Животът на една жена и волята й за успех по време на Голямата депресия.

Милдред Пиърс има страхотни крака, кулинарен талант и несломим характер. Тя използва тези свои предимства, за да надживее развода си и бедността и да се измъкне с нокти и зъби от незавидното си социално положение. Но Милдред има две слабости: непреодолимо влечение към безотговорни мъже и безразсъдна преданост към чудовищната си дъщеря. От тези елементи Джеймс М. Кейн изгражда един изключителен психологически роман с опустошителна емоционална сила и героиня, чиито амбиции и болки са близки и понятни за всеки читател.

„Това е роман, който веднъж започнат, със сигурност ще бъде завършен, защото в него се долавя дълбокото, бавно просмукване на първичната кал, в която някога са пълзели змии и червеи. Тук няма правила, няма ограничения, нищо друго, освен инстинктивни нужди. Истинска баня на сетивността.“Ню Йорк Таймс, Бук Ривю

„Никой друг не е успявал по начина, по който го прави Кейн, нито Хемингуей, нито дори Реймънд Чандлър.“Том Улф

Джеймса М. Кейна вместе с Дэшилом Хэмметом и Раймондом Чандлером некоторые критики называют одним из основателей `крутой` школы в классическом американском детективе. Мировую славу писателю принес роман `Почтальон всегда звонит дважды`. Он был не раз экранизирован – наиболее известна версия Боба Рафелсона с Джеком Николсоном и Джесикой Ланг в главных ролях.

От любви до ненависти один шаг. Герои романов Кейна знают это не понаслышке. Ради новой счастливой жизни они готовы поддаться ослепляющей страсти и нарушить все табу общественной морали – даже если требуется убить человека. Но приведет это решение к долгожданной свободе или к краю пропасти?

«Почтальон всегда звонит дважды» и «Двойная страховка» – истории о любви, предательстве и коварном бумеранге судьбы, ставшие классикой жанра нуар.

Джеймса Кейна наряду с Дэшилом Хэмметом и Раймондом Чандлером некоторые критики называют одним из основателей «крутой» школы в классическом американском детективе. В настоящем издании собраны «засветившиеся» в списках бестселлеров романы Кейна «Почтальон всегда звонит дважды», «Двойная страховка», «Серенада», «Бабочка» и «Растратчик», а также ряд рассказов. «Все беды от женщин» — так можно было бы охарактеризовать сюжетную схему, которую автор использовал в большинстве своих книг. Однако у Кейна никогда до конца не ясно, кто кого искушает, ангел перед нами или демон в ангельском обличье. Любовные отношения между героями романов Кейна — это всегда огонь, страсть, кровь и… предательство.Любители детективов найдут в романах Кейна захватывающую интригу, напряженное действие и возможность проявить свои дедуктивные способности; поклонники любовных романов погрузятся в пучины темной страсти; не оставят равнодушными произведения Дж. Кейна и увлекающихся психологической — «серьезной» литературой.Роман «Почтальон всегда звонит дважды» публикуется в новом переводе.СОДЕРЖАНИЕ:Почтальон всегда звонит дважды.Двойная страховка.Серенада.Растратчик.Бабочка.Рассказы:— Младенец в холодильнике,— Труп на рельсах,— Девушка под дождем,— Побег,— Пастораль.

Given its extraordinary span, its international scope, and its variant styles and groundbreaking stylists, A Century of Great Suspense Stories is a singular achievement. A bestselling master of suspense himself Jeffery Deaver had the enviable task of selecting from the thousands of stories written over the past one hundred years those which best represented the classic form, as well as the justly celebrated authors whose ironic twists and stunning payoffs left a lasting, vivid, and unnerving impression. The result is a triumph.

