Best remembered for his sensational bestselling novels of the 1930s, James M. Cain may well be one of the most important, yet still misunderstood, of American authors. Among other writers and for certain critics, his reputation and singularity are unquestioned, resting on an extraordinary force of style and view of the human condition that have influenced a host of modern authors. Cain’s unique voice — hard-edged, caustically ironic, and impeccably controlled — was in fact forged through an extensive journalistic training and remains best exemplified in the compressed power of his short fiction.

Here then, timed with a major revival of interest in Cain’s work, is the first book to collect the best of his shorter work — selected short stories and sketches together with one of his finest serials, the novella published at different times under the titles “Money and the Woman” and “The Embezzler.” As taut and brilliant in its way as Cain’s most famous serial, this ingenious example of Cain’s “love rack” fiction has been out of print for many years, but reads as immediately today as when first written more than three decades ago. Equally fascinating, especially when seen within Roy Hoopes’s tracings of the development of Cain’s work, are the entertaining sketches and dialogues Cain originally wrote for journalistic publication — beautiful models of efficiency and concision stamped with Cain’s characteristic irony. We are given ten of his best, out of hundreds he wrote for the and H. L. Mencken’s Together with nine of his finest short stories — including those three Cain classics, “Pastorale,” “The Baby in the Icebox,” and “Dead Man” — this volume comprises both an ideal introduction to the work of this remarkable American author and a mandatory book for all James M. Cain fans.

Los Angeles, 1950. Red crosscurrents: the Commie Scare and a string of brutal mutilation killings. Movieland leftists on a collision course with a grand jury investigating team. A young homicide detective obsessed with capturing a murderer of unparalleled viciousness — even though the price may be horrific self-revelation. Gangsters and cops and fixers and Hollywood grotesques in a noir novel of epic scope and depth. The Big Nowhere is the story of three men caught up in a massive web of ambition, perversion, and deceit. Danny Upshaw is a Sheriff’s deputy stuck with a bunch of snuffs nobody cares about; they’re his chance to make his name as a cop — and to sate his darkest curiosities. Mal Considine is D.A.’s Bureau brass, climbing on the Red Scare bandwagon to advance his career and to gain custody of his adopted son, a child he saved from the horror of postwar Europe. Buzz Meeks — bagman, ex-Narco goon and pimp for Howard Hughes — is fighting Communism for the money. All three men have purchased tickets to a nightmare. The Big Nowhere is dark, brutal, tender and powerful; it is a remarkably vivid portrait of a remarkable time and place. With his best-selling The Black Dahlia, James Ellroy established himself as the modern master of noir fiction; The Big Nowhere establishes him as a major American novelist.

The Black Dahlia is a police novel on an epic scale; a classic period piece that provides a startling conclusion to America’s most infamous unsolved murder mystery. Already hailed as a masterpiece, it establishes James Ellroy as this country’s most powerful living writer of noir fiction. On January 15, 1947, the torture-ravished body of a beautiful young woman is found in a vacant lot in Los Angeles. The victim makes headlines as the Black Dahlia, and her murder sparks the greatest manhunt in California history. Caught up in the investigation are Bucky Bleichert and Lee Blanchard: Warrants Squad cops, friends, and adversaries in love with the same woman. But both are obsessed with the Dahlia — driven by dark needs to know everything about her life, to capture her killer, to possess the woman even in death. Their quest will take them on a hellish journey through the underbelly of postwar Hollywood, to the core of the dead girl’s twisted life, past the extremes of their own psyches — into a region of total madness. With the no-punches-held style that has become the trademark of a James Ellroy novel, this brilliant and savagely original author launches the reader on a roller-coaster ride through the violent world of the ’40s L.A. cop.

