“Beatnik-attired,
Bread Loaf Fellow Shane Stevens was on stage in spring 1970, his
reading calling for armed rebellion against the white power structure
for sending Puerto Ricans, blacks, and hippies to die in Vietnam”.
—Jo
LeCoeur. “Fierce, Kind Friend: John William Corrington”. Legal
Studies Forum,
vol. 27, 2003.
I’ve
spent the last ten years attempting to construct a biographical
portrait of Shane Stevens, the best crime fiction writer you’ve
probably never heard of. Stevens was the author of Go
Down Dead,
Way
Uptown In Another World,
Dead
City,
Rat
Pack,
By
Reason of Insanity,
and The
Anvil Chorus.
Under the pseudonym J.W. Rider, he wrote the novels Jersey
Tomatoes
and Hot
Tickets
featuring a PI named Malone, an ex-seminarian and former FBI agent
living and operating in Jersey City.
If
you have heard of Shane Stevens, then, like me, you probably
discovered him through Stephen King. In the afterward to The
Dark Half,
the Master of Horror confesses that he borrowed the name Alexis
Machine from Stevens’s Dead
City
and praises Shane for having produced "three of the finest
novels ever written about the dark side of the American Dream."
It
was this praise that cause me to seek out his work. As only one of
his novels has remained in print with any regularity here in the US,
the struggle to track down his work and to understand it, lead me to
the mystery of the man.
Stevens
was white. He grew up in the largely black neighborhoods, first
Hell’s Kitchen and then Harlem. He played his cards close to his
chest, as can be seen by how he described himself to Contemporary
Authors:
“I never give interviews, stay in shadow, travel by night. I don’t
associate with writers, don’t do book reviews, don’t play
politics or give advice. I try not to hurt anyone. I go where I want
and write what I want.”
Nowadays,
the average person generates a ridiculous amount of easily-found
information. If the person is famous or engaged in some sort of
artistic career, then they’re likely maintaining an active social
media presence that easily doubles that available information. Before
the internet, however, this was not the case—you could go through
life, be nearly invisible and leave almost no trace.
Match
this tendency toward secrecy with a life lived pre-internet, add in
failing memories and a dying-off witness pool, then include the few
people who simply will not speak to me (including Shane’s daughter
from an early marriage), and I think you can understand why my search
for Shane Stevens has been slow.
But
what I want you to understand is why the mystery surrounding an
almost entirely forgotten crime author has held my attention for
nearly a decade and how the work and the man and my search all feed
each other.
When
I began, I knew, if I were to find out anything about Stevens, my
first resource was the work itself. What do the author bios say? Who
took the author photographs? Who are the books dedicated to? Who or
what details are mentioned in the foreword? What about press
surrounding the book—are there any details there?
I
gave myself three rules: 1) Find documented sources, 2) Treat “facts”
from people as valid only when they are repeated by multiple people
consistently or can be verified some other way, 3) Clearly identify
my own conjecture and include reasoning.
This
gave me many avenues to pursue, lots of dead ends, but also
immediately hooked me into the sheer breadth of Stevens’s mystique.
Even his birth year remains an unknown.
Among
the sundry biographical snippets that ran with his various articles,
newspaper bylines, and dust jacket photos, Shane’s birth year
varies greatly, if you do the math, all the way from 1937 up to 1941.
(The only thing he never changed was the month and day – October
8th).
For
a brief example of what I’m talking about: the 1941 date is the
final birth year Shane provided himself to Contemporary
Authors.
This is also the date you’ll usually see listed on something modern
if it has any biographical info at all. However, the author bio on
the dust jacket for Go
Down Dead,
states the Stevens is 28 years old. The press surrounding his first
novel (see “Books: Harlem Idiom,” Time,
Feb 24, 1967), repeats Stevens’s age as 28 years old.
Go
Down Dead
was published in 1966. If Stevens was 28 years old, then he was born
in 1938, not 1941.
