Book picks similar to
The Best of William Irish by Cornell Woolrich
short-stories
noir
essentials
fiction
The Ice Maiden (Detective Inspector Jack Gilbert)
Michael Saunders - 2018
Simply waiting for a bus why should Anne ever dream of dying? He was an opportunist driven by lust, needing to climax while looking into her eyes as she died. Found two months later she will be like all the others - frozen in time. Hunting the killer down is Detective Inspector Jack Gilbert, a dinosaur of the old school, a fish out of water in the swinging sixties, but with a reputation second to none. What is Jack’s sad secret? What does the future hold for him? Read the ICE MAIDEN and there’s a link at the end allowing you to download for FREE, number one in the Jack Gilbert Series – THE CHOCOLATE KILLER. For you, chocolate will never taste the same again!
Miss Pinkerton
Mary Roberts Rinehart - 1932
But how could it be when the only possible suspect is Herbert's frail Aunt Juliet? Posing as Juliet's private duty nurse, the Homicide Bureau's Hilda Adams develops grave suspicions. Why is the maid terrified of every dark corner? And if a mad killer is on the loose, who will be targeted as the next victim? Reissue. .
On The Exorcist: From Novel to Film
William Peter Blatty
Includes the Academy Award winning screenplay. The original controversial ending of the novel. Many exclusive photos never published before.
The Hot Rock
Donald E. Westlake - 1970
Here, the released convict and his ride pal Kelp plot to steal the $500,000 Balaboma Emerald. The former British colony has recently become independent and split. The Akinzi have the stone, the Talabwo want it back, and their UN rep will pay for retrieval.
The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis
Max Shulman - 1951
He cowrote The Tender Trap, which became a big-screen vehicle for Frank Sinatra, and his hilarious, Elvis-intensive satire Rally 'Round the Flag, Boys! also made it to Hollywood, pairing the young Paul Newman with the equally young Joanne Woodward. Shulman's best-known creation, however, is probably Dobie Gillis--that smooth-talking schlemiel of a college student, always on the make for female companionship. And in this case, the synergistic success of the book--which generated both a limp movie musical and a much-beloved television series--does Shulman a real disservice. Why? The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis is much funnier than either of its live-action spin-offs, for one thing. With Dobie himself narrating, the plots shake off at least a grain of their sitcom stiffness. More to the point, though, is Shulman's mastery of wise-guy prose: the goofy, comical elevation of Dobie's voice suggests a kind of broad-brush S. J. Perelman, and if Shulman is a tad less clever than that comedic monster, he's also superior at inducing the world-class belly laugh. Certainly The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis does the trick nicely, and the period illustrations are an irresistible bonus, suitable for framing.
The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards
Robert Boswell - 2009
Clete and I developed a plan for me . . . a plan that would work all that summer and beyond. Even after I left the mountain, it stuck.Robert Boswell's extraordinary range is on full display in this crackling new collection. Set mainly in small, gritty American cities no farther east than Chicago and as far west as El Paso, each of these stories is a world unto itself.Two marriages end, one by death, the other by divorce, and the two wives, lifelong friends, become strangers to each other. A young man's obsession with visiting a fortune-teller leaves him nearly homeless. And in the unforgettable title story, a man dubbed Keen recounts the summer he spent on a mountain with his best friend, Clete, and a loose band of slackers, living in a borrowed house, abstaining from all drugs (other than mushrooms and beer)—and ultimately asking just what kind of harm we can do to one another.
The Tiny Book of Tiny Stories 2010
Joseph Gordon-Levitt - 2010
Featuring 31 favorite tiny stories and illustrations by 45 writers and artists from the 2,312 contributions to wirrow's endlessly popular Tiny Stories collaboration; plus a special introductory interview by RegularJOE & wirrow. Designed for hitRECord by Marke, wirrow, & 45 hitRECorders.
Bedelia
Vera Caspary - 1945
But is Bedelia too good to be true? A mysterious new neighbor turns out to be a detective on the trail of a “kitten with claws of steel”—a picture-perfect wife with a string of dead husbands in her wake.Caspary builds this tale to a peak of psychological suspense as her characters are trapped together by a blizzard. The true Bedelia, the woman who chose murder over a life on the street, reveals how she turns male fantasies of superiority into a deadly con.Femmes Fatales restores to print the best of women’s writing in the classic pulp genres of the mid-20th century. From mystery to hard-boiled noir to taboo lesbian romance, these rediscovered queens of pulp offer subversive perspectives on a turbulent era. Enjoy the series: Bedelia; The Blackbirder; Bunny Lake Is Missing; By Cecile; The G-String Murders; The Girls in 3-B; In a Lonely Place; Laura; Mother Finds a Body; Now, Voyager; Skyscraper; Stranger on Lesbos; Women's Barracks.
