So Many Doors

Oakley Hall’s second novel (and the first published under his own name) is a superb noir about Jack Ward, a working-class California man who at the start of the book sits on death row for murdering his girlfriend (named V). The book is less a mystery novel than a psychological character study, and what makes it great is not just Hall’s tight prose (this is one of the better-written books in the entire Hard Case Crime series), but the use of shifting perspectives as Jack’s and V’s relationship is filled in from the points of view of his father, friends, and finally V herself. Oakley would achieve later fame for Warlock (1958), a western and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, but this is an underrated gem.