[ENDED] Kindle 100 $0.99 Mysteries [ENDED]

[SensualPoet]

Well, there goes another 99¢ ... Richard Deming's Tweak the Devil's Nose features Manville (Manny) Moon, a PI with "a grim contraption of cork, steel, aluminum and leather, where his right leg used to be" and a face that looks like "a battered Saint Bernard". His normal stomping ground is Buffalo; this one, published in 1953, concerns the murder of the Lt Gov of Illinois.

A brief appreciation can be found at this blog spot.

[ATDrake]

If anyone's looking for more modern stuff amidst the lot, M.E. Kerr is the pseudonym of an award-winning YA author (I read her autobiography at some point) and under the name Vin Packer she had a book which launched the lesbian pulp adventure subgenre (out from different republisher, not on sale), according to her Wikipedia entry.

So if you wanted potentially LGBT-friendly stuff, she's probably your best-bet, and the Fell series dates from the 80s if you're not up to 50s old-school tales.

[SensualPoet]

Uh-oh ... another one. Talmage Powell wrote five Ed Rivers novels in the early 1960s; his PI is based in Tampa, Florida.

Start Screaming Murder is the fourth entry in this series. In the story, Nietzel and Baker explain, “Ed is sapped in an alley near his apartment. When he staggers into his pad he finds tiny Tina La Flor--a midget singer--hiding in his room after coming in over the transom. She was being chased by the sapper--Bucks Jordan--a heavy who was after her body. Ed comes to her aid for seventy-five bucks a day plus expenses--Ed’s going rate. Ed manages to catch Jordan at Tina’s house, beat him up and warn him about letting Tina alone. Bucks agrees and shortly afterwards Lieutenant Ivey shows up to tell Ed that Bucks is dead--murdered by his own blackjack. Now Ed has to find the real murderer as well as Tina who has mysteriously disappeared. In unraveling the knots, Ed is locked in a car trunk, hit on the head umpteen times and ‘angrified’ something awful! And when Ed is mad he really plays rough.”

The synopsis above and a fuller appreciation of Powell is found here.

Thanks, Prologue Books, for reviving what sound like a feast of treats.

[ATDrake]

Originally Posted by Blue Tyson

Or how about a pulp version of :-

Lysistrata

Okay, I have to get that. And now I'm envisioning pulp mashups of Euripides. Medea is basically perfect for the genre.

ETA: Here's the official site for the Prologue Books imprint. They have a couple of author spotlights up.

[SensualPoet]

OK, one more ... thanks AT Drake for highlighting ME Kerr / Vin Packer.

There are several Vin Packer titles in the sale; many sound more like suspense thrillers than mystery tales. This is the one I picked out: Intimate Victims

"A well-to-do man, about to be arrested for embezzlement, prepares to flee the country. But his farewell note to his lady-love is intercepted by a stranger. Reading it, the stranger sees two roads open up: for himself, a road to wanton luxuries; for the writer of the letter, fear and oblivion on skid row."

The blurb from Prologue Books reads:

"Somehow He’d Ended Up with Someone Else’s Coat . . . and that act could end Robert Bowser’s life before it started.His hand trembled as he answered the phone.“Mr. Bowser?”“Yes.”“Mr. Bowser, my name is Harvey Plangman.”“Yes, Mr. Plangman. I have your wallet, and jacket, too, I believe.”“And I have yours.”“Why don’t you drive over here? I could offer you a drink and we could reclaim our things.”“Mr. Bowser, were you planning on going to Brazil?”Was this really how the world ended?“You don’t have anything to be afraid of, Mr. Bowser.”“I’d better come there.”“Yes, I think it would be better if you came here. You’ll know who I am all right, Mr. Bowser. I’m wearing your coat . . .”"

A couple of other appreciations are found here for Something in the Shadows, and here, for The Evil Friendship.

[ATDrake]

I'm tempted to just buy an Amazon gift certificate and get the lot, since I a) need to focus my time and energy today on doing my taxes instead of sampling things and b) will be getting money back after mailing in my taxes anyway.

I figure that since Prologue Books is just launching, they're putting up the good stuff first (or at least books of varying quality by whom they think are the quality authors worth reprinting), in order to impress people with the line's wares. Maybe the line will drop in quality as they include the more marginal things later, or maybe the quality is already kind of uneven now, but these should overall be the decently-readable things so that they don't get a bad rep right off the bat.

And even though I've developed this pathological dislike for the Mobi format, I figure at 99 cents a pop and the possibility of getting KF8 downloads which are more easily extractable to something I can edit as an ePub without conversion cruft does kind of make up for that.

Even if the formatting is messed up on some of these and I'll already have to fix them before reading.

In any case, I'm definitely getting the Lysistrata riff, and some of the M.E. Kerr/Vin Packer/Marijane Meaker books, including the lesbian one based on the true-life crime of a very popular murder mystery author who's been writing what she knows, and the one with the transgender detective because you don't often see transgender detectives even nowadays.

[SensualPoet]

I've started reading most of my Kindle titles using the Android app on the Kobo Vox. That works out really well for me.

[ATDrake]

I have a Kindle already. I just really, really dislike paying any amount of actual money for Mobipocket format because of past experience with how annoying it is to fix errors in it and work with the buggy Amazon-provided tools for dealing with it.

ETA: It turns out the Edgar Awards have a database of past winners and nominees which you can search on their website.

Sale authors who came up with "hits" include Gault, Flora, Kerr, Lacy, & Miller.

