Editor“Reprinted from the late 1950s comes a tautly plotted, gritty tale of gang wars, racketeering, police corruption, and the dangers faced by a murder witness who risks his life to give testimony against powerful mobsters.
Late American author Ovid E. Desmarais, better known as Ovid Demaris, was a journalist and bestselling author of thirty books. Praised for his investigative reporting on organised crime, political and business corruption, gambling and the underworld, several of his non-fiction books enjoyed a combined 64 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and have been translated and published in twenty-two countries.
Hard-hitting non-fiction aside, hardboiled crime fiction, detective stories, and paperback original suspense novels make up the bulk of Demaris’s body of work.
His best-known tale, Candyleg, was made into the 1969 Italian film Machine Gun McCain, featuring John Cassavetes, Britt Ekland and Peter Falk, and The Hoods Take Over, first published by Gold Medal Books and reprinted this month by Stark House Press, also caught the attention of Hollywood, later becoming a movie called Gang Wars, starring Charles Bronson.
Arriving in bookstores in June 1957, four months after his successful debut, Demaris’s gritty second novel was a socially relevant and timely story focused on gang-related crimes, crooked police officials and civic responsibility.”
Nicholas Litchfield’s review of the grisly yet powerful hard-hitting 1950s crime novel The Hoods Take Over is published today in the Lancashire Post and syndicated to 20 newspapers in the UK. You can read the full book review here.