In this ambitious anthology you’ll revel in the sardonic, overtly amoral plotting of Patricia Highsmith. You’ll rediscover the strangely poignant and surprising turns of Stanley Ellin, and the profoundly underrated Margaret Millar, a genius who mixed savage social satire with brooding horror. You’ll be treated to Stephen King at his chilling best. You’ll find yourself on the violent urban streets of Ross Macdonald and Mickey Spillane, and seeped in the ominous regional flavor of Sharyn McCrumb and Tony Hillerman. You’ll marvel at the cunning webs spun by Lawrence Block, Ruth Rendell, Anthony Boucher, and Sara Paretsky, all of whom defy expectations as they reinvent the genre. And you’ll understand the awesome reputations of those authors who set the standard, such as the legendary Harlan Ellison, Fredric Brown, the master of the twist ending, and James M. Cain, uncannily skilled at knowing what went on between men and women behind closed doors. (The darker the room the better.)

Delivering everything from the one-two punch of the detective story to the ingeniously precise trappings of the police procedural, from the disquieting corners of the criminal mind to sheer dread-inducing horror, A Century of Great Suspense Stories is a rich anthology of this popular literary genre, a stunning tribute to the art of storytelling, and to the men and women who have done it best.

This is a distinguished publishing event. Career in C Major and Other Fiction is the final anthology of previously uncollected short fiction by James M. Cain, the renowned author of Mildred Pierce, The Post matt Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, and many other works. Cain died in 1977 at age eighty-five. Cain's novels made him, along with Hammett and Chandler, one of the best-selling American writers of the twentieth century.

This is a book filled with delights. Included are the first hardcover reprint of Career in C Major, the classic Cain comic novel that has been out of print for many years; short fiction from Redbook, Liberty, and Esquire; and dramatic dialogues from The American Mercury.

Career in C Major is just the main course of a feast that includes page after page of marvelously entertaining stories and dialogues. The selections have been chosen and illuminated with insightful commentaries by Roy Hoopes. Career in C Major and Other Fiction will occupy a place on bookshelves for many years to come.

When blonde, 16-year-old, Sonya Lang confronts real-estate man Graham Kirby with the fact that she’s pregnant by his sleazy half-brother Burwell, that’s bad. When it turns out that her condition is the result of a particularly degrading rape, that’s worse. As her father says, “What wipes out that stain is blood.”

This is quintessential James M. Cain, giving us characters whose emotional intensity is unlimited. Suspenseful, intricately plotted, CLOUD NINE is an important addition to contemporary American literature.

Galatea may seem strange Cain to those who link him with California and violent stories out of the West. But to those who knew him earlier, particularly his origins in Annapolis and his life in the counties near by, it will hardly come as a surprise. Cain returned to southern Maryland to find it startlingly changed. Cogitating this transformation from oxcarts, scrub woods, and plug tobacco to grand boulevards, lumber, and big auction rooms, he found himself inventing a novel about it. The result is Galatea, the story of Holly Valenty, a girl who is a product of the old dispensation, but who succumbs to the temptations of the new, a story with all the Cain magic — brutal, shocking, yet tender and believable.

What are the ingredients of a hard-boiled detective story? “Savagery, style, sophistication, sleuthing, and sex,” said Ellery Queen. Often a desperate blond, a jealous husband, and, of course, a tough-but-tender P.I. the likes of Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe. Perhaps Raymond Chandler summed it up best in his description of Dashiell Hammett’s style: “Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it... He put these people down on paper as they were, and he made them talk and think in the language they customarily used for these purposes.”

