The gang was restless, just looking for some idle fun, when they roughed up a man they thought was a homosexual. The game got out of hand; their victim was blinded. It was Paula Halstead’s bad luck to witness the attack and to catch a glimpse of one of the boys. He knows they must track her down and somehow or other make her keep her mouth shut. They find her alone in the house and, in their mindless way, decide that a gang rape would guarantee her silence. In this they are very successful. She commits suicide. When her husband, Professor Curtis Halstead, comes home from a late meeting, he finds her body and a cryptic note. From that moment, he begins to change from the...

A wonderfully dark, pitch-perfect noir prequel to The Maltese Falcon, featuring Dashiell Hammett’s beloved detective, Sam Spade. It’s 1921 — seven years before Sam Spade will solve the famous case of the Maltese Falcon. He’s just set up his own agency in San Francisco and he gets off to a quick start, working cases (he doesn’t do domestic) and hiring a bright young secretary named Effie Perrine. When he’s hired by a prominent San Francisco banker to find his missing son, Spade gets the break he’s been looking for. He spends the next few years dealing with booze runners, waterfront thugs, banking swindlers, gold smugglers, and bumbling cops. He brings in Miles Archer as a partner to help...

Dashiell Hammett and William Vollmann are just two treats in this stellar sequel to the smash-hit original volume of San Francisco Noir, which captures the dark mythology of a world-class locale.

The first DKA File novel, Dead Skip, was called “superb in its swift, to-the-point plotting and on-the-mark dialogue. Dan Kearny’s detectives are Lew Archer in concert, and Joe Gores’ novel ranks at the head of its class.” — O. L. Bailey, Saturday Review In Final Notice Joe Gores has done it again. Here are the same characters, the same “fist in the face of authenticity.”[1] Joe Gores demonstrates once more how fresh and compelling the detective novel really can be.

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

It’s not the best of times for the repo men and skip tracers of DKA. The big boss has been thrown out of the house by his wife, landing, for the foreseeable future, in Larry Ballard’s apartment. Ken Warren has fallen into the grasp of the sexually predatory mother of a multimillionaire computer geek. Bart Heslip has gone undercover in the Tenderloin, wearing a nose ring, a leather vest, and an attitude. O’B is up in redwood country, getting rained on. And Ballard, for a change, has met a woman who’s a match for him. But while the streets of San Francisco sizzle and DKA’s best snag repos that range from luxury cars to truck tires to the electronic equipment of a talentless heavy metal...

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...

Bestselling novelist James Ellroy introduces this year’s collection of the finest mystery writing. Many of the contributors herein are novelists themselves, displaying their talents in short story form: Michael Connelly tells a fatal tale of revenge in “Two-Bagger.” In Joe Gores’s “Inscrutable,” the Feds beat the Mafia at their own game. Stuart Kaminsky demonstrates how horribly wrong things go when a robber gets cocky in “Sometimes Something Goes Wrong.” And Robert B. Parker shows just how important Jackie Robinson’s fans can be in “Harlem Nocturne.” Also featured are veterans of the short story form and favorites of this series. Brendan DuBois’s “A Family Game” introduces a former Mafia...

A collection of eight stories. Includes the first appearance of the DKA File Series, and “Goodbye Pops” which won an Edgar for the Best Short Story of the Year. Joe Gores has written over 100 short stories, a dozen screen and teleplays (for such series as Columbo, B. L. Stryker, and Magnum PI), and eight novels, including the Edgar-winning Time of Predators.