Hard Case Crime and Donald Westlake

Hard Case Crime will bring out Donald Westlake's Memory, written in the '60s and never published. Charles Ardai says that Lawrence Block had the manuscript. Ardai explains: The book is called MEMORY, and it's outstanding. Don wrote it in the early 1960s but set it aside when his literary agent advised him that it was too literary and encouraged him to concentrate on more commercial sorts of crime fiction. And despite Larry's urging him to publish it over the decades that followed, Don never did.

He should have. It's a beautifully written, heartbreaking story about a man who suffers an assault (after being caught in bed with another man's wife) and wakes up in a hospital bed suffering from a peculiar sort of brain damage that doesn't make him unable to function but does make it hard for him to form new memories or retain old ones. Stuck far from home (and struggling even to remember where home used to be), paranoid about the attentions of the police, and desperate to reconstruct his lost life, Paul Cole sets out on an extraordinary private investigation: a missing persons case in which he himself is the missing person.