Jump forward to 1968. The biographical blurb at the bottom of his
December article for The
Writer,
lists Stevens as 27 years old. An article written two years later,
and Stevens is magically one year younger.
 |
| Shane Stevens lecturing at Breadloaf Writers’ Conference, Middlebury College? |
Stevens
likewise claimed to have been born in New York City. Based on various
references in his letters and conversations with a few people who
knew him, I suspect—but cannot at this juncture prove—that
Stevens was born in New Jersey (probably Hoboken).
Next
I turned to Harlem. The neighborhood features in three of his novels,
and Shane talked about Harlem a lot:
“I
look uptown, thinking of the years I lived in Harlem, white sheep in
wolf’s clothing but lean and hungry. Just about a mile from here at
128th Street and Park Avenue. But from where I started a little while
ago, at 86th and Fifth, my old block’s way uptown in another
world.” (“The Rat Packs of New York,” New
York Times Magazine,
November 28, 1971.)
In
an interview at The
Harry Crews Online Bibliography,
Damon Sauve questions Crews about Shane and their time together at
The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. While Crews has great things to
say about Way
Uptown in Another World,
the real gem in the interview is this passage here:
“Yeah.
He was raised in Harlem. And he's white, but—he's white, but in
every possible sense, he's black. Everything, including speech,
clothes, hating white people. Not that every black hates white
people. Strange dude. Strange dude.
“But
the first time he was there, about the first three days and nights,
he didn't sleep a wink. He sat on the step all night. He said it was
too damned quiet. You know, raised in Harlem.”
While
waiting on info from Middlebury College about Shane’s time at Bread
Loaf, Crews’s praise of Way
Uptown In Another World,
sent me back to that book. The dust jacket bio tantalizingly mentions
jail time in both San Francisco and Mexico.
I
tried to follow those trails but they both lead to dead ends. I don’t
know where exactly in Mexico Stevens did time, San Francisco’s
digital records don’t go back for enough, and I lack the funds to
pay a researcher to delve through the paper records.
When
those leads went for naught, I returned back to Way
Uptown In Another World.
The dust jacket photo was taken by a man named Alan Caruba.
Researching Caruba, led me to how he met Stevens and another trove of
tantalizing info.
Caruba
wrote an article for the September 21, 1970 edition of Publishers’
Weekly
called “Bread Loaf 1970: Boot Camp for Writers.” The article is
mostly a fluff piece about the Vermont writer’s conference, but the
passages concerning Stevens are very revealing. Caruba describes
Stevens as having friends who were wanted by the FBI. He also says
that Stevens has a “Marlon Brando kind of sex appeal,” as all the
girls had posted signs all over Middlebury that read: “Shane is
sweet.”
Stevens’s
sex appeal would lead me to his novel Rat
Pack,
which he dedicated to “all the young girls”, and then eventually
to a line of ex-girlfriends.
While
nosing around for any press on Way
Uptown In Another World,
I discovered an essay Shane wrote for Black
Review #1,
edited by Mel Watkins. A passage from Stevens’s “The White
Niggers of the 70s” provides a succinct clue to his penchant for
secrecy and moving in shadows. Stevens admits:
“I
have been shot, stabbed, beaten, gassed, stomped, whipped, jailed and
had acid thrown on me. I have smelled death, seen its shadow and
heard its cry. Violence has been my natural playground, and I know a
little about it. And about the darker side of violence too, the
violence that is within oneself. It’s just beneath the surface,
lurking there, waiting, always ready to smash and destroy.”
Mysteries
fill Stevens’s life like shadows in a condemned building, drawing
me ever onward. But while so many of the darkened hallways prove to
be empty and the dingy rooms can only offer broken tidbits, the best
clue into Shane Stevens is his work. As Samuel Butler wrote, “Every
man’s work, whether it be literature or music or pictures or
architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself, and
the more he tries to conceal himself the more clearly will his
character appear in spite of him.”
