Live Gold

In Live Gold, Robert Sheckley plunges his hardboiled hero Stephen Dain into a glittering, treacherous world where greed, deceit, and glamour collide. When Dain is hired to recover a cache of stolen gold, he quickly discovers that every lead comes with a double-cross — and that the real treasure isn't what's buried, but who's willing to kill for it. Set against a backdrop of sun-drenched coastlines, smoky bars, and luxury gone rotten, Sheckley's noir pulses with cynical intelligence and effortless cool.

Dain, the quintessential mid-century private eye — sardonic, sharp, and unflinchingly human — moves through a labyrinth of deceit that reflects Sheckley's fascination with moral ambiguity. Every clue seems solid until it melts away like the gold itself, and every ally hides a blade. Yet amid the bullets and betrayals, flashes of wry humor and philosophical insight remind readers that Sheckley's noir world, though bleak, is never without irony or truth.

 Written with the precision of a craftsman and the flair of a born storyteller, Live Gold stands as one of Sheckley's most accomplished crime novels. Lean, witty, and relentlessly tense, it fuses pulp urgency with literary intelligence — a gleaming testament to how even in noir, Sheckley could make cynicism shine.