Classic Noir

This revised and expanded edition of Eddie Muller's Dark City is a film noir lover's bible, taking readers on a tour of the urban landscape of the grim and gritty genre in a definitive, highly illustrated volume. Dark City expands with new chapters and a fresh collection of restored photos that...

The Thin Man introduces Nick and Nora Charles, New York's coolest crime-solving couple. Nick retired from detecting after his wife inherited a tidy sum, but six years later a pretty blonde spies him at a speakeasy and asks for his help finding her father, an eccentric inventor who was once Nick's client. Nick can no more resist the case than a morning cocktail or a good fight, and soon he and Nora are caught in a complicated web of confused identities.

Mildred Pierce had gorgeous legs, a way with a skillet, and a bone-deep core of toughness and determination. She used those attributes to survive a divorce in 1940s America with two children and to claw her way out of poverty, becoming a successful businesswoman. But Mildred also had two weaknesses: a yen for shiftless men and an unreasoning devotion to her monstrous daughter.

This book looks at the contributions made by the actors and actresses who appeared in film noir, and the directors who made them: Edward G. Robinson, Orson Welles, Joan Bennett, Dan Duryea, John Carradine, Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck, Frank Sinatra, Sterling Hayden, Humphrey Bogart, Peter Lorre, Edmond O’Brien, Van Heflin, Robert Ryan, Cornel Wilde, Richard Conte, James Cagney, Ida Lupino, John Huston, Delmer Daves, Edgar G. Ulmer, Fritz Lang, Anthony Mann, Phil Karlson, Lewis Allen, Robert Wise, Henry Hathaway, John Brahms, Otto Preminger, Billy Wilder, Jacques Tourneur, Alfred ...

Extensively revised by Nabokov in 1965 - 30 years after its original publication - Despair is the wickedly inventive and richly derisive story of Hermann, a man who undertakes the perfect crime: his own murder. One of the 20th century’s master prose stylists, Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg in 1899. He studied French and Russian literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, then lived in Berlin and Paris, where he launched a brilliant literary career. In 1940 he moved to the United States, and achieved renown as a novelist, poet, critic, and translator.

Noir contains three classic thrillers by Richard Matheson, the grand master of suspense. Originally published in the 1950s, at the very beginning of Matheson’s distinguished career, these page-turning classics are finally on audio for your listening pleasure. Now listeners everywhere can savor three unforgettable tales of crime, corruption, and cold-blooded murder.

The renowned novel from crime fiction master Raymond Chandler, with the "quintessential urban private eye" (Los Angeles Times), Philip Marlowe Featuring the iconic character that inspired the film Marlowe, starring Liam Neeson. Philip Marlowe's about to give up on a completely routine case...

A spellbinding novel set in the universe of Isaac Asimov’s classic Galactic Empire series and Foundation series Due to circumstances within our control . . . tomorrow will be canceled. The Eternals, the ruling class of the Future, had the power of life and death not only over every human being...

"Corbett's work has garnered him an Edgar© Award nomination, and we can see why." — New York Times A dead man in a schoolyard. A diamond in his mouth. A Mystery that goes back decades. Two rival crime gangs—the Shiners and the Travellers—are already on the brink of war when a body is found hanging from a schoolyard fence. Detective Frank Yakabuski is called in to investigate and immediately identifies the dead man. It’s Agustus Morrissy, leader of the Shiners. In retaliation, the Shiners soon murder a high-ranking Traveller and kidnap the twelve-year-old granddaughter of the ...

The absurdly outrageous, sarcastically satiric, and always entertaining New York Times bestselling author Christopher Moore returns in finest madcap form with this zany noir set on the mean streets of post-World War II San Francisco, and featuring a diverse cast of characters, including a...

Every cynical detective who ever walked down a mean street with a gun and a code owes him a debt. Every hard-boiled cop, every burned-out private eye, every noir thriller on the shelf today traces back to one man — a former Pinkerton operative who had actually done the work, and who taught American crime fiction to stop being a parlor puzzle and start drawing blood. Before Dashiell Hammett, the detective story was a genteel game of clues. After him, it was literature. This volume collects the first three novels — written in a furious burst between 1929 and 1930, the books that invented ...

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!

The behind-the-scenes story of the quintessential film noir and cult classic, Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity—its true crime origins and crucial impact on film history—is told for the first time in this riveting narrative published for the film's 80th anniversary. From real crime to serial...

One of the 20th-century's most darkly beautiful works of crime fiction - a story of carny life, spiritualism, and a con man of merciless resolve.

There is not much left of the irascible Albert Evan Jasper, "dean of American forensic anthropologists," after his demise in a fiery car crash. But in accord with his wishes, his remains are installed in an Oregon museum to create a fascinating if macabre exhibit. All agree that it is a fitting end for a great forensic scientist - until what is left of him disappears in the midst of the biannual meeting of the august WAFA - the Western Association of Forensic Anthropologists - in nearby Bend, Oregon. Like his fellow attendees, Gideon Oliver - the Skeleton Detective - is baffled. 

Boston blueblood Charlotte Vale has led an unhappy, sheltered life. Lonely, dowdy, repressed, and pushing 40, Charlotte finds salvation at a sanitarium, where she undergoes an emotional and physical transformation. After her extreme makeover, the new Charlotte tests her mettle by embarking on a cruise and finds herself in a torrid love affair with a married man which ends at the conclusion of the voyage. But only then can the real journey begin, as Charlotte is forced to navigate a new life for herself.

This annotated edition of The Maltese Falcon includes: • A 14,000-word critical study, "Detecting the Detective" • On the Flitcraft parable — the strangest scene in crime fiction • On the 1941 film and how it froze the book in amber • A full life of Dashiell Hammett — Pinkerton man to blacklist • A Note on the Texts and the novel's public-domain status The bird is a fake. Everyone lies and dies for it anyway. That is the whole of the world — and the detective is the only one who knows it. In 1930 a former Pinkerton operative named Dashiell Hammett published the novel that ...

A queer Thelma and Louise meets a modern-day The Stepford Wives after a woman wakes up buried alive—with her head severed—in this visceral yet campy, feminist horror novel that tears apart the patriarchy . . . literally. Some women are too angry to stay buried. Daisy claws her way out of a...

This annotated edition of Red Harvest includes: • A critical study of the first hard-boiled novel • On Poisonville — Hammett's Butte, Montana, and the mine wars • How Red Harvest fathered Yojimbo and A Fistful of Dollars • On the Continental Op, the detective with no name • A note on the 1929 first-edition text and its public-domain status Before Sam Spade, before the falcon, before noir even had a name, there was a nameless detective, a town called Poisonville, and about two dozen corpses. In 1929 Dashiell Hammett published his first novel and invented the hard-boiled crime ...

From Michael Crichton Creator of Jurassic Park, ER, Twister, Rising Sun, and Disclosure Writing as John Lange Comes a new Hollywood mystery thriller, originally written in 1973 by Crichton but never before published, that will keep you guessing until the very end. In the glitz and decadence...