While
represented by his first agent, the legendary Henry Volkening, Shane
Steven’s first novel saw publication at the tail end of 1966. Go
Down Dead
centers on an African-American youth named Adam Clayton Henry who
everyone calls King. (A nod to Adam Clayton Powell Jr—the first
African-American member of the House, elected and sent to Washington
by the people of Harlem). He’s the “president” of a Harlem
street gang called The Playboys. One of his gang was put out of
commission by members of The Tigers, a white gang from the next
neighborhood over. The Playboys responded in kind and now the tension
between the two has risen and is ready to explode.
From
the opening pages we know that King is planning a big move against
the enemy and he’s not messing around. The young gang leader knows
where he can score some dynamite and plans on blowing up the Tigerman
clubhouse, taking all the whites out for good and leaving The
Playboys to reign unopposed as the “swingiest bop gang in New
York.”
Go
Down Dead
is very strong first novel that provides a startling look into the
violent lives lost on Harlem’s streets. It’s written in what can
sometimes be a hard to follow street-slang. In short letter, Stevens
wrote and circulated to reviews, he says, the prose is “the
language of the people who live it. So that the reader may become a
participant and not just a spectator. It is a language of pain, or
despair and neglect—yes, and of hope as well.”
His
next novel, Way
Uptown in Another World
is, for me, Shane’s masterwork. Unlike his first, Uptown
is both simple and starkly poetic, authentic but approachable. In
this messy, but beautiful book, Stevens explores the themes that
would come to dominate his more well-known works. Here, Stevens
dissects that dark side of the American Dream and its false promise
of opportunity. He explores the true division between peoples—money
and class. And Stevens reminds us that it doesn’t have to be this
way.
This
second novel sweeps through the life of a young African-American
named Marcus Garvey Black. Marcus has a quiet childhood in
Mississippi. He and his family are far from rich, but they’re happy
and get by as best they can, until his father is run over by a white
man. The white man feels a tad guilty so he pays Marcus’s mother
ten dollars as recompense—thus establishing one of the main themes:
how much is a man worth?
Like
many African-Americans Marcus and family head north for the promise
of better job opportunities and the hope of eased racial tensions.
Marcus quickly learns, however, “The kids in Harlem were not the
same as back home in the country. They hung out in gangs and a lotta
them shot up on dope and got in all kinda trouble. The streets were
always full and you hadda fight for everything.”
In
the early chapters Uptown
functions as sort of picaresque: the adventures of a lovable rogue.
Marcus ditches school and tries his hand at a variety of jobs, most
illegal, many of them funny, until he finds his true calling as a con
man with a host of money-making schemes.
The
novel takes a darker turn when a fistfight at a baseball diamond
leads to murder and Marcus is sent to prison.
After
his release, the book becomes essentially plotless There are drug
dealers and killers and thieves and robbers, white girls looking for
some “dark meat” to make their fathers’ angry before returning
to the safety of their wealthy lives somewhere far away. There are
hippies and love children who think they can topple the structures of
power with nothing more than a hug. There are militant Civil Rights
leaders, Black Power junkies, evil blacks and evil whites. But, yet,
kindness everywhere, if you look for it.
Each
chapter is a sort of lesson. Lessons of crime and poverty and
violence and love and life, as Marcus tries to understand himself, to
make sense of a world that seems to only want to teach him hate, “I
mean, what’s the good of living if you can’t go around hating all
the people who screw you down? Without that hate, you got no cover,
no protection. And if everybody’s the same and you ain’t better’n
nobody, how can you feel like a man? That’s the game everybody
plays, but without them all you got is love and beauty everywhere.”
Dead
City
is Stevens’s New Jersey mob novel and the source of the name Alexis
Machine. Multiple people who knew Shane when he was tending bar at
the Corner Bistro in New York, have confirmed that one of the
mobsters in that book is based on a real gangster who drank there
often. This third novel follows two men trying to work their way up
the ranks. Charley Flowers worked his way up once already, but after
blowing two big hits, he’s reduced to flophouse living and
strong-arm work. Now, he wants to return to real money, to his
previous position of power. Charley wants to be somebody in the only
way he knows how to be anybody.
