Overview

SWEET MONEY GIRL Hortense is a cynic. Love is great and all that, but it's money that makes the world go round. Maxie is in love with Hortense. She won't give him the time of day, but he knows if he can just put together a big real estate deal, she'll be his--at least for awhile. One night, Maxie introduces Hortense to Hugh, his best friend, who also falls in love with her. Hugh is a realist, willing to take Hortense on her own terms. This is the story of three lives that collide one December in New York City--Hortense, the dance instructor who knows how to look out for number one; Maxie, the mamma's boy who just wants his shot at happiness; and Hugh, who wrecks it for all of them. LIFE AND DEATH OF A TOUGH GUY Joey Kasow is a skinny Jewish kid growing up in the 1920's in Hell's Kitchen. Tormented by the Irish thugs in the neighborhood, he eventually gains their begrudging respect and is allowed to join their gang, the Badgers. Joey grows up tough. He knows he's got to take whatever is dished out to him to stay in the gang. He learns how to inflict pain--he learns how to kill. And gradually he works his way up the ladder to become the Spotter's enforcer. He is now Joey Case. But Joey can't escape his past, falling in love with innocent young Sadie Madofsky, his refuge from the brutal world around him. All Joey wants is to get ahead--but the Spotter has other plans for him.

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9781933586267

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Reviews

Electrifying, Mr. Appel has a flair for character. -- Saturday Review of Literature

The rise-and-fall tragedy of a man neither good nor wholly evil, written with haunting sensitively and perception. -Anthony Boucher, N.Y. Times (on Life and Death of a Tough Guy) Every word Benjamin Appel writes is convincing. The atmosphere is breathlessly accurate. -Seattle Post Intelligencer The details of how New York looked and felt then, and the men and women who populated it, are shot through with so much nuance and energy that they seem alive on the page today. -Wendell Jamieson, New York Times

The rise-and-fall tragedy of a man neither good nor wholly evil, written with haunting sensitively and perception. -Anthony Boucher, N.Y. Times (on Life and Death of a Tough Guy) Every word Benjamin Appel writes is convincing. The atmosphere is breathlessly accurate. -Seattle Post Intelligencer The details of how New York looked and felt then, and the men and women who populated it, are shot through with so much nuance and energy that they seem alive on the page today. -Wendell Jamieson, New York Times Benjamin Appel is the 'Jack Dempsey' of this writing craft, if there can be such a thing as a 'Man-Mauler' in the world of books. -- Indianapolis Post Electrifying, Mr. Appel has a flair for character. -- Saturday Review of Literature James Cain hasn't even a running chance of Dean of tellers of hard-boiled stories. He is completely out-pointed, outslugged, and outcursed by Benjamin Appel, whose Brain Guy is so tough the Public Library will have to keep it in a special cell. -- Harry Hansen

Author Information

Benjamin Appel was born in 1907 in New York City and grew up in Hell's Kitchen. He began writing short stories and was published in both literary and slick magazines. Brain Guy was his first novel, followed by fifteen others. In 1945 and 1946 he was sent as historian/journalist with the McNutt Mission to the Philippines. Returning to the States, he moved to Roosevelt, New Jersey, a New Deal resettlement town, where he lived with his wife and three daughters and wrote both fiction and nonfiction until he died in 1977. Carla is the daughter of Benjamin Appel, and currently lives in Washington D.C.

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