The Hot Beat

HAD L.A.’S HOTTEST BANDLEADER

BECOME AN INSTRUMENT OF DEATH?

Before his extraordinary career as a grandmaster of science fiction, Robert Silverberg honed his craft as a writer for a variety of pulp magazines, including crime digests with titles like Trapped and Guilty Detective Story Magazine. He also wrote this long-lost novel, which appeared under the pen name “Stan Vincent” in 1960 – and has never been published since.

Meet Bob McKay: once a rising star in the toniest nightclubs of Los Angeles, now a down-and-out denizen of tawdry bars where B-girls hustle drinks and brawls break out nightly. When one hustler winds up strangled, McKay lands on Death Row. Can a starlet and a sympathetic newspaper columnist clear his name before his date with the death chamber?

Featuring a new introduction by the author and three bonus stories from Guilty and Trapped, The Hot Beat offers readers a trip through time back to the pulp era, when a future star was making his bones with stories of murder, betrayal, and dangerous desires…