When
the novel opens, Flowers is paired with the new kid, a Vietnam vet
named Harry Strega. Harry grew up with few options and an inescapable
sense of detachment. The war widened the gulf separating him from the
rest of humanity. Freshly stateside, he sees violence and crime as
his only road to not just success, but his only road to anything at
all.
Here,
Stevens boldly weaves thoughts, memories, fears and flashbacks
amongst the action and the narrative. He splatters violence and sex
against the cityscape until the city becomes a character, our tour
guide through the characters’ private hells and twisted psyches as
they search for their share of the American Dream. While I think it
lacks the depth of his other work, Dead City builds to one of the
most stunning endings I’ve ever read, a beautiful parallel to the
beginning of the novel, twisting back on itself and forming the
“closed-system of perfect evil” that Stephen King praised so
highly.
Stevens’s
fourth novel grew out of a Nov 28, 1971, New
York Times article
called, “The Rat Packs of New York.” Here Stevens opens by
profiling the case of a young medical student who cuts through
Central Park with his girlfriend on their way home. Four black youths
accost the couple for a quarter. When the student tries to ignore
them and keep walking, one of them shoots him in the back. I tracked
down both the med student—now doctor—who was shot and the beat
cop who investigated the incident. The med student didn’t want to
talk and the cop tried to sell me a copy of his memoirs.
Stevens
uses this incident to trace the history of juvenile delinquency from
the early youth gangs that arose after WWII to the city under siege
era brought on by easy drugs, plentiful guns, and systemic poverty.
Stevens dispels the myth that gang culture was and is about race. The
racial lines that separate gang from gang, criminal from criminal,
according to Stevens is a racism of pure chance. He argues that those
lines were really neighborhood lines drawn by the uncaring hand of
poverty. Money was the issue when Stevens was writing and it’s
still the issue now.
In
the course of his investigation into the student shooting, Stevens
interviews, befriends, and follows four black youths he calls:
Jumper, Wolfie, Chester, and Johnny Apartment.
His
non-fiction article directly informed and shaped his next fictional
novel. Billed as “An American Clockwork Orange” and described by
Chester Himes as “a classic of the lowers depths,” Rat
Pack
follows four Harlem youths over the course of a single violent New
York City night as they look for the big score that will finally help
them escape the soul-crushing poverty and the misery of living in the
uptown ghetto.
While
his last Harlem novel may have been as slim and as sharp as a shiv,
it was his fourth book, By
Reason of Insanity,
that would prove to be his breakout book: $100,000 advance on the
hardback rights (“Book Ends: Sharing the Wealth,” New
York Times,
Jan 15, 1978.) and $455,000 for the reprint rights in paperback
(“Betting on the Big Book”, Book
World,
October 1, 1978). This serial killer novel predates both the term and
Thomas Harris’s far more famous Red
Dragon
by two years. Written in a style that reads more true crime than
thriller, Stevens uses reporter Adam Kenton’s manhunt for Thomas
Bishop to confront abuse, poverty, loneliness, crooked politics, sex,
media manipulation, the death penalty, opportunism, the changing face
of police work, and, as if seeing the future, our twisted habit of
making killers famous.
Producing
a book Stephen King called, “One of the finest novels ever written
about perfect evil,” Shane avoids the flights of fancy that would
come to dominate the serial killer subgenre. Harris’s esteemed Dr.
Lecter is a comic book villain with a taste for human flesh, a Bond
baddie with all the ridiculous background trappings—Eastern
European nobility raised by a Japanese sexpot aunt, genius level
intelligence, photographic memory, superb physicality and master
level artistic ability—but stripped of all the pulp fun.
