Humorous Noir

It's not every afternoon that an enigmatic, comely blonde named Stilton (like the cheese) walks into the scruffy gin joint where Sammy "Two Toes" Tiffin tends bar. It's love at first sight, but before Sammy can make his move, an air force general named Remy arrives with some urgent business. 'Cause when you need something done, Sammy is the guy to go to; he's got the connections on the street.

Charlie McGinley writes detective novels. At least he did, until writers block kicked in. He owes his publisher a book, multiple wives alimony and a loan shark is about to break his thumbs. Charlie hightails it out of L.A. two steps ahead of the police and his latest ex. On Route 66, he runs into Ben Fox, a mysterious Native American hitchhiker who just happened to know Ernest Hemingway Charlies favorite writer.

A luxury kidnapping? Or a disaster in the making? He’s done this before—followed women, watched them, waited for their secrets to surface. It always ends the same. He chooses the perfect victim. And then he makes them pay. But this one? She’s too perfect. Too normal. The kind of woman who smiles like she has nothing to hide. That’s what gives her away. When she leaves the hospital that night, he’s ready. Calm. Precise. Until she turns to him and says: “This is a mistake.” She’s not talking about him. By the time he realizes he’s taken the wrong woman—she’s already ...

Private eye Eddie Valiant doesn't like Toons - those cartoon characters who live side-by-side with humans. But Eddie will work for a Toon if his cash supply is low enough. So he reluctantly agrees when Roger Rabbit, a Toon who plays straight man (or should that be straight rabbit) in the Baby Herman cartoon series, asks him to find out who's been trying - unsuccessfully - to buy his contract from the DeGreasy Brothers syndicate. Then Rocco DeGreasy is murdered - and Roger is the prime suspect!

On the 12th floor of the Acme Building, on a cold February day in St. Paul, Guy Noir looks down the barrel of a loaded revolver in the hands of geezer gangster Joey Roast Beef, who is demanding to hear what lucrative scheme Guy is cooking up with stripper-turned-women's-studies-professor Naomi Fallopian. Everyone wants to know, and Guy faces them one by one, as he and Naomi pursue a dream of earning gazillions by selling a surefire method of dramatic weight loss.

A mix of paranormal mystery, dark humor, and supernatural crime-solving, The Dead Detective box set follows Richelle Dadd, a cop who wakes up to find herself in the middle of a murder scene—her own. Book 1: The Dead Detective Detective Richelle Dadd has seen plenty of crime scenes, but she never expected to wake up in one. Now, as an undead investigator, she’s dealing with more than just a bitter divorce—she’s also on a mission to solve her own murder. But being reanimated comes with a catch: she’s been turned into a zombie assassin, forced to carry out dangerous assignments while...

San Francisco, 1947. Bartender Sammy “Two Toes” Tiffin and the rest of the Cookie’s Coffee Irregulars—a ragtag bunch of working mugs last seen in Noir—are on the hustle: they’re trying to open a driving school; shanghai an abusive Swedish stevedore; get Mable, the local madam, and her girls to a Christmas party at the State Hospital without alerting the overzealous head of the S.F.P.D. vice squad.

Charlie just wants a quiet life … Then he finds a human skull buried in the front yard. Mystery writer Charlie McGinley moves from L.A. to a small town in New Mexico. No more big-city hassles. No more big-city hustles. Guess again! Suddenly Charlie has to deal with disappearing bodies, crabby cops, crazed killers, and a very pregnant wife, while trying desperately to avoid ending up in an unmarked grave next to the mysterious stiff. Gold Medal Winner, Humor and Satire —2024 Global Book Awards “Proverbial skeletons in closets and actual ones buried in the yard help make this a bone-...

Publié en 1830, Le Rouge et le Noir de Stendhal est un roman historique et psychologique qui dépeint l’ascension sociale et les ambitions de Julien Sorel, un jeune homme ambitieux issu d'une famille modeste. À travers ses tentatives pour gravir les échelons de la société, il se trouve souvent dans les intrigues au milieu de personnes influentes. Satire mordante de la société française du XIXe siècle, l'œuvre s'attaque aux hypocrisies de l'Église et des aristocraties, tout en constatant la folie des actions du protagoniste.

There’s a voodoo woman in New Orleans who knows your darkest secrets French Quarter paranormal investigator Wyatt Thomas learns he’s permanently linked to the spirit of a man with whom he’d fought a duel during another lifetime. The only person who can free Wyatt from his curse is long-dead voodoo queen Marie Laveaux. To seek her help, he must travel back to Antebellum New Orleans, succeed in his endeavor, or be trapped in the past forever. When Wyatt meets his former lover at the Mulatto Ball, he doesn’t know if he wants to return. While Wyatt is time traveling, detective Tony ...

