A Promise of Death

About the Book

The dark, sinister crime novel of a bygone era, portrayed so convincingly in the works of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, has made an impressive resurgence. This novel follows in the footsteps of these trailblazers, featuring a bulldog P.I. out to foil saboteurs in war-time Los Angeles. Based on an actual historic event involving major corporations, the story unravels the probable motivations of the bad guys. Here is all the magic that was Hollywood a few decades ago-- the blondes, the weasels, the innocents and the abusers. In the middle of a war, people squeezed a lot of good times into whatever time they had left. Nick Black, excop turned P.I., got sucked into the maelstrom and found himself playing hide-and-seek with the Grim Reaper.

About the Author

Charles Crandall studied creative writing at San Francisco State University and has authored nine non-fiction books. This is his first fiction novel. Always a fan of the Raymond Chandler noir form, his Saturdays growing up were spent in the theaters running double-feature gangster flicks starring Bogart, Mitchum, George Raft, and Cagney. He spent many hours warming the principal’s bench at school for answering teachers in a gangster dialect and found, to his dismay, that none of these educators was a fan of the genre or his attempts to identify with it. This novel is the first of a trilogy featuring his P.I. hero, Nick Black, an ex-LAPD detective working in the war years of 1943-1945.