Jazz music fused with pulp fiction. The result? Stories that croon like Nat "King" Cole, and strike like a lead pipe. Tales of Jazz artists, and other assorted characters, looking for that big break — often getting broken. Charles Boeckman was a musician writing pulp fiction between gigs. He knew his milieu. 22 stories, culled from Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, Manhunt, and many others.

Mr. Boeckman's stories usually focused on sad people trying to escape their dreary lives — shifty con-artists, embittered detectives and hen-pecked losers. The author's jazz background figures into several stories, reaching a two-fisted crescendo.