Featuring the best from the modern masters of detective, intrigue, suspense, and mystery fiction.

Featuring the best from the modern masters of detective, intrigue, suspense, and mystery fiction.

In their heyday, the true-crime pulp magazines spawned many of the masters of American detective fiction. These early gems have been unearthed and collected here for the first time.

What are the ingredients of a hard-boiled detective story? “Savagery, style, sophistication, sleuthing, and sex,” said Ellery Queen. Often a desperate blond, a jealous husband, and, of course, a tough-but-tender P.I. the likes of Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe. Perhaps Raymond Chandler summed it up best in his description of Dashiell Hammett’s style: “Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it... He put these people down on paper as they were, and he made them talk and think in the language they customarily used for these purposes.” Hard-Boiled: An Anthology of American Crime Stories is the largest and most comprehensive collection of its kind, with over half of the stories...

Pulp fiction has been looked down on as a guilty pleasure, but it offers the perfect form of entertainment: the very best storytelling filled with action, surprises, sound and fury. In short, all the exhiliration of a roller-coaster ride. The 1920s in America saw the proliferation of hundreds of dubiously named but thrillingly entertaining pulp magazines in America: Black Mask, Amazing, Astounding, Spicy Stories, Ace-High, Detective Magazine, Dare-Devil Aces. It was in these luridly-coloured publications, printed on the cheapest pulp paper, that the first gems began to appear. The one golden rule for writers of pulp fiction was to adhere to the art of storytelling. Each story had to have a...

Знаменитый американский прозаик хладнокровно анализирует души своих героев — преступников и обывателей — и показывает без прикрас изнанку жизни. В романе «Преступление» перед читателем предстает лицемерное общество, которое вынуждает суд обвинить невиновного подростка в убийстве девочки.

Blood is thicker than water and that's doubly true for the King family who have built a considerable fortune through decades of ruthless violence and bloodshed such as Oklahoma has never seen. Ike King taught his boys well: when you see something you want all you need is a clever mind, two fists and a powerful hunk of metal. But Ike may have taught them too well. Now the King brothers are using their childhood lessons against their father and each other Arlie thought he had won the battle when he murdered his brother, but then Crich shows up with a U.S. Marshal tight on his tail and complicates matters. This may just be the largest showcase of violence and greed that the dysfunctional King...