In the era before he created moody private investigator Matthew Scudder, burglar Bernie Rhodenbarr, sleepless spy Evan Tanner, and the amiable hit man Keller — and years before his first Edgar Award — a young writer named Lawrence Block submitted a story titled “You Can’t Lose” to Manhunt magazine. It was published, and the rest is history. One Night Stands and Lost Weekends is a sterling collection of short crime fiction and suspense novelettes penned between 1958 and 1962 by a budding young master and soon-to-be Grand Master — an essential slice of genre history, and more fun than a high-speed police chase following a bank job gone bad.

Consider Ariel Jardell, an adopted twelve-year-old girl driven by jealousy — her mother thinks — and by forces far more bizarre — as you will discern — to a precocious excursion into evil from mere mischief, to malevolence beyond compare... Haunting as The Turn of the Screw, chilling as The Bad Seed, Ariel spins a complex web of demonic circumstance with a fascinating, terrifying child at its center, giving new definition to the age-old conflict of good and evil, sane and insane.

Stephen Blake comes from a long line of Galway Blakes, a family famous in history — or infamous — for jettisoning its Catholic roots to save their land from the English. As a young man he was always happiest when drinking with his mates, and a ready hand in a fight. With no particular plans in mind, he went up to study at Trinity College, and immediately afterward “took the king’s shilling” by joining the British army, and came out harder, leaner, and suspect in the eyes of his countrymen. Now nearly forty, he is a good man blown in bad directions. Out of misplaced loyalty he agrees to take part in an IRA bank heist. Doomed to failure from the start, it goes disastrously wrong when his friend is killed, and Stephen must leave Ireland, determined to reinvent himself as an American. Now he and girlfriend Siobhan, best friend Tommy, IRA terrorist Stapleton, and a particularly American sort of psychopath named Dade are all on a collision course somewhere on the road between the dive bars of New York and the pitiless desert of the Southwest.

The discovery of the partially-clothed body of a teenage girl in the heart of Bristol’s red light district indicates a tragic yet familiar scenario. But this marks the start of a baffling murder investigation where nothing is as it first appears. Fourteen-year-old Melanie Cooke told her mother she was visiting a school friend. Who was she really going to meet? Detective Inspector David Vogel is led towards three very different principal protagonists, each of whom grows increasingly chilling. But are they what they seem? And is any one of them capable of murder? A darkly complex secret lies behind Melanie’s death — and its ultimate revelation will shock Vogel and his team to the core.

If you can’t trust your family, where do you turn... Joyce Mildmay’s life is torn apart when her husband Charlie is killed in a tragic yachting accident. Though financially secure, Joyce is left to raise their three children by herself within Tarrant Park, a secluded gated development set in the rural countryside outside of Bristol. Six months later a mysterious letter arrives on her doorstep which turns her shattered world upside down. The letter is from Charlie, delivered belatedly in the event of his death, and contains a sinister warning that Joyce’s father, Henry Tanner, and the family business is not as it seems. For their children to be safe, her husbad pleads, she must leave their home and never look back. Confused and alarmed by this message from beyond the grave, Joyce decides instead to stay and unearth the truth. But what she learns reveals a trail of intrigue and deceptiont that stretches back though the years. It seems that death is only the beginning...

Jack Taylor has never quite been able get his life together, but now he has truly hit rock bottom. Still reeling from a violent family tragedy, Taylor is busy drowning his grief in Jameson and uppers, as usual, when a high-profile officer in the local Garda is murdered. After another Guard is found dead, and then another, Taylor’s old colleagues from the force implore him to take on the case. The plot is one big game, and all of the pieces seem to be moving at the behest of one dangerously mysterious team: a trio of young killers with very different styles, but who are united in their common desire to take down Jack Taylor. Their ring leader is Jericho, a psychotic girl from Galway who is grieving the loss of her lover, and who will force Jack to confront some personal trauma from his past. As sharp and sardonic as it is starkly bleak and violent, Galway Girl shows master raconteur Ken Bruen at his best: lyrical, brutal, and ceaselessly suspenseful.