Hard-Boiled: An Anthology of American Crime Stories is the largest and most comprehensive collection of its kind, with over half of the stories never published before in book form. Included are thirty-six sublimely suspenseful stories that chronicle the evolution of this quintessentially American art form, from its earliest beginnings during the golden age of the legendary pulp magazine Black Mask in the 1920s, to the arrival of the tough digest Manhunt in the 1950s, and finally leading up to present-day hard-boiled stories by such writers as James Ellroy. Here are eight decades worth of the best writing about betrayal, murder, and mayhem: from Hammett’s 1925 tour de force “The Scorched Face,” in which the disappearance of two sisters leads Hammett’s never-named detective, the Continental Op, straight into a web of sexual blackmail amidst the West Coast elite, to Ed Gorman’s 1992 “The Long Silence After,” a gripping and powerful rendezvous involving a middle class insurance executive, a Chicago streetwalker, and a loaded .38. Other delectable contributions include “Brush Fire” by James M. Cain, author of The Postman Always Rings Twice, Raymond Chandler’s “I’ll Be Waiting,” where, for once, the femme fatale is not blond but a redhead, a Ross Macdonald mystery starring Macdonald’s most famous creator, the cryptic Lew Archer, and “The Screen Test of Mike Hammer” by the one and only Mickey Spillane. The hard-boiled cult has more in common with the legendary lawmen of the Wild West than with the gentleman and lady sleuths of traditional drawing room mysteries, and this direct line of descent is on brilliant display in two of the most subtle and tautly written stories in the collection, Elmore Leonard’s “3:10 to Yuma” and John D. MacDonald’s “Nor Iron Bars.” Other contributors include Evan Hunter (better known as Ed McBain), Jim Thompson, Helen Nielsen, Margaret Maron, Andrew Vachss, Faye Kellerman, and Lawrence Block.

Compellingly and compulsively readable, Hard-Boiled: An Anthology of American Crime Stories is a page-turner no mystery lover will want to be without. Containing many notable rarities, it celebrates a genre that has profoundly shaped not only American literature and film, but how we see our heroes and ourselves.

CARD-GAMBLING AND LOVE GAMBOLING IN THE CITY OF GAY DIVORCEES

Jane Delavan had dark, red hair and plenty of shape of a nice, refined kind. To Ed Horner she was only a little fancy flirtation under the Nevada moon, but he found some peculiar circumstances developing when Jane’s husband, Tom Delavan, himself came to town, followed very shortly afterwards by his first wife, the beautiful but jealous Lady Sperry.

Ed wondered what kind of game Jane Delavan was playing with him, leading him on as she was? And why should Lady Sperry take a heated interest in him of a sudden? What were the cause of secret midnight callers roaming at will through hotel bedrooms? Suddenly Ed Horner found himself slowly being ringed about by a group of hard-hating, highly emotional people who all had motives that involved them in a case of murder and the JEALOUS WOMAN.

Adding to the fast growing list of James M. Cain novels, JEALOUS WOMAN is fiction that rates high for tight-packed action and a set of colorful, trigger-tense characters — a sure guarantee of the reader’s interest to the final smashing climax.

MIGNON is James M. Cain’s first novel in nearly ten years. Readers of previous bestsellers such as The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, and Mildred Pierce will find Mignon Fournet, the heroine of the new novel, as remarkable a creation as the women in those two celebrated books.

Mignon is a beautiful young widow who, with her father, has come to New Orleans at the close of the Civil War in the hopes of improving their war-reduced fortunes. But the risky trade in contraband cotton has landed her father in jail and Mignon at the hotel room door of Bill Cresap. Cresap, recently discharged from the Union Army for wounds received in battle, has arrived in New Orleans to start a business with a friend. Reluctantly, but irrevocably, Cresap is drawn into the intrigues and dangers which engulf the irresistible Mignon.

Also moving among the dark events of those tough, troubled times is a fascinating variety of richly drawn characters. There is Adolphe Landry, Mignon’s enigmatic father; Frank Burke, Landry’s unscrupulous partner; Gippo, Burke’s henchman, more animal than human; and Marie Tremaine, the beautiful, rich, and powerful chatelaine of a notorious New Orleans gambling house.

From gaudy New Orleans, the scene shifts up-river to the bloody Red River battle. There, the personal and military dramas are joined. Cresap, in the turbulent actions which follow, finds himself not only involved in the intrigues of desperate men, but the passions of two beautiful women. In an explosion of violence and tragedy, the novel reaches its inevitable climax.