Stevens’s
Thomas Bishop is a realistic and brutal killer, a terrible
manifestation born of a lifetime of horrors. There are no diabolical
schemes, no ridiculous clues hidden under fingernails and down
someone’s throat. There are no bodies left in strange tableaus that
echo some forgotten 16th century Italian artwork. There’s just
blood and guts and rage and gore. The novel builds to an incredibly
thrilling climax, then immediately pulls the rug entirely out from
under you with an exceptionally clever twist that confirms: monsters
are made, not born.
The
success and big money from his serial killer novel allowed Stevens to
pursue and research firsthand a much different project: The
Anvil Chorus
is an international thriller set in 1970s Paris.
Inspector
Cesar Dreyfus is an Alsatian Jew and distant relative of the famously
persecuted Alfred Dreyfus. Cesar is called in to investigate the
death of Dieter Bock, a former SS member who for the last several
years has lived secretly in a Paris suburbs until someone hanged him
with piano wire in a locked room.
Like
all of Steven’s characters, Dreyfus is repulsed by the inequality
of the system, horrified at the manipulation of the people, and the
unfairness of—everything. He attacks the murder investigation
ferociously, risking the ire of his superiors, the French
Intelligence Community, and the government himself. This particular
case sinks its claws into him tighter than any other. Dreyfus’s
parents were killed during WWII and the investigation into Bock fuels
his burning desire for revenge, “Thought his adolescent years,
Cesar dreamed of finding their killers, becoming a hunter of
murderers. When he finally did, he discovered there were many
murderers, more than he’d realized, more than he’d ever imagined.
They were everywhere, in every walk of life, looking just like
everyone else, and so his quest turned into a calling, his job a
profession. But the dream never went away, or the nightmares either.”
The
case escalates and what seems like a simple murder becomes something
more. Dreyfus discovers the link to more murders, shady political
dealings, and a woman who inspires a terrible obsession in every man
she meets. The Nazi’s death starts Dreyfus on a journey through a
twisted labyrinth of lies and deceit born during WWII and nurtured in
evil by a secret Nazi plan code-named: Anvil. As Dreyfus storms
through his investigation, surviving attempts on his life and
manipulation on a global scale, he realizes exactly how little
separates us from the things we so deeply hate.
The
Anvil Chorus
is the most traditional novel Stevens wrote in terms of plot and
narrative. In some ways, this makes it more difficult to discuss
without giving away plot points. However even at his most
traditional, Stevens writes as only he can. He weaves the
cut-and-dried procedural with passages of deeply poetic prose and a
haunting depth of character while still investing everything with his
usual social critique.
If
there’s any clue to the two, fairly traditional and surprisingly
funny PI novels that Stevens wrote under a pseudonym, it lies perhaps
in the pseudonym itself—J.W. Rider. Perhaps after his big success
and big money, Shane wanted to simply be just a writer.
The
first novel, Jersey
Tomatoes,
finds Malone investigating two separate cases. A shady real-estate
developer wants Malone to find out who’s been sending him death
threats. Meanwhile, an anti-religious activist is convinced her
devout mother’s suicide is actually something sinister.
Hot
Tickets,
the second in the series, again centers on two cases and follows a
similar pattern. A wrestling promoter hires Malone to track down
who’s been threatening his big star, Samson. Meanwhile as a favor
to his secretary, Malone tries to help out one of her tenants, a
stripper studying to become an Episcopalian Minister.
In
addition to numerous book reviews, investigative pieces, and
non-fiction articles, Stevens also did screenplay work, providing the
first pass on a straight adaptation of Sol Yurick’s The
Warriors
before rights passed to Lawrence Gordon, who took the film to
Paramount where Walter Hill shaped its comic book aesthetic (“Movie
Call Sheet,” Los Angeles Times, April 25, 1969). Stevens also
adapted the rock musical The
Me Nobody Knows
(“News of the Screen”, New
York Times,
Feb 24, 1974.) for a film version that was to be directed by Gil
Cates but unfortunately never got made. His working relationship with
Cates was such that the two planned to follow that film with an
adaptation of Stevens’s own Way
Upton in Another World.
