Dave Zeltserman-free Julius; Nightmare Noir: Nightmare Alley

I've made Julius Katz Mysteries free on Smashwords.

Julius Katz Mysteries with 2 award-winning stories (including last years Shamus) now free http://tiny.cc/iqp29 #ebook #free #mystery

thanks,
Dave

-------------------From The Los Angeles Times:

Paperback Writers: Nightmare noir
PAPERBACK WRITERS

William Lindsay Gresham's novel 'Nightmare Alley' draws deeply on autobiographical sources to tell the story of a doomed carnival hustler.

March 28, 2010|By Richard Rayner
William Lindsay Gresham's novel "Nightmare Alley" (NYRB Classics: 288 pp., $16) tells the rise-and-fall story of Stan Carlisle, a hustling carnival wanna-be who transforms himself into the Great Stanton, a big-time stage magician, and then into a fake psychic, running a "spook racket" before reaching too far and engineering his own catastrophe.

In the end, Carlisle is torn apart by the very same emotional disturbances that have driven him, let down by a woman who loves him and betrayed by another who is even more ruthless than he. The "nightmare" of the title rings true, for this delirious and unstoppable novel -- first published in 1946, famously filmed starring Tyrone Power in 1947 and only now re-issued by NYRB Classics in its full, uncensored version with a new introduction by Nick Tosches -- inverts the American dream. The plot turns the Horatio Alger myth on its head and the psychology leans on Freud, but the torment, the pervading sense that the human creature lives in a trap he or she is doomed never to escape, comes from the heart and mind of the author. Never was noir more autobiographical than here.

http://articles.latimes.com/2010/mar/28/entertainment/la-caw-paperback-writers28-2010mar28
"Baptized an Episcopalian, raised an agnostic, in turns a Unitarian, a hedonist, a stoic, a Communist, a self-made mystic, and an eclectic grabber after truth, I had at last come home," wrote William Lindsay Gresham after his reconversion to the Christian faith in the early 1950s.