BRADY’S BAD FUCKED I wrote it on the bedroom wall, in yellow day-glo marker. Nice colour, blended well with the years of nicotine. I haven’t taken my medication for the past week. If I couldn’t go a few days without the lithium, I was in deep shit. I’d gotten the job ten days earlier and it entailed a whack of pub-crawling. Booze and medication Is the worst of songs. Sing that! A job of pure simplicity. Find a white girl in Brixton. Piece of cake. What I should have done is doubled my medication and lit a candle to St Jude — maybe a lot of candles. Add in a lethal ex-con, an Irish builder obsessed with Gene Hackman, the biggest funeral Brixton has ever seen, and what you get is the Blues like they’ve never been sung before.

Here is the story of a mad love, written against the mysterious background of the underworld. Unlike the ordinary tale of this type with its crude, realistic descriptions, Manhattan Love Song is attuned in style and pace to the exoticism that surrounds and controls the life of Bernice. Because it is unusual, daring and bizarre this book will impress and delight the reader as few books have done before.

Two teenage boys befriend an escaped bank robber — an act that changes their lives forever — in Moonchasers, a powerful short novel in the tradition of Stand by Me and To Kill a Mockingbird. Tom and Barney are only fifteen years old, and content to spend the summer sharing dime novels, monster movies, and all the other innocent pleasures Somerton, Iowa, has to offer. But when they conspire to shelter a wounded criminal who reminds them of their idol, Robert Mitchum, they set in motion a chilling chain of events that will teach them about trust, brutality, and courage. Moonchasers and Other Stories also contains several other compelling tales of suspense by Ed Gorman, including “Turn Away,” which won the Shamus Award for best detective story, and a new story that has never appeared in any previous book or collection, “Out There in the Darkness.” These and other stories make up an outstanding collection of fiction by an author who has been described by the San Diego Union as “one of the most distinctive voices in today’s crime fiction.”

Somewhere in the desert a girl has only minutes to live. A freaked-out rock group, a tyrannical industrialist, a very clever Mexican cop — the ingredients of a highly explosive confrontation.

Here are the swift pace, the hard, crisp prose, the almost unbearably tense dramatic situations which are typical of James Cain. But here also are a deeper view of life, a bigger subject, and a group of characters closer to the average reader’s experience than Mr. Cain has ever given us before. Here, in other words, is his most substantial and most ambitious novel. It is the story of a woman, her daughter, and her two husbands. At twenty- eight she was a “grass widow” without a cent. She learned to work; she created a business and built it into a notable success. Along the way she acquired two lovers, one of whom became her second husband. But none of that was important. What was important was her daughter Veda — the lovely, haughty, greedy, cruel child who knew what she wanted and got it. The relations between mother and daughter, between mother and husband and lover, between husband and daughter, intermingle and fuse into a shattering climax. Nine years have passed, and in this terrific moment all the characters are at last stripped and revealed, all the motives — good and evil — hared, all the ways of life finally chosen. It is a scene no one will easily forget.

DRAW ONE— That’s waitress lingo. Means a cup of coffee. It’s a part of a language that Carrie Selden had spoken for a long time. Carrie was a hash-slinger. Lots of big business men ate at Karb’s just to watch her trim figure moving by their tables. Grant Harris was one of them — he watched, waited and was married by Carrie. The millionaire and the waitress. It was a newspaper field-day. In spite of everything she was called, Carrie felt she had to set the record straight. This is her candid story — the intimate details of the life of Carrie Selden Harris, who asks you to pass judgment on her only after you’ve read her story.

Here is brilliantly executed narrative of two human beings caught in the terrifying grip of their own hatreds and fears. On an immediate level this is a powerful novel of violence and suspense, but in a more significant area it casts a surgically compassionate light on the most anguishing problems of the human spirit. The story develops with classic simplicity; two men, strangers but inevitable enemies, meet in the planning of a crime. They violate the laws of society deliberately and gravely; a bank is broken into, a man is killed and the two protagonists are driven to ground in a lonely farmhouse. One of them is bitter and inarticulate, tormented by his inadequacies and failures. His accomplice, a Negro, is clever but in panic at the thought of death. Do they dare trust one another? Instinct warns them no, and betrayal becomes inevitable. But who will be betrayed is the lesser question; what is betrayed is of paramount importance. There is freedom of the spirit as well as freedom of the body, and a glimmering of this occurs to betrayed and betrayed alike. In the framework of this problem, they are forced to examine their hatred and fear and to reassess themselves as individuals possessing our common humanity.

