John Dortmunder left prison with the warm words of the warden ringing in his ears and not one chance of going straight. Soon Dortmunder was riding in a stolen Cadillac with venetian blinds, reuniting with old friends and scheming to heist a large emerald belonging to a small African nation. As always, his planning is meticulous. As always, the execution is not. Undaunted, Dortmunder is now chasing the gem by plane, train and automobile. Because this hot rock has a way of getting stolen — not just once, but again and again and again…

Pulp fiction has been looked down on as a guilty pleasure, but it offers the perfect form of entertainment: the very best storytelling filled with action, surprises, sound and fury. In short, all the exhiliration of a roller-coaster ride. The 1920s in America saw the proliferation of hundreds of dubiously named but thrillingly entertaining pulp magazines in America: Black Mask, Amazing, Astounding, Spicy Stories, Ace-High, Detective Magazine, Dare-Devil Aces. It was in these luridly-coloured publications, printed on the cheapest pulp paper, that the first gems began to appear. The one golden rule for writers of pulp fiction was to adhere to the art of storytelling. Each story had to have a beginning, an end, economically-etched characters, but plenty going on, both in terms of action and emotions. Pulp magazines were the TV of their day, plucking readers from drab lives and planting them firmly in thrilling make-believe, successors...

Some days you just might be better off dead — at least, that’s what smart-aleck Barry Lee, an amiable schemer with a gift for grift, decides when yet another of his get-rich-quick schemes falls short of perfect and he finds he has only one asset left: his life. Or rather, the insurance on it. Collecting the benefits of life insurance, however, involves some painfully ultimate realities that Barry Lee would sooner avoid.　So it is that Barry and Lola, his beautiful South American wife and partner in con artistry, set out to play the globalization of the insurance industry to their fiduciary advantage. All they need for a successful operation is a country where corruption comes disguised as efficiency, where copious paperwork passes for accurate records, and where a coroner doesn’t think it necessary to see the corpse in order to issue a death certificate. Lola knows just the place. She was born there.The story of Barry and Lola’s journey to her native Guerrera and their sure-fire scheme to pull off the perfect con, which begins with the staging of Barry’s spectacular and very public accidental death, becomes increasingly perilous as Barry attempts to negotiate his afterlife in a world he in no way understands. To his surprise, then, some of Lola’s more blunt-minded and ham-fisted cousins are figuring that if the whole family’s going to get rich with Barry Lee dead, he’s not dead enough.

On a literary landscape filled with cunning criminal masterminds, Donald E. Westlake’s John Dortmunder is in a league of his own. With no scam too outrageous to contemplate, and no plan too simple to go wrong, this quirky career thief has stolen everything from money buried under a reservoir to a bank — the whole bank. Now the ultimate repeat offender returns in a first-time collection of short stories that prove that just like bagels and donuts, with Dortmunder it’s always better by the dozen... THIEVES’ DOZEN

The master of the comic caper is back with a new riotous tale of double identity. When Art Dodge falls in love with beautiful twins, he wants both all to himself. So, Art and Bart Dodge marry the girls, until he is exhausted and decides Bart has to go.

John Dortmunder y su banda son contratados por un embajador africano para robar un famoso diamante, conocido como Balabomo, que cobija celosamente otro país africano. Dortmunder es extremadamente hábil y minucioso, pero lamentablemente desafortunado. Siempre fracasa. Con la suerte de espaldas, se ve condenado a planificar el golpe una y otra vez con una inercia y tenacidad casi religiosas. «La vida es un equívoco constante» parece decir el escurridizo diamante a la banda de Dortmunder. Ellos, impasibles, le intentarán dar caza por tierra, mar y aire. Un diamante al rojo vivo es una de las obras maestras del extraordinario Donald Westlake. Sin lugar a dudas, su novela más hilarante e ingeniosa. Una brillante comedia repleta de equívocos y llena de personajes inolvidables, con la que John Dortmunder, ladrón y gafe profesional, se presenta en sociedad. Todo un mito de la novela negra.

Who stole Sassi Manoon?Ask Kelly Bram Nicholas IV, the world’s youngest mad scientist, who gets all his answers from Starnap, the seagoing computer.Or ask Jigger Jackson, the girl who wants to be a movie star so bad she’d sell somebody else’s body for the chance.Or ask Frank Ashford, the boy of 1,000 voices 1,000, none of them his own.Or ask Robby Creswel, the black man’s answer to Raffles, perpetrator of the first crime-in.Or ask Major Alfred ffork-Linton and Miss Adelaide Rushby, the slightly dotty and vaguely mysterious couple who could even be exactly what they seem.Or ask Benny Bernard, the forlorn flack whose principal companions are a pair of Afghan hounds named Kama and Sutra.Or ask Sassi Manoon herself, the movie queen, the superstar, the million-dollar property swiped from the middle of a swinging film festival on a Caribbean island and held by everybody in sight. Ask Sassi Manoon who stole Sassi Manoon... and then ask her why she didn’t mind.Or you could ask Donald E. Westlake, whose hilarious explanations of the light side of the underworld have included last year’s award-winning God Save the Mark, and who here turns crossed eyes on the World of Film, the ancient and dishonorable art of Holding for Ransom, and the winning delusion that Love Will Find a Way. It’s all on the inside, a carnival caper of the Spanish Main, the loony Westlake touch that promises the daffiest band of desperadoes synchronizing their watches since Alec Guinness went straight.Who stole Sassi Manoon? You’ll have a great time finding out.

A collection of suspense stories, puzzle stories, whodunits and tricky whydunits involving police detectives, private eyes, talented and sometimes lucky amateurs, armchair detectives, and ethnic detectives.