Clifton Adams is best known for his westerns, having won two Spur Awards for best novel in both 1969 and 1970. But he also wrote two of the best Gold Medal noir thrillers. As August West said of Death’s Sweet Song in the Vintage Hardboiled Reads blog, "This may be the best crime fiction novel that Gold Medal published in the 50s.” It’s got it all—a beautiful, conniving woman, a vulnerable safe, and a guy with lots of moral flexibility. Whom Gods Destroy is the tense story of a self-destructive bootlegger and the woman he can’t forgive. Cullen Gallagher of the Los Angeles Review of Books provides a new introduction. While the prolific Adams primarily wrote westerns, he did make a few forays into crime—only two under his own name, both of them Gold Medal paperbacks reprinted here. Both stories are set in the dusty small towns of the author’s native Oklahoma. Death’s Sweet Song (1955) is about a washed-up tourist-court operator off Route 66 who gets in over his head when he tries to cut in on a box-factory robbery. Whom Gods Destroy (1953) features a high-school football hero turned short-order cook who tries to muscle in on the bootleggers in his dry-county hometown. Death is better, with a tight downward spiral of a plot and wonderfully evocative prose; Gods has its moments, but too many reversals as the ill-fated hero tries one desperate scheme after another. Both, though, feature crackling sexual tension between the schemers and their femmes fatales. In Death, it’s a love-hate relationship where blows are foreplay to kissing; in Gods, it’s pure hate, the man’s sense of inadequacy strong enough to ruin both his life and that of the woman who loves him. --Keir Graff [Death's Sweet Song]may be the best crime fiction novel that Gold Medal published in the 50s. It's a story of how things can spiral out of control once you take that step--and you can't go back. --August West, Vintage Hardboiled Reads The real thing. Uncluttered prose, smooth, and assured, with just the right amount of description to make things real and immediate. --Bill Crider, Mystery*File Death s Sweet Song is outstanding...a timeless story of one alienated person in an uphill battle, trying to get even with the rotten world around him. --Brian Greene, Criminal Element DEATH'S SWEET SONG What is it about the petite blonde? When Paula Sheldon and her husband Karl pull into Joe Hooper's rundown gas pump motel outside Creston, Hooper can't take his eyes off her. And he sure can't figure why a classy guy like Sheldon would check into his dump of a place. But that night he gets an earful when he overhears the Sheldons discussing a robbery with a local ex-con. Hooper is desperate to get away from Creston, even more desperate to spend time with Sheldon's wife. He takes a chance and convinces the Sheldons that he'd make a better partner. And everything goes smoothly until the old watchman tries to play hero. It's his own damn fault that Hooper has to shoot him. Paula likes a man who knows how to take charge, and she likes what she sees in Hooper. It's enough to make a guy go a little crazy--crazy enough to do anything WHOM GODS DESTROY Roy Foley has hated Lola ever since she laughed at him in high school--the poor kid from across the Oklahoma tracks who was filled with ambition and dared to declare his love. Now he's back in town with some scores to settle. By chance he runs into Sid Gardner, another Burk Street kid, who's running alcohol in their dry state and making pretty good money at it. Roy quickly joins him. But Roy also has eyes for Sid's wife, Vida, with her long white-blonde hair and bewitching manner. Together, Roy figures that he and Vida can take over the booze sales from Barney Seaward, the top dog in Big Prairie, and maybe he can get back at Lola, who is now married to the local D.A., Seaward's kept man. Roy has it all figured out once he's got Sid out of the way, Barney will be next. But hate is a poor substitute for ambition, and Roy has a long way to go to get ahead of Lola. : Clifton Adams was born in Comanche, Oklahoma in 1919. During WWII, he served in the Tank Corps in both Africa and Europe, developing his favorite hobby, cooking, while trying to prepare army rations. He wrote over 50 books and 125 stories under several pseudonyms including Clay Randall, Jonathan Gant and Matt Kinkaid--and won two Spur Awards for his westerns, Tragg's Choice in 1969 and The Last Days of Wolf Garnett in 1970. He had also been named "Oklahoma Writer of the Year" in 1965 by the University of Oklahoma, his alma mater. He died of a heart attack in San Francisco, California on October 7, 1971.