Of MIGNON, Mr. Cain says: It is a continuation, in theme, of a previous book, Past All Dishonor, in which the hero is tempted, by his love for a girl, so slight his duty — not much, just a little bit. In MIGNON, Mr. Cain depicts the bafflement of large numbers of men, even in high places, who must wrestle the rules of war and slight them — not much, but a little bit. “Treason,” says Mr. Cain, “doesn’t invite my interest, at least as a narrative theme, being so stark it defies exploration. But its close relative, cheating just little bit, fascinates me. Sometimes, as in Mignon, it even manages to seem quite praiseworthy, which is where the trouble really starts.”

Here are the swift pace, the hard, crisp prose, the almost unbearably tense dramatic situations which are typical of James Cain. But here also are a deeper view of life, a bigger subject, and a group of characters closer to the average reader’s experience than Mr. Cain has ever given us before. Here, in other words, is his most substantial and most ambitious novel.

It is the story of a woman, her daughter, and her two husbands. At twenty- eight she was a “grass widow” without a cent. She learned to work; she created a business and built it into a notable success. Along the way she acquired two lovers, one of whom became her second husband. But none of that was important. What was important was her daughter Veda — the lovely, haughty, greedy, cruel child who knew what she wanted and got it.

The relations between mother and daughter, between mother and husband and lover, between husband and daughter, intermingle and fuse into a shattering climax. Nine years have passed, and in this terrific moment all the characters are at last stripped and revealed, all the motives — good and evil — hared, all the ways of life finally chosen. It is a scene no one will easily forget.

Here is Cain at his peak, in a new novel that dealt. inevitably, with violent emotions and violent deeds. Here passion and murder are the ingredients of the tale, and what Cain does with them makes this his most terrific adventure in suspense.

The hero is a young Confederate spy in Virginia City, the great mining town, at the height of its boom period. The woman for whom he conceives a wild and desperate infatuation is one of the camp’s sporting girls — in every way a dangerous creature, greedy, conscienceless, and utterly irresistible. The story of his fight to possess her, set against that brawling and turbulent scene, produces another unlaydownable book.

Mr. Cain writes: “I have tried to put real human beings before the reader, to explain, as plausibly as I can, how a gunman got that way, what the prostitute was doing there, why the mine-owner was a bit of a heel, and so on. Also, I have tried to present the life of the time as it was, and as few people nowadays seem to realize it was.”

Enter a world of seedy nightclubs, dangerous, dimly-lit street and cool, wisecracking dicks pitting themselves against armies of ruthless gangsters. This is pulp fiction, a genre spawned amid the disillusionment of post-World War I America — and now reaching new heights of popularity.

Writers like Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett turned that unique blend of rapid-fire action, violence and cynical humour into an art form that is being recreated by a fresh wave of young writers whose stories have all the drama and atmosphere of their predecessors’.

This page-turning collection, brought together by a true aficionado of the hardboiled story, includes, of course, Chandler and Hammett, but also Mickey Spillane, Ross MacDonald, Ed McBain and James Hadley Chase from the vintage years and from the current generation James Ellroy, Elmore Leonard and Quentin Tarantino, to name just a few of the twenty great writers featured here. Even Stephen King, doyen of the world of horror, has turned his hand to pulp fiction and is represented in this book.

The world of the hard-drinking, fast-action, apparently indestructible private eye, personified by Chandler’s creation, Philip Marlowe, was never more vibrant. It’s all here, and more, in a book that no fan of the genre can afford to miss.

James M. Cain, acclaimed as one of the modern masters of mystery, has once again woven a forceful tale that challenges people’s basic morality with temptations they are powerless to resist.

Davey Howell is content in his rural Ohio solitude; the static broadcasts of the country radio stations are his only steady contact with the “outside” world. But then a hijacker plummets into his life, along with $100,000 cash ransom and a beautiful stewardess as hostage. Suddenly, Davey’s sense of “the good life” faces its toughest challenge — with the hijacker dead, who would know if the money were lost or stolen?

RAINBOW’S END bears all the trademarks that have made James Cain one of our most influential writers. The money: $100,000 is more than Davey dreamed of making in his entire lifetime. The woman: the worldly stewardess is like none Davey has ever known. The momentum: Cain is the master, whirling hours into instants and back again. And finally, the man alone: Cain isolates Davey, leaving him to make his own decisions within this hoard of temptation. This is the dramatic force of James M. Cain, named by Camus as “the greatest American writer.”

