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Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930s & 40s
James M. Cain, Horace McCoy, Edward Anderson, Kenneth Fearing, William Lindsay Gresham, Cornell Woolrich · back to the book
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorComplete Novels: Red Harvest / The Dain Curse / The Maltese Falcon / The Glass Key / The Thin Man
Dashiell Hammett · 967 pages
"In a few years of extraordinary creative energy, Dashiell Hammett invented the modern American crime novel."--BOOK JACKET. "The five novels that Hammett published between 1929 and 1934, collected here in one volume, have become part of modern American culture, creating archetypal characters and establishing the ground rules for a whole tradition of hardboiled writing."--BOOK JACKET. "Each novel
L.A. Noir
James Ellroy · 746 pages
Det. Sgt. Lloyd Hopkins is the most brilliant homicide detective in the Los Angeles Police Department. A thinking cop in a brutal world, his obsession with hunting down monsters is more than an occupational hazard--it's become a lifestyle. In three explosive cases, he will venture into the heart of evil . . . while trying to reclaim his own soul.Blood on the Moon: Twenty random killings of women r
The Bayou Trilogy: Under the Bright Lights, Muscle for the Wing, and The Ones You Do
Daniel Woodrell · 470 pages
In the parish of St. Bruno, sex is easy, corruption festers, and double-dealing is a way of life. Rene Shade is an uncompromising detective swimming in a sea of filth. As Shade takes on hit men, porn kings, a gang of ex-cons, and the ghosts of his own checkered past, Woodrell's three seminal novels pit long-entrenched criminals against the hard line of the law, brother against brother, and two vas
In a Lonely Place
Dorothy B. Hughes · 224 pages
Postwar Los Angeles is a lonely place where the American Dream is showing its seamy underside—and a stranger is preying on young women. The suggestively named Dix Steele, a cynical vet with a chip on his shoulder about the opposite sex, is the LAPD's top suspect. Dix knows enough to watch his step, especially since his best friend is on the force, but when he meets the luscious Laurel Gray—a femme
The Postman Always Rings Twice
James M. Cain · 128 pages
Frank Chambers, un trotamundos sin empleo, narra en primera persona la atracción que siente por Cora Papadakis, la esposa de un emigrante de origen griego propietario de una taberna en California, y cómo se vuelven amantes unidos por el ardor y la ambición. Pero no será tan fácil librarse del viejo marido. Y habrá que contar, además, con el inescrutable destino: ese cartero que siempre llama dos v
The Killer Inside Me
Jim Thompson · 224 pages
Lou Ford is the deputy sheriff of a small town in Texas. The worst thing most people can say against him is that he's a little slow and a little boring. But, then, most people don't know about the sickness--the sickness that almost got Lou put away when he was younger. The sickness that is about to surface again.
The Big Sleep
Raymond Chandler · 220 pages
Philip Marlowe, a private eye who operates in Los Angeles's seamy underside during the 1930s, takes on his first case, which involves a paralyzed California millionaire, two psychotic daughters, blackmail, and murder
Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950s
Jim Thompson, Patricia Highsmith, Charles Willeford, David Goodis, Chester Himes · 892 pages
Shoot the Piano Player
David Goodis · 158 pages
Once upon a time Eddie played concert piano to reverent audiences at Carnegie Hall. Now he bangs out honky-tonk for drunks in a dive in Philadelphia. But then two people walk into Eddie's life—the first promising Eddie a future, the other dragging him back into a treacherous past.
Brighton Rock
Graham Greene · 309 pages
An atmospheric crime thriller featuring a teenage sociopath intent on becoming the underworld boss of Brighton. Having murdered a man who had betrayed his gang the young gangster Pinky Brown tries to covers his tracks but circumstances never seem to go his way and he becomes ever more desperate, even going so far as to marry a young girl who witnessed the shooting, it being the law at that time t
No Orchids For Miss Blandish
James Hadley Chase · 192 pages
Miss Blandish - innocent, exquisite, vulnerable heiress - is kidnapped by a gang of ruthless hoods who've never tried big-time crime. Foiled by their own vicious ineptitude and the greed of a superior mob, the kidnappers lose their million dollar prize. Blandish, terrified and broken, is now the captive of Ma' Grisson and her sadistic, sexually deviant son Slim. When Dave Fenner was hired to so
Rendezvous in Black
Cornell Woolrich · 214 pages
Johnny and Dorothy had everything — life, love, happiness. Then she was killed in a freak accident, and Johnny vowed that, one by one, those responsible would feel the loss of those they most loved...
Hardboiled: An Anthology of American Crime Stories
Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Chester Himes, Norbert Davis, John D. MacDonald, Benjamin Appel, Elmore Leonard, Jonathan Craig, David Goodis, Ross Macdonald, W.R. Burnett, Mickey Spillane, Gil Brewer, Leigh Brackett, Helen Nielsen, Evan Hunter, Jim Thompson, H.A. DeRosso, Michael Kerr, James Re · 540 pages
Nightmare Alley
William Lindsay Gresham · 275 pages
Stanton Carlisle, employed as a carny at a travelling circus watches their freak-show geek - an abject alcoholic, the object of the voyeuristic crowd's gleeful disgust and derision - and wonders how a man could fall so low. There's no way in hell, he vows, that anything like that will ever happen to him. Unlike the tragic figure he sees before him, Stan is young, clever and ambitious and quick
The Engagement
Georges Simenon · 147 pages
Simenon (1903-1989), creator of Inspector Maigret, dispassionately describes the fate of the odd Mr. Hire, a reclusive middle-aged man whose life of dull routine begins an inevitable slide into disaster when a prostitute is brutally murdered near his apartment in a Paris suburb. Guilty only of a slightly disreputable occupation, a voyeuristic fascination and an unusual physical appearance, Hire in
Batman: The Long Halloween
Jeph Loeb · 369 pages
Unaware of being watched, Batman pursues villains including Killer Croc and Poison Ivy, and discovers that Poison Ivy's latest plan will require that he ally himself with Catwoman in order to defeat his old friend Superman.
Sanctuary
William Faulkner · 311 pages
Lee Goodwin es acusado de asesinato. El escenario del crimen es una casa oculta entre los árboles que alberga una destilería ilegal. Allí viven, entre otros, Ruby, una mujer que ha renunciado a todo por Lee, y Popeye, un sádico gánster marcado por una infancia terrible. El abogado Horace Benbow lucha para que Goodwin no sea juzgado por ser quien es, sino por los actos de los que le acusan. Para el
Blind Man with a Pistol
Chester Himes · 240 pages
"New York is sweltering in the summer heat, and Harlem is close to the boiling point. To Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones, at times it seems as if the whole world has gone mad. Trying, as always, to keep some kind of peace, their legendary nickel-plated Colts very much in evidence, Coffin Ed and Grave Digger find themselves pursuing two completely different cases through a maze of knifings
Miami Blues
Charles Willeford · 208 pages
After a brutal day investigating a quadruple homicide, Detective Hoke Moseley settles into his room at the un-illustrious El Dorado Hotel and nurses a glass of brandy. With his guard down, he doesn’t think twice when he hears a knock on the door. The next day, he finds himself in the hospital, badly bruised and with his jaw wired shut. He thinks back over ten years of cases wondering who would wan