Set in 1991, just as Star Trek: The Next Generation has rocketed the cast to global fame, the young and impressionable actor Brent Spiner receives a mysterious package and a series of disturbing letters, that take him on a terrifying and bizarre journey that enlists Paramount Security, the LAPD, and even the FBI in putting a stop to the danger that has his life and career hanging in the balance.

There's a different schemer or slimeball behind every door: cocaine duckpins who have survived only by the dumbest fortune, hard-luck gigolos desperate to score, undercover cops busting undercover cops who are running sting operations on undercover cops.

James Stark, a.k.a. Sandman Slim, crawled out of Hell, took bloody revenge for his girlfriend’s murder, and saved the world along the way. After that, what do you do for an encore? You take a lousy job tracking down monsters for money. It’s a depressing gig, but it pays for your beer and cigarettes. But in L.A., things can always get worse. Like when Lucifer comes to town to supervise his movie biography and drafts Stark as his bodyguard.

Sammy Dee is a mid-level Long Island mafioso in witness protection. Didier Onyekachukwu was the corrupt minister of finance of the former Upper Volta. Both men find themselves in middle age, living in the Southern California version of genteel poverty in a down-market condo complex called Paradise Gardens. Enter Marcy Gray, a "mature" actress barely getting by on a meager SAG pension.

Charlie McGinley writes about tough guys…then he has to become one. Fed up with writing cheesy detective fiction, Charlie dreams of writing something serious. Unfortunately, his publisher insists that he keep cranking out hard-boiled Johnny Dent PI novels. When Charlie stumbles across an urban legend about Thomas Edison inventing a machine that could speak to the dead, he thinks he’s found the perfect gimmick to spice up his next book. That is, until he builds the "Ghost Machine" and accidentally uses it... And people in his small New Mexico town start dying. Suddenly, Charlie must ...

His name is Deutsch Baggerly. He's a sort of hot, middle-aged, retired potato salesman turned private eye. He's traded the spuds to go after the puds. Anything anyone can do he can't do better. He has the instincts of a wet-bottom shoofly pie. Absurdity, apathy, and luck are his favorite weapons, and occasionally potatoes. Yet he somehow stumbles into solving cases no one else will touch. He's horrible at shark diving, paintball, karate, safe-cracking, knife-throwing, e-mailing, zip lining, you name it. But don't tangle with him: he's Pennsylvania Dutch and he may put the hex on you. He has...

What drives someone to murder? Logan McRae's personal history is hardly squeaky clean, but now that he works for Professional Standards he's policing his fellow officers. When Detective Inspector Bell turns up dead in the drivers seat of a crashed car, it's a shock to everyone. Because Bell died two years ago. They buried him. Or they thought they did. As an investigation is launched into Bell's stabbing, Logan digs into his past. Where has he been all this time? Why did he disappear? And what's so important that he felt the need to come back from the dead?

Sometimes making a little easy money turns out to be a bad idea! That's sure the case for the protagonist of this short noir tale which is also available in the collection Easy Money & Other Stories. "I weave my way through the crowd, stroll up and bump into the guy hard from behind. I throw my elbow into the back of his arm so the big glass mug he's holding swings up. His beer slops all over his shirt. He spins and gets in my face. I hit him once, hard as I can, with a right uppercut to the chin. It don’t even phase him. My knuckles and wrist feel like I just punched a cinder block, but ...

Ever noticed how "Two-Minute Mysteries" always contain the most inane, unlikely solutions? So did writer and musician Tyler James Cook, who grew weary of solutions like, "He couldn't have stolen it, because he can't put his left hand in his right pocket." Balderdash! In the spirit of those mysteries, Cook created Inspector Gerard, a grizzled, film noir detective from Aurora, Illinois. Gerard sees the clues no one else sees--including the reader. For the first time ever, here are collected all of Cook's classic tales, from the first pencil-and-paper drafts of a chubby high school junior, ...

"Get ready for an intense ride through the dark and gritty streets of Manchester in this brutal and lyrical crime thriller. As the hedonistic club scene of the 90s rages on, a girl falls to her death from the stage, unnoticed by most. But for John Black, an ex-SAS soldier working security that night, her death will change everything. Now in witness protection after exposing the city's underworld, he returns to Manchester to help a grieving mother find answers to her son's suicide. But as he delves deeper into the case, strange recordings hint at a disturbing increase in sexual depravity in ...