A Rage in Harlem


Chester Himes - 1957
    Luckily for him, he can turn to his savvy twin brother, Goldy, who earns a living—disguised as a Sister of Mercy—by selling tickets to Heaven in Harlem.  With Goldy on his side, Jackson is ready for payback.

No Beast So Fierce


Edward Bunker - 1972
    Reissue.

Pulp


Charles Bukowski - 1994
    Opening with the exotic Lady Death entering the gumshoe-writer's seedy office in pursuit of a writer named Celine, this novel demonstrates Bukowski's own brand of humour and realism, opening up a landscape of seamy Los Angeles.

Nobody Move


Denis Johnson - 2009
    Nobody Move, which first appeared in the pages of Playboy, is the story of an assortment of lowlifes in Bakersfield, California, and their cat-and-mouse game over $2.3 million. Touched by echoes of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, Nobody Move is at once an homage to and a variation on literary form. It salutes one of our most enduring and popular genres—the American crime novel—but with a grisly humor and outrageousness that are Denis Johnson’s own. Sexy, suspenseful, and above all entertaining, Nobody Move shows one of our greatest novelists at his versatile best.

Blood on the Moon


James Ellroy - 1984
    He’s got a beautiful wife, but he can’t get enough of other women. And instead of bedtime stories, he regales his daughters with bloody crime stories. He’s a thinking man’s cop with a dark past and an obsessive drive to hunt down monsters who prey on the innocent. Now, there’s something haunting him. He sees a connection in a series of increasingly gruesome murders of women committed over a period of twenty years. To solve the case, Hopkins will dump all the rules and risk his career to make the final link and get the killer.

The Dead Stay Dumb


James Hadley Chase - 1941
    From the first to the last page, the ruthlessness of an inhuman killer is set down with stark realism. Chase's second book.A cold, ruthless racketeer, Dillon had risen from lackey gunman to Kansas City boss. Now he was big time, big money.But then Dillon started living it up with two young beauties - and began to make mistakes. And once Dillon's guard was down, an outsider got his chance to pull a gruesome doubletake.Death was right around the corner... Dillon didn't take his eyes off the exit to the dark alley. He went on, keeping his gun ready. The open street ahead of him, the deep shadows, and the knowledge that death was waiting for him made his nerves tingle.Quite suddenly two men sprang into the alley. Dillon could see them outlined against a street light. Instantly, he started firing before his brain telegraphed to his hand.One of the men tossed up his hands and fell forward, but the other ducked out of sight - now more determined than ever to see Dillon dead.Dillon has been out of the rackets for some time ; now he was ready to carve his way back in. Ambitious, cold-blooded, impatient, he just needed a start, and one or two unlucky people to help him on his way. He found them. Like Nick Gurney and Roxy, small-time operators who reckoned Dillon was the coming man...Myra, the curvaceous boxer's daughter tired of small-town life and reckless for excitement... and Hurst, the racketeer who ruled half a city. One way and another, they all helped Dillon, while Dillon helped himself. He didn't hear any complaints either, for a long time...

Grifter's Game


Lawrence Block - 1961
    The first novel published by Block under his own name is now available in this complete, unabridged edition.

Hard Rain Falling


Don Carpenter - 1964
    The novel follows the adventures of Jack Levitt, an orphaned teenager living off his wits in the fleabag hotels and seedy pool halls of Portland, Oregon. Jack befriends Billy Lancing, a young black runaway and pool hustler extraordinaire. A heist gone wrong gets Jack sent to reform school, from which he emerges embittered by abuse and solitary confinement. In the meantime Billy has joined the middle class: married, fathered a son, acquired a business and a mistress. But neither Jack nor Billy can escape their troubled pasts, and they will meet again in San Quentin before their strange double drama comes to a violent and revelatory end.

Beat to a Pulp: Hardboiled


David CranmerAmy Grech - 2011
    This collection includes thirteen lean and mean stories from the fingertips of Garnett Elliott, Glenn Gray, John Hornor Jacobs, Patricia Abbott, Thomas Pluck, Brad Green, Ron Earl Phillips, Kent Gowran, Amy Grech, Benoit Lelievre, Kieran Shea, David Cranmer, and Wayne D. Dundee and a boiled down look at hardboiled fiction in an introduction by Ron Scheer. Edited by David Cranmer and Scott D. Parker.

Blackmailer (Hard Case Crime #32)


George Axelrod - 1952
    From the Academy Award-Nominated Screenwriter of BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY'S and THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE Comes a Breathtaking Story of Murder and Mischief...IT'S THE STORY of a big-game hunter, fisherman, fighter, visitor to Cuba, drunk, and Nobel Prize-winning author, recently deceased of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, whose final unpublished manuscript could fetch a mint...IT'S THE STORY of a short, balding man with a high-pitched voice and a vicious wit, whose cocktail parties are the talk of the town, especially when a beautiful woman dies at one of them...IT'S THE STORY of Hollywood's sexiest starlet, who manages to conceal things even when she's wearing nothing but a towel......and it's the story of Dick Sherman, intrepid New York publisher, on the trail of the literary find of the century-and the killer who will stop at nothing to keep it from being found.

Dreaming of Babylon


Richard Brautigan - 1977
    It's a black comedy set in San Francisco in 1942. The central character, C. Card, is no Sam Spade, but actually does do detective work of a sort, when he's not off dreaming of Babylon.

Nightmare Alley


William Lindsay Gresham - 1946
    Young Stan Carlisle is working as a carny, and he 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.And since Stan is clever and ambitious and not without a useful streak of ruthlessness, soon enough he’s going places. Onstage he plays the mentalist with a cute assistant (before long his harried wife), then he graduates to full-blown spiritualist, catering to the needs of the rich and gullible in their well-upholstered homes. It looks like the world is Stan’s for the taking. At least for now.

The Big Sleep


Raymond Chandler - 1939
    He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. This is the Code of the Private Eye as defined by Raymond Chandler in his 1944 essay 'The Simple Act of Murder.' Such a man was Philip Marlowe, private eye, an educated, heroic, streetwise, rugged individualist and the hero of Chandler's first novel, The Big Sleep. This work established Chandler as the master of the 'hard-boiled' detective novel, and his articulate and literary style of writing won him a large audience, which ranged from the man in the street to the most sophisticated intellectual.

Wild at Heart


Barry Gifford - 1990
    The heroes of Barry Gifford's world are Sailor and Lula, unconditional lovers whose dreams and adventures were David Lynch's inspiration for the award-winning movie version of this novel.

Soft Touch


John D. MacDonald - 1958
    Once Jerry had a beautiful bride and a good salary at her old man's successful business - that was before his wife turned into a lush. Before the business started to go to pieces. And before the lazy afternoon when Vince Biskay, an old army buddy, rings his doorbell and makes an intriguing proposition. Vince promises to bring excitement into Jerry's life - and money - but this is a plan that leaves only death and destruction in its wake.