Американская мафия 50-х годов переживает тяжелые времена и теряет влияние. В это время набирает силу республика Фиделя Кастро, над которой никак не могут восторжествовать американские силы. Правительство делает ставку на братьев Кеннеди, одаренных молодых политиков. Лишь одна старая и нечистая история, связанная с их отцом, может помешать безукоризненному замыслу.Ситуация усложняется вмешательством самонадеянного, но бесхарактерного агента ФБР, вообразившего, что он сможет в одиночку победить преступность. Именно ему в итоге удается разгадать и сопоставить намерения участников происходящего. Он знает все, но машину уже не остановить.Продажные журналисты, политики, борцы с «красной угрозой», наркобароны и коррумпированные полицейские — все они сплачиваются ради единой цели: сделать одного из членов семьи Кеннеди президентом. Сделать, чтобы после уничтожить.

Death knell in L.A.

Beneath the golden glitter, Tinsel Town spawns sleaze, sickies, psychos, and wiseguys. Ex-cop Fritz Brown, sometime P.I., full-time Beethoven buff, sees it all as he walks the shady side of the streets. Now he’s got a client named Freddy “Fat Dog” Baker, a caddy who flashes too much cash... and a gut feeling that this case could be his last. Arson, pay-offs, and porn are all part of the game. But so is Fat Dog’s foxy cello-playing sister. And soon Brown’s desire to make beautiful music with her threatens to turn his favorite song into a funeral march.

From Wilshire to Watts, ambitious rookie Freddy Underhill patrols L.A. looking for glamor and glory. His dreams of being a hotshot California cop are bigger than the bats he makes on his golf game or the busts of the women he picks up.

So when a flashy lass he knows from a one-night stand is strangled, Underhill sees his chance to grab headlines with a quick collar. Until the clandestine set-up to catch the killer breaks open a locked door to kinky sex and sleazy secrets — and murder in smog city closes in on both Underhill’s career and his life.

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.

Nocturnes: Short dark riffs, the blues formalized.

James Ellroy, described by the Los Angeles Times: “Developing into one of the great American writers.”

Ellroy’s L.A. Quartet novels — The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, White Jazz — an epic pop history of a toxic metropolis.

Hollywood Nocturnes: An alternative Ellroy universe, etched less in blood and more in elegiac neon.

Dick Contino: Accordion virtuoso, lounge lizard, Red Scare scapegoat. On a greased slide in ’58 L.A.: A show biz fatality begging to happen. Dick Contino’s Blues: Half nocturne, half torch song. A blast back to tailfins, disease-free promiscuity, sex killers, Commie-bashing, publicity kidnaps, and B-movie redemption — an ode to a time when love came cheap.

Nocturnes: Noir set to music.

James Ellroy: America’s great noir writer.

Dick Contino: America’s kingpin accordion player, then and now. The accordion and noir?...

Suspend your disbelief.

Hollywood Nocturnes: The novella Dick Contino’s Blues, Ellroy’s entire short-story oeuvre, and a few surprises. Dig it, kats and kittens, chix and charlies: This is prime-time Ellroy.

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.

Meet Freddy Otash: corrupt cop turned sleaze hustler, extortionist, pimp, and an actual historical figure who made the 1950s magazine “Confidential” the go-to source for the sins of the rich and famous. In his prime, Freddy raised hell, and in the pages of “Shakedown” he finds himself in purgatory — literally — waiting for a transfer. Will he make it to heaven, or is his fate trending south? Promised redemption if he confesses, Freddy writes a tell-all peopled by Hollywood greats like Liz Taylor, Marilyn Monroe, John Wayne, and Gary Cooper (to name a few), who are up to all sorts of wrong. Threesomes, foursomes, men’s room misadventures — anything goes in this licentious world.

Featuring the best from the modern masters of detective, intrigue, suspense, and mystery fiction

Freddy Otash was the man in the know and the man to know in ’50s L.A. He was a rogue cop, a sleazoid private eye, a shakedown artist, a pimp — and, most notably, the head strong-arm goon for Confidential magazine.

Confidential presaged the idiot internet — and delivered the dirt, the dish, the insidious ink, and the scurrilous skank. It mauled misanthropic movie stars, sex-soiled socialites, and putzo politicians. Mattress Jack Kennedy, James Dean, Montgomery Clift, Burt Lancaster, Liz Taylor, Rock Hudson — Frantic Freddy outed them all. He was the Tattle Tyrant who held Hollywood hostage, and now he’s here to CONFESS.

“I’m consumed with candor and wracked with recollection. I’m revitalized and resurgent. My meshugenah march down memory lane begins NOW.”

In Freddy’s viciously entertaining voice, Widespread Panic torches 1950s Hollywood to the ground. It’s a blazing revelation of coruscating corruption, pervasive paranoia, and of sin and redemption with nothing in between.

Here is James Ellroy in savage quintessence. Freddy Otash confesses — and you are here to read and succumb.