Dreadful Summit — Stanley Ellin

A teenage boy sets out to avenge his father in this noir novel from the author of Specialty of the House.Every sports fan in New York knows Al Judge, the hard-bitten reporter whose column is the scourge of gamblers, gangsters, and corrupt players across the city. Sixteen-year-old George LaMain is Judge's biggest fan???until the night when his own father becomes the target of the journalist???s attacks, taken down in a public spectacle of violent humiliation. Reeling from a moment that upends his whole worldview, George takes his father's gun and sets out into the night on a quest for revenge. But before he can achieve the vigilante justice he seeks, the young man will make a series of discoveries that reveal an unsettling truth about the family he thought he knew. A noir-tinged coming of age novel by the master of the mystery story, Dreadful Summit is a riveting, atmospheric revenge novel rendered with both depth and suspense. It was included in the Haycraft-Queen cornerstone list of the greatest mysteries of all time, and inspired the 1951 Joseph Losey film The Big Night. Introduction by Andrew Klavan.