the 1940s and 1950s, selling millions of copies to readers craving escapism from post-war austerity. Prosecutions under Britain's then-harsh obscenity laws dealt them a severe blow, however, and today they are highly sought after by collectors.

The Lady Has a Scar, originally published in 1950, is one of the most risqué of these classic novels. It is reissued by Telos Publishing...