William Ard’s vintage hard-boiled thriller YOU’LL GET YOURS is a snappy little volume that covers a lot of story territory in under 200 pages. Lean like great noir.

It’s a private eye novel, though the gumshoe in this becomes less neutral than that archetype is sometimes wont to be. In my mind, he is a cross between the private dick and the harried anti-hero of classic hard-boiled fiction.

At any rate, YOU’LL GET YOURS is a marvelous take on the genre and brings with it a grim, unpredictable story. Snappy dialogue and twisting tale-telling stand Ard in good stead in this 1952 yarn. It’s packed with brutality and sensuality as per genre standards.

A touch of the entertainment industry and underground nude photography are compelling plot elements. The stolen valuables, you see, upon which the PI’s case initially seems to hinge, are really just a red herring.

That’s not a spoiler; you’ll find out quick things aren’t the way they seem.

But isn’t that always the case with great noir? Isn’t that how it should be?

Stark House does another happy-making move for me. This publisher not only digs up “lost” classics of the noir variety, it digs up really good ones.

Carter Brown’s Al Wheeler mysteries are some of the best vintage hard-boiled mystery reading you’re going to come across. Brown’s writing is as fast-paced as perhaps any of his peers. They’re packed with gobs of great characters, some likeable as hell and some deliciously hate-worthy. But they’re all well-written.

As are the stories themselves. Brown’s hard-boiled prose is among the finest; he knows how to sling a metaphor for sure. Al Wheeler’s adventures are also sexy as hell, with Wheeler being a thorn in everybody’s side - from the women he tries to seduce to his mortified bosses.

But Wheeler is the man for the job when it’s a peculiar crime. My favorite setup here is in Booty for a Babe, in which Al finds himself solving a crime at a science-fiction convention.

These three novels are testaments to Brown’s authorial leanness. Noir is known for that and this author is as lean as it gets (even despite a couple of padding sequences involving Wheeler’s weird dreams in Booty). He is not one to waste space. Every word is worthy.

With succulent descriptions of succulent women, two-fisted action, twists and turns, and Wheeler’s irrepressible attitude, there’s nothing NOT to like in Brown’s series about this rakish police officer.

Did I say it? Yeah I said it. Bonzo bingo goddam right I did. This pair of attention-snatchers by Richard Wormser must be among the absolute top of the genre. I feel ultra-effusive saying all these things, especially in context of having praised Stark House aplenty prior til now.

But maybe there are some things in the world that just keep getting better, that still have surprises, that keep finding excellence. I’d say SH is one of those things. This label has really heaped upon us a wealth of great crime fiction we might not otherwise have heard of. Much of the press’s output is lesser known, but as good as or better than a significant chunk of what fills the shelves of the market now or even in the days of the classics.

Wormser epitomizes classic noir. His storytelling is as lean as turkey-dinner at an overeater support group’s Christmas party. Yet it’s rammed to the effing gills with plot complexity and attention to characters, even the “minor” ones.

To boot, this omnibus features two distinctly different settings. One is urban and loaded with cops, crooks and city officials (and you never know which of those is which). The other is as ripe with evil but located in a small town cursed by a day of coincidence. Only the guilty-looking protagonist feels the day’s awfulness deeper than the rest.

Finally, as template-based as even some great noir can be, Wormser’s THE BODY LOOKS FAMILIAR and THE LATE MRS. FIVE are striking in their originality.

Everything about these two books is spectacular. This is damn near to flawless writing, genre notwithstanding.