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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 a pen name 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...

• First publication in more than 60 years—and first ever under the author’s real name!
• Silverberg is a five-time winner of both the Nebula and Hugo awards, science fiction’s highest honors, and was named a Grandmaster by the Science Fiction Writers of America
• Kirkus Reviews on THE HOT BEAT: "Genuinely juicy pulp noir...Silverberg’s novel isn’t a modern homage but the real thing; he brings the same vigor and imagination to noir that characterizes his award-winning science fiction."

"Dazzling."

— Michael Chabon

"A master of his craft."

— Los Angeles Times

"A sure-fire page turner."

— Chicago Sun-Times