“Just you,” Andrew Farrell says, when Sarah Welles asks him what he wants of her. “Just you.” But long before she finally gives in to Andrew, long before she walks up those steps into the mysterious world of his wood-paneled office, long before she feels his naked body against hers, Sarah knows she has already chosen to betray her husband and her marriage. Adultery will be the least of her crimes. Making forbidden love to Andrew, Sarah has no idea of the dangerous game she has begun. She is about to find out who her lover really is, and Andrew is about to discover how unforgiving and relentless her husband can be. CRIMINAL CONVERSATION is a gripping novel of sex, passion, and violence, set against a backdrop of a society tattered by criminality. Prom victims to predators, from foot soldiers to kingpins, Evan Hunter spins a masterly tale that no one — not even Ed McBain — could do better: an explosive and erotic novel of psychosexual suspense.

Murder was in the air. A cop had killed himself, and every crook in town knew that would be sure to bring on THE BIG HEAT. Why did they fear a dead man? Dave Bannion, homicide sergeant, fought for the answer to that question. He got it... Then the big heat came. The dead man was a police clerk who shot himself for no obvious reason. That was Bannion’s first judgment, until a girl named Lucy presented a quite different picture of the dead man from the one he had shown to the world — and to his fastidious, glacial wife. Bannion’s chief, Lieutenant Wilks, wanted the case closed and speculation ended — quickly and tightly. So did Max Stone and Lagana who held the city in a sinister, underworld grip. Why did they fear a dead man? In this story of grim excitement, pathos and dramatic surprise, one of our foremost mystery writers presents the outstanding murder novel of the season.

Hans Olofson is the son of a Swedish lumberjack. His childhood was unsettled: an alcoholic father, and a mother disappeared, only alive in old photographs. His adolescence was no easier as he lost both his best friend and his lover tragically. Alone and adrift, as a young man his only desire is to fulfil his lover’s dream and visit the grave of a legendary missionary who survived alone in the remote hills of Northern Zambia. On reaching Africa, Olofson is struck by its beauty and mystery. After fulfilling his initial quest, an opportunity of employment in the region tempts him to stay. Time passes quickly. Though dismayed by the attitude of the white population to their adopted country, which is compounded by their vulnerability to alcohol and malaria, he is interested enough to take up sole responsibility for the farm he manages. For almost two decades Hans Olofson battles with a hostile environment and a placid, but resistant workforce. Set in the 1970s and 1980s, The Eye of the Jeopard explores the relationship between the white farmers and their native workers. Through Olofson’s descent into near mental collapse it becomes clear that many years spent in a foreign land do not necessarily breed an understanding of its people: a handful of generations of white settlers cannot change a continent underpinned by myth and superstition. The Eye of Leopard is a first-rate and original psychological thriller delving deep into the mind of a man lost in an unknown world.

She is a Broadway dancer, exquisite and mercurial. He is a dedicated psychiatrist, happily married to a beautiful woman, the father of two lovely children vacationing with their mother on Martha’s Vineyard. “Good morning, sir”, she said, as she passed David Chapman on a sunny June day in Central Park. Moments later, she was locked in mortal combat with a mugger, and David came to her rescue... They tell each other some truths, but only some. They know each other’s mysteries, but only some. They slip into a realm of sensual deception and imminent danger... For who is Kate Duggan really, the woman who makes sexual fantasies come true? And who is David Chapman, the doctor who spends his day with other people’s neuroses, guilt, and lies? Now, in the heat of a New York City summer, they will learn everything — when a stalker turns their mad lust into a murderous affair.