DRAW ONE—

That’s waitress lingo. Means a cup of coffee. It’s a part of a language that Carrie Selden had spoken for a long time.

Carrie was a hash-slinger. Lots of big business men ate at Karb’s just to watch her trim figure moving by their tables. Grant Harris was one of them — he watched, waited and was married by Carrie. The millionaire and the waitress. It was a newspaper field-day.

In spite of everything she was called, Carrie felt she had to set the record straight. This is her candid story — the intimate details of the life of Carrie Selden Harris, who asks you to pass judgment on her only after you’ve read her story.

A beautiful Hollywood movie star, her glamor girl sister, and a handsome sheriff who has an eye for a pretty woman, provide the explosive triangle around which James M. Cane has built this latest story of violence and desire. The first appear in print of this exciting and provocative novel is literary treat you will not want to miss and in only the usual two or three dollars, it is priced to the range of everyone.

The flood of vigorous emotions, of love so deadly that it slays, packs “Sinful Woman” from start to smashing finish. You can’t lay it down once the striking Sylvia Shoreham, vivid movie star, hits the Reno gambling halls for a show-down with Baron Adlerkkreutz, her hot-blooded, woman-killer husband. You’ll be gripped by Sheriff Lucas as his mad desire for Sylvia runs head-on into his oath to uphold law and order; you’ll be caught by the Hollywood conniving of Dimmy Spiro, Sylvia’s producer, and by the colorful impact of Cain’s with other boldly drawn characters. And throughout the whole book you’ll be held at fever pitch by the deadly puzzle of Sylvia’s sister Hazel, whose knockout beauty underlines every scene with the tension of a fast-ticking bomb.

The BIGGEST, the BOLDEST, the MOST COMPREHENSIVE collection of PULP WRITING ever assembled!

Weighing in at over a thousand pages, containing over forty-seven stories and two novels, this book is big baby, bigger and more powerful than a freight train — a bullet couldn’t pass through it. Here are the best stories and every major writer who ever appeared in celebrated Pulps like Black Mask, Dime Detective, Detective Fiction Weekly, and more. These are the classic tales that created the genre and gave birth to hard-hitting detectives who smoke criminals like packs of cigarettes; sultry dames whose looks are as lethal as a dagger to the chest; and gin-soaked hideouts where conversations are just preludes to murder. This is crime fiction at its gritty best.

Including:

• Three stories by Raymond Chandler, Cornell Woolrich, Erle Stanley Gardner, and Dashiell Hammett.

• Complete novels from Carroll John Daly, the man who invented the hard-boiled detective, and Fredrick Nebel, one of the masters of the form.

• A never before published Dashiell Hammett story.

• Every other major pulp writer of the time, including Paul Cain, Steve Fisher, James M. Cain, Horace McCoy, and many, many more of whom you’ve probably never heard.

• Three deadly sections — The Crimefighters, The Villains, and The Dames — with three unstoppable introductions by Harlan Coben, Harlan Ellison, and Laura Lippman.

Featuring:

• Plenty of reasons for murder, all of them good.

• A kid so smart — he’ll die of it.

• A soft-hearted loan shark’s legman learning — the hard way — never to buy a strange blonde a hamburger.

• The uncanny “Moon Man” and his mad-money victims.

Mandy Vernick is a girl with a problem. She is abused by her stepfather (with her mother’s tacit approval), and discovers that her mother is having an affair. With nowhere to turn, Mandy runs away from home, hoping to find her father in Baltimore. Vernick denies that he is Mandy’s father. Desperate and confused, the voluptuous six- teen-year-old becomes involved in a bank robbery that ends with three men dead.

The Enchanted Isle has a bittersweet ending but, before Cain allows us to relax and share in Mandy’s joy, he strips the facade from a family’s carefully built house of lies and in the process keeps the reader wondering what will happen next... and to whom.