Richard A. Lupoff

During World War II, due to a shortage of qualified pilots, Uncle Sam began a program of training thousands of military pilots. Among these were the Tuskegee Airmen, a unit of African-Americans eager to fly in combat. Fifty years later a Hollywood studio sets out to create a documentary about these brave airmen, featuring grizzled survivors of that long-ago era flying lovingly maintained vintage aircraft. And then…murder strikes on the movie set, and Hobart Lindsey, insurance...

A 1928 DUESENBERG! Most of them were rich, most of them were beautiful, and now one of them was dead in an unexpected and particularly nasty way. Oh, and a perfectly maintained, priceless 1928 Duesenberg Phaeton, the royalty of collectible, classic automobiles, had disappeared. Where do you hide a totally recognizable Dusie? Insurance man Hobart Lindsey is back on the case…along with his sometime sparring partner and lover, homicide investigator Marvia Plum, Lindsey’s troubled mother, and a cast...

WHEN A MAN’S PARTNER IS KILLED… So begins one of the most famous quotations in all of crime fiction. And just as the murder of Sam Spade's partner, Miles Archer, sets off the quest in the great Dashiell Hammett's greatest novel, so the murder of Hobart Lindsey's partner, Cletus Berry, sets off the quest in The Silver Chariot Killer, the sixth of Richard A. Lupoff's classic series of «Killer» mysteries. It's Christmas week in New York and Cletus Berry's body has been...

He was a white, suburban bachelor. A total square. Lived with his mother. Worked for an insurance company. She was a black, tough, streetwise cop. Then somebody stole a quarter million dollars worth of rare comic books. And then people started getting murdered. Lindsey and Plum were like oil and water, but they had to work together, like it or not! Joe Gores, author of Hammett and other novels, said: «Lupoff writes with intelligence, humor, wisdom, and a zest for life. He had a lot of fun...

Prior to World War II, black actors were restricted to mainstream film roles as chauffeurs, maids, night club entertainers, and comic buffoons. But there was a second Hollywood, a BLACK Hollywood, where great producers and directors like Oscar Michaud created films with all-black casts for exhibition to black audiences. Some of the actors worked only in black productions. Others, like the talented Eddie Anderson, could play comic roles in white productions and serious roles in all-black films....

Who WAS that gorgeous model? When a helicopter loses power and plunges into the icy waters of scenic Lake Tahoe, killing its only passenger, millionaire Albert Crocker Vansittart, what looks like a routine claim against a life insurance policy turns into a mystery for investigator Hobart Lindsey and his sometime collaborator Marvia Plum. The reason: half a century ago, the youthful Vansittart had come across a hardboiled mystery novel and become obsessed with the glamorous model who'd posed...

Bob Bjorner is the last of the «red hot lefties» at radio station KRED in Berkeley, Calif. His paranoia makes him bring his personal lock to keep intruders out of the studio while he's on the air–but they get to him anyway! He opens his lunch, takes his first mouthful of sashimi, and falls over dead. Homicide detective Marvia Plum scrambles to the station in time to see broadcasters, engineers, and administrators trying to figure out what to do next. Bob Bjorner, Radio Red himself, is...

Is it really over? Have Hobart Lindsey and Marvia Plum solved their last case? Lindsey, the mild-mannered bachelor insurance adjuster. Plum, the tough inner-city cop and single mom. You can hardly think of an odder couple, but somehow they were able to bring out the best in each other. Through a series of eight novels that carried them from California to Louisiana, from Denver to Chicago to New York to Rome, they explored the eccentricities of American pop culture, from comic books to race...

THEIR LAST BOW. A cache of stolen comic books had originally brought insurance man Hobart Lindsey and police officer Marvia Plum together. They were as different as different could be: he, a diffident suburban bachelor living with an emotionally damaged mother; she, a tough inner-city cop raising an at-risk child. Their tumultuous relationship endured for seven years, then seemingly ended as Marvia Plum abandoned her career to return to the arms of an old flame while Lindsey's duties...