[koland]

Has anyone checked samples on these to see if any are in Topaz format? A number of them are file size/no page number listings, which sometimes is a sign of topaz lurking beneath (then again, so is page number and no file size and I've seen some with both listed).

[ATDrake]

Filesize w/o page number has traditionally been the opposite, indicating Mobi-format books. But page number is no longer an indicator of Topaz since Amazon changed that.

I downloaded for USB transfer the sample of a random bloaty-looking title (1894 kb) which came through as ".azw" (I think actual Topaz samples are still .tpz for USB transfer books). It opened okay in Kindle Previewer, but seems to be taken up entirely with the front cover and has no text inside.

So part of the huge filesizes may be due to having large cover images and maybe they're counting these things as KF8 format or whatever now.

And typically Topaz books have Look Inside samples which are taken directly from the print book or have ones that look like Topaz innards, rather than these, which have mostly looked like Mobi-format samples in the ones I tried.

[AnemicOak]

Originally Posted by ATDrake

I have a Kindle already. I just really, really dislike paying any amount of actual money for Mobipocket format because of past experience with how annoying it is to fix errors in it and work with the buggy Amazon-provided tools for dealing with it.

What tools are you using to fix things? When I get a Mobi needing a few fixes I usually convert it to ePub and fix things up in Sigil and re-convert, but I'm curious to other workflows.

[AnemicOak]

It looks like they anticipate that there will be errors in these and that they have plans in place to fix them...

A large portion of Prologue titles have been converted from very old hardcopy editions, using OCR (optical character recognition) software. Despite the use of the most up-to-date OCR technologies and various quality checks in place, the use of these automated systems during the eBook conversion process is not perfect. While reading titles converted in this manner you may spot errors where an incorrect character was interpreted and resulted in the misspelling of a word due to the imperfections associated with this process. If you come across these types of errors, please report them to the publisher and we will address and correct the issue.

[ATDrake]

Originally Posted by AnemicOak

What tools are you using to fix things? When I get a Mobi needing a few fixes I usually convert it to ePub and fix things up in Sigil and re-convert, but I'm curious to other workflows.

I use MobiUnpack to extract the actual HTML & other stuff (or at least a reasonably close approximation) from the Mobi file. I find that using a 3rd-party converter tends to add in cruft which I'm just going to edit out later.

TextWrangler (a freeware Mac text editor) to fix typos and modify formatting (I tend to do that by hand, as I like to have my source laid out a certain way if I'm going to spend time on it) and make tweaks to the OPF and NCX files if necessary.

Then I run everything back through KindleGen, and use kindlestrip to take out the auto-included source files (and if I weren't using an older version of KindleGen, would need MobiUnpack to split the Mobi version from the KF8 to save space), and then a look in the Kindle Previewer and off to Mobi2Mobi to adjust the metadata, and I'm done.

(Needless to say, unpacked and edited source files kept around in case there turn out to be other changes which need to be made later.)

Originally Posted by AnemicOak

It looks like they anticipate that there will be errors in these and that they have plans in place to fix them...

Oh, good. I like to see a publisher who's aware of problems and openly willing to fix.

This bumps up the likelihood that I'll pick up more stuff from them during this sale, just to encourage bargain pricing and series continuations when they get around to doing sci-fi/fantasy pulps like they plan.

[koland]

Originally Posted by ATDrake

Filesize w/o page number has traditionally been the opposite, indicating Mobi-format books. But page number is no longer an indicator of Topaz since Amazon changed that.

I downloaded for USB transfer the sample of a random bloaty-looking title (1894 kb) which came through as ".azw" (I think actual Topaz samples are still .tpz for USB transfer books). It opened okay in Kindle Previewer, but seems to be taken up entirely with the front cover and has no text inside.

So part of the huge filesizes may be due to having large cover images and maybe they're counting these things as KF8 format or whatever now.

And typically Topaz books have Look Inside samples which are taken directly from the print book or have ones that look like Topaz innards, rather than these, which have mostly looked like Mobi-format samples in the ones I tried.

Thx. I tried a few and did get azw (and it does look like huge cover scans on many, so not much to sample) -- tpz should be the topaz download samples (azw1 on kindle device files), while the KF8's are (I think) a 4 at the end (2 is a game and I've seen some 3's also).

[Blue Tyson]

Originally Posted by ATDrake

I'm tempted to just buy an Amazon gift certificate and get the lot, since I a) need to focus my time and energy today on doing my taxes instead of sampling things and b) will be getting money back after mailing in my taxes anyway.

That was tempting, definitely.

So far, I have picked these :-

In the Vanishing Room - Robert Colby
Kim - Robert Colby
The Star Trap - Robert Colby
Don't Cry For Me - William Campbell Gault
Lysistrata - Fletcher Flora
Park Avenue Tramp - Fletcher Flora
Skulldoggery - Fletcher Flora
Two Hot To Handle - Ed Lacy
The Evil Friendship - Marijeane Meaker/M. E. Kerr/Vin Packer
Fell - Marijeane Meaker/M. E. Kerr/Vin Packer
Fell Back - Marijeane Meaker/M. E. Kerr/Vin Packer
Fell Down - Marijeane Meaker/M. E. Kerr/Vin Packer
Scott Free - Marijeane Meaker/M. E. Kerr/Vin Packer
Shabby Street - Orrie Hitt [US only country change needed]
Sin Doll - Orrie Hitt
Badge of Evil - Whit Masterton (from whence the Heston movie came)
A House in Naples - Peter Rabe
Kiss The Girls and Make Them Die - Charles Runyon