Epitaph for a Tramp & Epitaph for a Dead Beat: The Harry Fannin Detective Novels

david markson robert mcginnis

Before achieving critical acclaim as a novelist, David Markson paid the rent by writing several crime novels, including two featuring the private detective Harry Fannin. Together here in one volume, these works are now available to a new generation of readers.

In Epitaph for a Tramp, Fannin isn't called out to investigate a murder — it happens on his doorstop. In the sweltering heat of a New York August night, he answers the buzzer at his door to find his promiscuous ex-wife dying from a knife wound. To find her killer, Fannin plies his trade with classic hard-boiled aplomb. In the second novel, Epitaph for a Dead Beat, Fannin finds himself knee-deep in murder among the beatniks and bohemians of the early 1960s, where blood seems to flow as readily as cheap Chianti.

Intricately plotted and rife with wisecracks, David Markson offers suspenseful and literary crime novels.

Genres fictionmysterynovelscrime

377 pages, Paperback

First published January 1,1959

Series

Harry Fannin

This edition

Format: 377 pages, Paperback
Published: November 15, 2006 by Catapult
ISBN: 9781593761349
ASIN: 1593761341
Language: English

About the author

david markson

David Markson was an American novelist, born David Merrill Markson in Albany, New York. He is the author of several postmodern novels, including This is Not a Novel, Springer's Progress, and Wittgenstein's Mistress. His most recent work, The Last Novel, was published in 2007 and received a positive review in the New York Times, which called it "a real tour de force."

Markson's work is characterized by an unconventional approach to narration and plot. While his early works may draw on the modernist tradition of William Faulkner and Malcolm Lowry, Markson says his later novels are "literally crammed with literary and artistic anecdotes" and "nonlinear, discontinuous, collage-like, an assemblage."

Dalkey Archive Press has published several of his novels. In December 2006, publishers Shoemaker & Hoard republished two of Markson's early crime novels Epitaph for a Tramp and Epitaph for a Dead Beat in one volume.

In addition to his novels, he has published a book of poetry and a critical study of Malcolm Lowry.

The movie Dirty Dingus Magee, starring Frank Sinatra, is based on Markson's first novel, The Ballad of Dingus Magee, an anti-Western. He wrote three crime novels early in his career.

Educated at Union College and Columbia University, Markson began his writing career as a journalist and book editor, periodically taking up work as a college professor at Columbia University, Long Island University, and The New School.

Markson died in his New York City, West Village apartment.