An unconventional crime story that became a massive bestseller in the 1930s…launching Tiffany Thayer’s controversial, and highly successful, writing a career, one that’s all but forgotten today, even though he sold millions of books. Now, after nearly 100 years, the blockbuster Thirteen Men is finally back in print…and hasn’t lost any of its narrative power over time. It is still, as the San Francisco Examiner declared, “One of the most realistic studies of the American melting pot that has ever been penned.”
This is the story of the twelve men on a jury, sitting in judgment of a murderer, the thirteenth man. Each chapter is from the point of view of an individual juror…and then, finally, we enter the mind of the clever and unrepentant killer himself, a man who has slaughtered 38 people. But it’s so much more than a collection of character studies or a courtroom procedural…it’s a searing, compelling, darkly funny thriller, an uncompromising look into humanity and inhumanity, the judges and the judged.
“Startlingly unusual. By far the most original book in the last decade is, at best, an inadequate description of Tiffany Thayer’s racy and gory novel. Novels like Thirteen Men are seldom published and ought not to be missed. “Richmond Planet
“You’ve never read anything like Thirteen Men before. If you shock easily, lay off of it, but whatever you are, you can be sure it won’t bore you. An extremely unusual novel and a very good one.” Vacaville Reporter
“It is not only the damndest book, but easily the cleverest you have read in a long while. It affords glimpses of what the great American novel will be like when written at last. This story is immense in its implications. At the same time, it is moving to the fast tempo of this country. Audacious, ribald, philosophic.” San Francisco Examiner
“A strange and wild story which will startle the book world.” The Morning Call
“Entirely different from any other book. Written with a blunt, brutally ironic, realism. Outstanding.” New York Sun
“Sometimes it is good, sometimes it is bad. Always it is interesting. It is decidedly a book for the sophisticated. Thayer has a penetrating wit, an ironical eye for mankind’s foibles, a desire to startle and destroy. He has written a book which it is impossible to leave. Once started, it must be finished.” Minneapolis Journal
“It is supremely entertaining and, compared to the common run, decidedly superior. A story full of flesh, color and humanity handled with extraordinary skill” Richmond News Leader
“Strangely defiant and cruelly revealing. An amazing book to cause gasps, one which snaps a finger at the conventions of style and material. It is also thoughtful, challenging and flippant.” Oakland Tribune
“A wonderful book. There is irony, nonsense, bitterness, inconsequentiality, humor, pathos, all well blended with a dozen more of those elusive but indispensable things that make the book that is a book. The thing is gratifying, far more than amusing. It is one of the craziest books we have ever read, but by the same token, one of the sanest. Don’t start Thirteen Men without expecting to encounter some pretty raucous stuff.” Hammond Indiana Times
“A corking story, at one turn a roaring farce, at another an unmistakable tragedy, and all the time a stinging satire on the particular mechanics of the law.” The Evening Star
“This young writer furnishes us with something new under the sun in book form, for which in these days of conventional novels with the same plots should be awarded some sort of medal. Thayer writes naughty things about life and people…and his naughtiness is apt to sting or cause protest since it is too accurately about life. The best trial story we have ever read.” Fort Worth Star-Telegram
“Refreshingly original. It is effortlessly tender, brutal, humorous, obscene, profound, and trivial in exactly the right places. And it packs a wallop in its double-barreled ending, which would put any thriller in the bestselling class.” Detroit Free Press
Tiffany Thayer /
Crime Fiction, Historical, Literary Fiction
