Artie is handsome, athletic, and popular, but he possesses a hidden, powerful sadistic streak and a desire to dominate. Judd is a weedy introvert, a genius who longs for a companion whom he can idolize and worship. Obsessed with Nietzsche’s idea of the superhuman, both boys decide to prove that they are above the laws of man by arbitrarily picking and murdering a Jewish boy in their neighborhood.This new edition of Meyer Levin's classic literary thriller Compulsion reintroduces the fictionalized case of Leopold and Loeb – once considered the "crime of the century" – to a new generation. This incisive psychological portrait of two young murderers seized the imagination of an era and is generally recognized as paving the way for the first non-fiction novel. Compulsion forces us to ask what drives some further into darkness, and some to seek redemption.Heartbreaking as it is gripping, Compulsion is written with a tense and penetrating force that led the Los Angeles Times to call Levin, “the most significant Jewish writer of his times.”

    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.Shoot the Piano Player is a bittersweet and nerve-racking exploration of different kinds of loyalty: the kind a man owes his family, no matter how bad that family is; the kind a man owes a woman; and, ultimately, the loyalty he owes himself. The result is a moody thriller that, like the best hard-boiled fiction, carries a moral depth charge.

    The pain in my side was bad now, but you should have seen the other two guys. They felt no pain. They were dead. I walked carefully into the bleak morning away from all the warmth in my life - from Peggy and the suitcase full of money - but damned if I didn't walk with something like pride. My name is Mike Ballard. I had been a bad man and a worse cop, but this thing that I was doing now was good.

    Confidential underbelly of a dark and fetid Los Angeles, a city littered with innumerable true-life noir characters: a hophead butcher who eviscerates his dance-hall girlfriend; an electrician who makes love to his pet collie; an Italian immigrant who engages in clandestine necrophilia; an inebriated hustler who strangles his homosexual meal ticket; an adulterous housewife who puts rat poison in her husband's coffee. Written in a terse, Dragnet-like style by the controversial autocratic director of the Los Angeles Police Department's Sex Offense Bureau, and graphically illustrated with mugshots and harshly-lit photographs of violently torn bodies, The Sexual Criminal is both an amazing sociological time capsule of a not-so-distant era in the history of Los Angeles and a voyeuristic, prurient examination of the explosive sex lives of its inhabitants.

    Malone)Robert Bloch “Water’s Edge”Charles Irving “You Wash, and I’ll Dry”Hal Ellson “Walk Away Fast”Kenneth Fearing “Three Wives Too Many”John E. Hasty “Unfinished Business”Louis Trimble “A Pitch for Murder”Carter Sprague “A Present for Peter”Matthew Lee “Home Ground”Norman Daniels “Rooftop”