Even in their most intimate moments Carol couldn’t forget that not so long ago he’d held another woman in his arms.

It is not often that an author spices a story with two heroes. One was George Cooper doing a quiet job in a quiet way. The other was Allan Farat, a sleek debonair hood who killed for pleasure. Around this dichotomy, John D. MacDonald has woven an exotic tale of deception that challenges the memories of a woman in love.

Slowly he built an eternal empire with the seconds he stole from other men’s lives... but not all his art could aid him when his own span lay between dawn and dusk — the dusk before the endless night that he would never see!

Could one man alone turn aside its terrible power, that had wiped out man’s mightiest heritage and left him only a future — the hope of death in the stars?

Sooner or later, a gent who’s dying for war — meets a hombre who’s killing for peace!

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.

Little did Ellis Morgan’s wife know what she was in for when a famous beauty came back into her husband’s life...

Three men had toyed her — and died violently... I was the next target — for a malignant, phantom boy-friend.

“Hit and Run” is a satisfying, well-written story that leads to unexpected places, a story that in the hands of a good writer resonates and stays with you long after you’ve finished reading it.

One moment of panic turned the driver into a hunted killer.

Imagine making all the lucky strokes of a lifetime again — in a single golf match? Mr. Fingerhaver did.

At last.

They were alone... with plumbers, carpenters, plasterers — and a bulldozer in the bedroom.

The exciting story of seven who were isolated on an island of terror: one whose greed stopped barely short of murder, and six who, stifling panic and forgetting self, rose to heights of courage and inner faith.

Here’s a man who set out to be the perfect husband. It almost broke up his marriage!

There are more universes in the cosmos than man has dreamt of in his philosophy.

A young widow listened while her two gallant suitors discussed how she would die...

Tale of strange and exotic love.

From out where the pale emotions of civilization are lashed into fury by primitive passions, come this tale of weird abandon and exotic love.

This fascinating story of unconventional love by John MacDonald round out this collection of great stories by truly great writers.

It seemed utterly senseless, that accident which made superfolk out of the folk on the bus — but was there a larger pattern behind it?

Morrow was not afraid of death. He was afraid of women. Too many of them wanted too much of him. And he was only one man.

There was Barbara, who for a price became his bedroom alibi.

There was young, tempestuous Jake, who wanted him at any cost.

There was married Felice, who paid too much for what she got.

In this emotion-packed novel, John D. MacDonald, distinguished author of the brass cupcake and MURDER FOR THE BRIDE, takes you into a whirlpool of crime, passion and revenge.

I’m a card cop. I can spot a shark’s trick after one hand... then I ran into ordinary citizen Carl Breton. With him I had to first meet his wife.