For several months, author Patti Abbott has been offering a special Friday showcase of overlooked or "€œforgotten"€ books that deserve a fresh look from readers.

The program originally began as a round-up of mystery and crime fiction novels that deserved a fresh look or wider readership than they received upon first release. Patti has since broadened the scope to include Young Adult fiction and nonfiction.

A round up of recently spotlighted titles can be found HERE.

My own recent contributions to Patti’s feature include a novel by Craig Holden and one by James Sallis:

Four Corners of Night

by Craig Holden

I first heard of Craig Holden at a James Ellroy signing in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Holden was in the audience that rather cold night and Ellroy took the trouble to tout CH’s most recent novel — it was a rare and ringing endorsement on the part of the Demon Dog.

I secured a copy of The Four Corners of Night (1999) and was pole-armed. Night is always in my crime fiction Top 10; depending on mood, it often cracks my top five.

Set in a mythical city in northwestern Ohio — a kind of re-imagined and combined Toledo/Detroit — the novel turns on the uneasy axis of two cops and the woman who stands uneasily between them. It’s a classic triangular dynamic that informs everything from Bruce Springsteen’s noirish “Highway Patrolman,” to James Ellroy’s own watershed novel, The Black Dahlia.

When I read Dennis Lehane’s Mystic River, I finished the novel so convinced Lehane’s River was informed and inspired by Holden’s Four Corners, I went looking for proof of concept. I found it in an interview Lehane gave during his promotional cycle for his then-latest-series entry Prayers for Rain; he had, he said, finished Holden’s novel “just last week.” Mystic River was unveiled in 2001.

That’s the kind of subtle classic Holden’s Four Corners of Night is — a novel that not only inspires other novels, but inspires novels that go on to inspire still other books.

The language sparkles from it’s richly evocative opening in an all too-real Denny’s along the Ohio-Michigan border (“‘Buck ninety-nine,’ Bank says. ‘Who can afford not to eat this shit at that price?’ He’s said this over the years maybe fifty times in this restaurant with me.”), to wonderfully evocative lines that touch poetry (“We have no business at this scene…standing in the river of some mother’s grief and feeling my own worthlessness.”).

Four Corner’s exploration of the ramifications of a child’s abduction pushed the boundaries of crime fiction to the far four corners; Holden’s book expanded the reach and breadth of crime fiction and shows that in the right hands, a crime novel can be both a page-turner, and an atmosphere-rich and wrenching character study.

Whenever the words won’t come — or if they come too easily — Four Corners of Night is one of the two or three books I consistently dip into for inspiration or humbling.

Death Will Have Your Eyes

by James Sallis

Death Will Have Your Eyes appeared in the summer of 1997 from St. Martin’s.

The novel debuted about the same time as Sallis’ Eye of the Cricket — arguably the finest of the novels in Sallis’ Lew Griffin cycle that is for me the high-water mark of crime fiction series and the works that most influenced my own published novels to-date.

Death Will Have Your Eyes, a spy novel like no other, is in some ways a mirror image of Cricket. In both books, rare men in search of another man venture out into the world, seeming to trust the gravity of their persona and movement into the world will draw their quarry to them. James Joyce’s eerie "Nighttown" sequence from Ulysses informs both novels.

What we get in Death is part road novel, part existential meditation and part bloodbath.

Along the way, both Death and Eye force radical reconsiderations of “fiction” and our relationship as readers to the characters living within the novels we savor.

In Death Will Have Your Eyes narrator/spy David Edwards reflects, "One thing I knew absolutely was that the stories we live by are as real as anything else is. As long as we live by them. Even when we know they’re lies."

One of the most obscure of Sallis’ novels, and, along with Renderings, perhaps the most interior of his fictional works, Death Will Have Your Eyes is, with Drive, one of the few of Sallis’ novels to be optioned for film.

"For three years I got these really nice checks in the mail for not doing anything," Sallis told me when I discussed the book with him a few years ago. “The guy who made ‘The Avengers’ film was in London and when the book came out there were piles of it in the bookstores. He saw it and thought, ‘I’m making this spy film and here’s another one.’ So it was optioned for three years. The option money for each year was more than I got for the hardback, so it was welcome.”

One has to wonder what that filmmaker was thinking. Although Sallis says he was inspired by pulp fiction, the Death Will reads deep…and seems rather a challenge to put on film.

"Sort of like Drive, it was something that I realized I wanted to do,” Sallis told me. “I wanted to write a spy novel. Because I love Phillip Attlee, Donald Hamilton — that sort of Gold Medal genre of spy novels. I wanted to write something that would be an homage to that. As a gift to myself, I decided I would write this novel that I’d wanted to.”

Sallis said he told his wife, “‘Nobody in the states is going to buy this book, but it will do well in Europe.’ And, indeed, it did well in Europe, and I had a heck of a time selling it here in the states. It came out here in hardcover, fell off the face of the earth and never had a paperback printing.”

And that is truly a crime.