Before his death in 2011, Cates described both projects to me as
typical Hollywood—projects “that just never materialized.”
Never
materialized is, likewise, a good way to describe the adaptations
Stevens provided for his own By
Reason of Insanity and
Jersey
Tomatoes.
As a screenwriter, his career was filled with these near misses.
Though if the rumors I’ve chased for years are true, Stevens spent
his years after the publication of the second and last Malone novel
working as script doctor in Hollywood.
Whether that rumor is true or not, I like
to think it is. There’s no better place to hide in the shadows than
in the city that survives on them.
Shane
Stevens: An Expanded Bibliography
Stevens,
Shane. “After Twenty Terrible Years.” [Rev. of THE
BERN BOOK: A Record of a
Voyage
of the Mind.
By Vincent O. Carter.] The
Washington Post and Times Herald,
May
27, 1973.
—.
The
Anvil Chorus.
Delacorte Press, 1985.
—.
“Black on Black, Issue No. 1.” [Review] The
Washington Post and Times Herald,
May 10,
1970.
—.
“The Best Black American Novelist Writing Today.” [Rev. of Blind
Man With A Pistol
by
Chester
Himes.] The
Washington Post and Times Herald,
April 27, 1969.
—.
By
Reason of Insanity.
Simon and Schuster, 1979.
—.
“The Cat Lady’s Trying To Survive, Like Everyone Else.” The
New York Times,
Jan 1, 1972
—.
“The Child’s Gonna Live.” The
New York Times,
June 19, 1969
—.
“A Day Like Any Other Day in Junk City.” The
New York Times,
May 29, 1972.
— “The
Death Watch.” The
Minority of One,
Volume 10, August 1968.
—.
Dead
City.
Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1973.
—.
“Die, Nigger, Die!” [Review of Die,
Nigger, Die!
By H. Rap Brown] New
York Times Book
Review,
June 15, 1969.
—.
“Eldridge Cleaver ‘A Soul Brother Gone Wrong’” The
Progressive,
Vol. 33, No. 7, July,
1969.
—.
“Fiction.” [Rev of Corky’s
Brother
by Jay Neugeboren.] The
Washington Post and Times
Herald,
Feb. 8, 1970.
—.
“Fantasy in black.” [Rev. of Horn
by D. Keith Mano.] The
Washington Post and Times
Herald,
March 23, 1969.
—.
“The Final Adventure.” Ellery
Queen’s Mystery Magazine,
Volume 53, No.2, February 1969.
—.
Go
Down Dead.
New York, NY: William Morrow, 1966.
—.
“Growing up black in South Africa.” The
Washington Post and Times Herald,
March 1,
1970.
—.
“A Guided Tour In Hell.” [Rev. of The
Ink Trunk
by William Kennedy.] The
Washington
Post
and Times Herald,
Oct 5, 1969.
—.
“I Am Clarence.” [Rev. of I
Am Clarence
by Elaine Kraf] The
New York Times Book
Review,
November 2, 1969
—.
“Inside; Prison American Style.” [Rev. Inside;
Prison American Style
edited by Robert J.
Minton
Jr.] The New York Times Book Review, May 30, 1971
—.
“Instant Urban Renewal.” The
New York Times,
June 19, 1971
—.
“Lucid Madness” [Rev. of The
Serpent
by Luigi Malerba] The
New York Times Book
Review,
May 19, 1968
—.
“The Most Dangerous Ghetto; Street Kids.” The
New York Times,
November 22, 1970
—.
“The Murder of Aziz Khan.” [Rev. of The
Murder of Aziz Khan
by Zulfikar Ghose] New
York
Times Book Review,
January 26, 1969
—.
“The Pornographers” [Rev. of The
Pornographers
by Akiyuki Nozaka] The
New York Times
Book
Review,
November 24, 1968
—.
