In the 1930s and ‘40s, he wrote about the otherworldly landscape of Southern California with a tough elegance themes bordered on poetry, driving his tarnished but noble knight through a neon-lit neverland. After a few years, a call from Hollywood sprung him from the pulpwood pages of the detective-fiction magazines and onto a movie lot, where he began crafting features that would light up the screens during Tinsletown’s golden age. It wasn’t Raymond Chandler. It was Chandler’s compadre from the pages of Black Mask and Dime Detective magazines, John K. Butler, whose star shone as brightly as Chandler’s in the pages of the pulps. Chandler went on to movies and best-selling novels; Butler stayed in the picture business, his work never reaching book form.
Until now.
For the first time, Butler’s swift and compelling tales have been collected in a brand-new volume. At The Stroke of Midnight, the beginning of a new, ambitious series from Adventure House, features the entire nine-novelette run of Butler’s most famous creation: Steven Middleton Knight, a.k.a. Steve Midnight, a once-dissolute playboy forced by circumstance and his own sense of honor into the hardscrabble, dangerous, life of a late-night cabbie. In these sharp and often funny stories, Butler and Midnight steer through a long-ago milieu so real that you can see the shadows of the palm trees and the hint of neon just outside the headlight beams, smell the cigar ash embedded in the seatcovers, taste the harsh liquor in the glove-compartment bottle, and feel the sting of the blackjack as it thuds against your skull.
Except for a couple of single-story reprints, none of these fascinating tales has ever been reprinted. They, like their creator, have been awaiting rediscovery for more than a half-century -- waiting for new generations to find out that John K. Butler belongs right up there with Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, in the top rank of the writers who made hardboiled detective fiction an art as well as a style.
The editor of At The Stroke of Midnight is John Wooley, an internationally known purveyor of American pop culture. His work includes co-authoring and associate-producing two feature-length video documentaries, writing the nonfiction volume Hot Schlock Horror (called by legendary Z-film producer David F. Friedman “the best genre-movie book I’ve ever read”), and penning dozens of comic-book scripts and hundreds of magazine and newspaper articles, interviews, and features. His previous collection of classic pulp stories, Robert Leslie Bellem’s Dan Turner, Hollywood Detective, spawned several new comic books and a made-for-TV movie starring Marc Singer, all scripted by Wooley. For At The Stroke of Midnight, he joins forces with his friend and fellow pulp aficionado, publisher John Gunnison, in the first of a new deluxe series from Adventure House.