The Shark-Infested Custard
Charles Willeford - 1993
Eddie Miller is an airline pilot who's studying to get his real estate license. Don Luchessi is a silver salesman who's separated from his wife but too Catholic to get a divorce. Hank Norton is a drug company rep who gets four times as many dames as any of the other guys. They are all regular guys who like to drink, play cards, meet broads, and shoot a little pool. But when a friendly bet goes horribly awry, they find themselves with two dead bodies on their hands and a homicidal husband in the wings—and acting more like hardened criminals than upstanding citizens.
Inside Ballet Technique: Separating Anatomical Fact from Fiction in the Ballet Class
Valerie Grieg - 1994
A Dance Book Club main selection, this guide offers a general explanation of anatomy, kinesiology, and technique for ballet dancers, students, and teachers.
I am a home to butterflies
J. Alchem - 2018
It will then be about them only. It will be all about the one they loved like thunder, about the one they struggled hard to keep, about the one who had left them in the middle of their 'forever', about their world shattering into pieces, about them gluing together every piece, and about them falling in love one more time.And if you still think it is about you and me, you haven't loved someone like thunder, yet.
An Event in Autumn
Henning Mankell - 2004
A Vintage Canada Original. Soon after Inspector Kurt Wallander moves into a new house with a charming garden, he makes an upsetting discovery: there is a hand--indeed, an entire corpse--buried in a shallow grave in the garden. It's the responsibility of the local police to handle the investigation...but Wallander, even though busy with another case, is soon drawn into the search for the truth about his new home, and its previous owner.
D.C. Noir 2: The Classics
George PelecanosLangston Hughes - 2008
Jones, George Pelecanos, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, James Grady, Julian Mayfield, Marita Golden, Elizabeth Hand, Julian Mazor, Ward Just, Jean Toomer, Roach Brown, Larry Neal, and others.George Pelecanos is an independent film producer, the recipient of numerous international writing awards, a producer and an Emmy-nominated writer of the HBO series The Wire, and the author of fifteen novels set in and around Washington, DC. He is the editor of the best-selling first volume of D.C. Noir.
Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930s and 40s
Robert Polito - 1997
The eleven novels in The Library of America’s adventurous two-volume collection taps deep roots in the American literary imagination, exploring themes of crime, guilt, deception, obsessive passion, murder, and the disintegrating psyche. With visionary and often subversive force they create a dark and violent mythology out of the most commonplace elements of modern life.James M. Cain’s pioneering novel of murder and adultery along the California highway, The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), shocked contemporaries with its laconic toughness and fierce sexuality.Horace McCoy’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1935) uses truncated rhythms and a unique narrative structure to turn its account of a Hollywood dance marathon into an unforgettable evocation of social chaos and personal desperation.In Thieves Like Us (1937), Edward Anderson vividly brings to life the dusty roads and back-country hideouts where a fugitive band of Oklahoma outlaws plays out its destiny.The Big Clock (1946), an ingenious novel of pursuit and evasion by the poet Kenneth Fearing, is set by contrast in the dense and neurotic inner world of a giant publishing corporation under the thumb of a warped and ultimately murderous chief executive.William Lindsay Gresham’s controversial Nightmare Alley (1946), a ferocious psychological portrait of a charismatic carnival hustler, creates an unforgettable atmosphere of duplicity, corruption, and self-destruction.I Married a Dead Man (1948), a tale of switched identity set in the anxious suburbs, is perhaps the most striking novel of Cornell Woolrich, who found in the techniques of the gothic thriller the means to express an overpowering sense of personal doom.Disturbing, poetic, anarchic, punctuated by terrifying bursts of rage and paranoia and powerfully evocative of the lost and desperate sidestreets of American life, these are underground classics now made widely and permanently available.
A Single Source
Peter Hanington - 2019
This time, he’s in Cairo – bang in the middle of the Arab Spring. ‘The only story in the world’ according to his editor. But it isn’t – there’s another story, more significant and potentially more dangerous, and if no one else is willing to tell it . . . then Carver will, whatever the consequences.William Carver spots the Arab Spring early, aided by one of the infamous ‘Listeners’ at the BBC monitoring station in Caversham. He and his producer Patrick chase the story across North Africa before arriving in Egypt where the battle between the corrupt old order and the new will be both bloody and potentially definitive.Meanwhile, in Eritrea, two brothers begin to make their way up from the Horn of Africa and across the continent, desperate to find a better life in Europe. The horrors they endure at the hands of people traffickers and others along the way test their endurance and humanity to its limit. Over a few tumultuous months, these two stories come together to prove inextricably linked.Carver knows this story is a complex one; the world is watching, but in the age of Facebook, Twitter and rolling news, its attention span is increasingly short. And if everyone is a reporter, then who can you believe?