“Quest for Dignity.” [Rev. of Soul
on Fire
by Eldridge Cleaver.] The
Progressive,
Vol. 32,
No.
5, May, 1969
—.
Rat
Pack.
The Seabury Press, 1974.
—.
“The Rat Packs of New York.” The
New York Times
Magazine,
November 28, 1971
— “The
Ruined Map.” [Review of The
Ruined Map
by Kobo Abe] The
New York Times Book
Review,
August
3, 1969.
—.”Savior,
Savior.” [Rev. of
Savior, Savior, Hold My Hand
By Piri Thomas.} The
Washington
Post
and Times Herald,
Oct 1, 1972.
—.
“A Special Kind Of Justice.” [Review of The
Crime of Martin Sostre
by Vincent Copeland]
The
Washington Post and Times Herald,
Aug 23, 1970.
—.
“Suddenly Last Summer” [Rev. of The
Fourth Angel
by John Rechy.] The
Washington Post
and
Times Herald,
Aug. 12, 1973.
—.
“Tickets A Writer Needs”. The
Writer,
December 28, 1968.
—.
“Time and Time Again.” [Rev. of Seven
Long Times
by Piri Thomas.] The
Washington
Post,
August 11, 1974.
—.
“Trixie.” [Rev. of Trixie
by Wallace Graves] The
New York Times Book Review,
November
30,
1969.
—.
“Way Uptown In Another World.” Evergreen
Review,
Volume 6, Issue 27, 1962.
—.
Way
Uptown In Another World.
G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1971.
—.
“What The Kid Knew.” The
Washington Post
and
Times Herald,
April 12, 1970.
—.
“What The White Man Has.” [Rev. of Three-Fifths
of a Man
by Floyd McKissick.] The
Washington
Post, Times Herald, June 1, 1969.
—.
“The White Niggers of The 70s.” Black
Review #1,
Mel Watkins, ed., Morrow, 1971.
As
J.W. Rider
—Hot
Tickets.
Arbor House Publishing, 1987.
—Jersey
Tomatoes.
Arbor House Publishing, 1986.
Editions
Go Down Dead
- William Morrow, 1966. Hardcover.
- Pocket Books, 1968. Paperback.
- Pocket Books, 1974. Paperback
- A Quokka Book (Pocket Books), 1978. Paperback
Way Uptown In Another World
- G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1971. Hardcover.
- Lancer Books, 1972. Paperback
Dead City
- Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1973. Hardcover.
- Barrie & Jenkins, 1974. Hardcover (UK edition)
- Pocket Books, 1974. Paperback.
- Corgi Books, 1976. Paperback (UK edition)
- Corgi Books, 1980. Paperback (UK reprint)
- Carroll & Graf, 1992. Paperback (US reprint).
Rat Pack
- Seabury Press, 1974. Hardcover.
- Pocket Books, 1975. Paperback.
- Simon & Schuster of Canada, 1976. Paperback
- Pocket Books, 1976. Paperback.
By Reason of Insanity
- Simon & Schuster, 1979. Hardcover.
- George Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1979. Hardcover (UK edition)
- Sphere Books, 1979. Paperback (UK edition)
- Dell Publishing, 1980. Paperback
- Sphere Books, 1980. Paperback
- Carroll & Graf, 1990. Paperback.
- Chicago Review Press, 2007. Paperback.
- Simon & Schuster Digital Sales Inc., 2014. (eBook edition)
The Anvil Chorus
- Delacorte Press, 1985. Hardcover.
- Andre Deutsch, 1985. Hardcover (UK edition)
- Dell Publishing, 1986. Paperback.
- Fontana, 1986. Paperback (UK edition)
- Carroll & Graf, 1993. Paperback.
Jersey Tomatoes
- Arbor House Publishing, 1986. Hardcover.
- Pocket Books, 1987. Paperback.
Hot Tickets
- Arbor House Publishing, 1987. Hardcover.
- Pocket Books, 1987. Paperback.
