Contains Chandler's essay on the art of detective stories and a collection of 8 classic Chandler mysteries.

    But now Hank is here, working as a bartender and taking care of a cat named Bud who is surely going to get him killed.It begins when Hank’s neighbor, Russ, has to leave town in a rush and hands over Bud in a carrier. But it isn’t until two Russians in tracksuits drag Hank over the bar at the joint where he works and beat him to a pulp that he starts to get the idea: Someone wants something from him. He just doesn’t know what it is, where it is, or how to make them understand he doesn’t have it.Within twenty-four hours Hank is running over rooftops, swinging his old aluminum bat for the sweet spot of a guy’s head, playing hide and seek with the NYPD, riding the subway with a dead man at his side, and counting a whole lot of cash on a concrete floor.All because of two cowboys, two Russian mafia men, and some of the weirdest goons ever assembled in one place. All because of Bud. All because once, in another life, in another world, the only thing Hank wanted was to take third base—without getting caught.

    Published for the first time in the United States, this gritty novel tells the story of a bar bouncer who needs to pony up $10,000 to buy into a horse racing syndicate and will stop at nothing to get it--not robbery, not even murder.

    Notoriously cunning and ruthless, Gloria shows her eager young protégée the ropes, ushering her into a glittering demimonde of late-night casinos, racetracks, betting parlors, inside heists, and big, big money. Suddenly, the world is at her feet--as long as she doesn't take any chances, like falling for the wrong guy. As the roulette wheel turns, both mentor and protégée scramble to stay one step ahead of their bosses and each other.

    Without Prejudice is a compulsive story of race and the dangers that can lie in the past.

    It was published, and the rest is history.One Night Stands and Lost Weekends is a sterling collection of short crime fiction and suspense novelettes penned between 1958 and 1962 by a budding young master and soon-to-be Grand Master—an essential slice of genre history, and more fun than a high-speed police chase following a bank job gone bad.

    . . It was only cheap glass, a fraud, a come-on for the suckers who paid Doc Magus to gaze into its depths and tell them tomorrow would be better. And Doc--a decent man, a smart man--pitied them. Yet tonight, even Doc had to believe the Madball. There was nothing left to lead him to the money--enough money to spring him free of the raucous, sordid world of the pitchmen and the pickled punks, the cotton candy and the kewpie dolls--and the belly dancers who needed him for all-night alibis.Doc was shrewd, but not quite shrewd enough. Someone else knew about the $42,000--a specialist in death, who was only yards away. . .MADBALL is a novel of one traveling show, and of the lives of its carneys, who live to close to the edge of frenzy.

    — But could any man ever have her? — After years at sea, Swede Nelson just wanted to find a nice girl and settle down. What he found was Corliss Mason: sensual irresistible - and deadly. Soon Swede's helping Corliss cover up a killing, but how long can they get away with murder? And why - even when he's in her arms - can't he shake that feeling that he's being set up?A writer for radio, television, movies, pulp magazines and paperbacks, DAY KEENE created some of the most memorable noir nightmares ever penned. HOME IS THE SALIOR is his greatest book, a tale of passion and obession that makes James M. Cain and Jim Thompson look tame -- now available of the first time in decades!

    The lost pulp crime novel by great American novelist Gore Vidal! Hired to smuggle an ancient artefact out of Egypt, Pete Wells finds himself the target of killers and femme fatales - and just one step away from triggering a revolution that will set Cairo aflame!

    Orphaned at birth, a gifted musician, he’s stuck in a California backwater, helping his Salvadoran aunt care for his damaged brother, an ex-marine badly wounded in Iraq. When immigration agents arrest his uncle, the family has nowhere else to turn. Roque, badgered by his street-hardened cousin, agrees to bring the old man back, relying on the criminal gangs that control the dangerous smuggling routes from El Salvador, through Guatemala and Mexico, to the U.S. border. But his cousin has told Roque only so much. In reality, he will have to transport not just his uncle but two others: an Arab whose intentions are disturbingly vague and a young beauty promised to a Mexican crime lord. Roque discovers that his journey involves crossing more than one kind of border, and he will be asked time and again to choose between survival and betrayal—of his country, his family, his heart.

    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.

    But it's all the money in the world to the struggling Cuban exiles of Miami who rescued Morgan the Raider. So when it's snatched by a man the Cubans trusted, Morgan sets out to get it back.A simple favor but as the bodies pile up - dead men and beautiful women - the Raider wonders what kind of Latin hell he's gotten himself into, and just who or what is the mysterious Consummata?Begun by mystery master Mickey Spillane in the late 1960s and completed four decades later by his friend Max Allan Collins (Road to Perdition), The Consummata is the long-awaited follow-up to Spillane's bestseller The Delta Factor - a breathtaking tale of treachery, sensuality, and violence, showcasing two giants of crime fiction at their pulse-pounding, two-fisted best.

    When he’s picked out of a photo array in a vicious rape case, the cops find his apartment empty. A stakeout catches Sugar when he returns . . . carrying a loaded pistol. The sex-crime cops get nothing from their interrogation, but a streetwise detective figures out why Sugar offers no alibi: at the time of the rape, a holiday-weekend break-in job was being pulled at a jewelry store. The DA offers Sugar two options: give up his partners in the jewelry heist and walk, or plead to the rape he didn’t commit—and he’ll toss in the gun charge. For Sugar, that’s not two options; he takes the weight.  When Sugar finishes his time, his money is waiting for him, held by Solly, the mastermind behind the jewelry heist. But Solly tells Sugar that one of the heist crew was actually sent by another planner—and that planner has just died. In Sugar’s world, all loose threads must be cut. He suspects that there’s more to this job than what Solly is telling him. But nothing he suspects or imagines can prepare him for what he finds . . .

    One day Richard decides to make an ambitious film, which turns into a fiasco. Enraged, he exacts revenge on all who have crossed him.

    The death of legendary private eye George Rowell looked like an accident; but searching for the truth behind it will put down-and-out East Village detective Payton Sherwood on the corpse-littered trail of a runaway investment scam artist, a drug-addicted reality TV star, and the bewitching beauty whose appearance set it all in motion...