Сбежавший из тюрьмы известный преступник по кличке Налетчик Морган оказывается перед выбором — стать пешкой в игре спецслужб за рубежом или погибнуть.

В четвертом сборнике «Частного детектива» представлены остросюжетные произведения известных зарубежных мастеров современного детективно-приключенческого жанра - Алистера Маклина, Э. С. Гарднера и Микки Спиллейна.Содержание:Алистер Маклин. Страх отпирает двериЭрл Стенли Гарднер. Дело о светящихся пальцахМикки Спиллейн. Дип

Сюжеты рассказов из сборника «Я умру завтра» подчас удивительны до па­радокса, но самое захватывающее – внезапная, непредсказуемая развязка.

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.

His name was Regan. They called him the killer cop. He was accused of taking a bribe, and then murdering the man who gave it to him. The jury said he wasn't guilty — but his friends and his colleagues weren't convinced.

So Regan had to prove it all over again — starting with the broad who poured him into a cab that fateful night. She was a big, beautiful redhead from a high class bordello, and when he found her, she was dead as doornails.

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.

The guns, the punks, the whores were dying too fast. A wise guy was speeding up the underworld’s death rate with a .38 Special.

Lt. Joe Scanlon manhunts the tawdry dives and deadly alleys of the slum jungle... his cover, a gorgeous lady cop who plays sex-bait... his target, a one-shot assassin who’s killing off the killers.

Here, collected for the first time, are the earliest short stories bylined Mickey Spillane... all written between 1941 and 1942.

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.

Mickey Spillane’s latest mystery features a new and special type of hero — a man assigned a government mission because he is so outstanding a criminal. Morgan the Raider, so called because his audacity compares to that of the famous pirate of old, stands convicted of having stolen $40,000,000. He is good at stealing himself out of jail, too; he has already escaped from custody once. Now he is offered a chance for a reduced sentence — but at the risk of his life. For he must get himself Into Latin American escape-proof prison, a granite torture fortress known as the Pose Castle, in order to find and free an important scientist. A beautiful American agent is assigned the job of accompanying — and watching — him, and he is scrutinized a lot less pleasantly by the Latin American rulers and an unknown assailant.

Mickey Spillane introduces Morgan the Raider in a novel which is at once an exciting mystery and a wonderfully colorful adventure story.

Dogeron Kelly, a walking bomb of a man, and Sharon Cass, a bright and beautiful girl old enough to know her own mind — and that mind is set on saving her precious gifts for the right man — are the star-crossed lovers of this new blockbuster by one of the world’s most popular writers.

All the rest is sex, violence, intrigue. A baronial old-family manor, high-level international illegal traffic, paid mobsters, café society, the rich and the beautiful, the vicious and the criminal, all are part of the fast-moving plot of the best Spillane ever.

This is gripping entertainment if ever there was: colorful, expert, impossible to put down. It is the first major Spillane novel that isn’t a Mike Hammer detective story, but the Spillane fan will recognize the touch of the master.

...the sub-chieftain of East Side prostitution died on silken sheets in a high rise apartment building whose door he thought was absolutely pick-proof.

Nobody heard a shot. Nobody saw an intruder...

With that, Spillane’s high-octane prose zeroes in on the no-holds-barred story of Gillian Burke, The Gill, an ex-cop who loves hard and hates hard. Mainly he hates the syndicate. Ever since the syndicate maneuvered him off the force, he’s made it his business to know what the syndicate was up to.

When some of the syndicate’s most important operators are put out of business, violently and permanently, by a mysterious assassin, Gill is persuaded to put his badge back on and see if he can find the killer before any innocent people get hurt. His investigation has hardly begun when he becomes involved, in unforeseen dangerous ways, with a ruby-lipped cop’s daughter in the pay of a syndicate higher-up and with Helga, a luscious Swedish blonde.

The scenes of passion have a vivid frankness unheard-of in previous Spillane mysteries. Explosive sex and top-notch suspense guarantee to keep the reader gasping till the satisfying and surprising end.