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.

In their heyday, the true-crime pulp magazines spawned many of the masters of American detective fiction. These early gems have been unearthed and collected here for the first time.

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.

An unstoppable anthology of crime stories culled from Black Mask magazine the legendary publication that turned a pulp phenomenon into literary mainstream.

Black Mask was the apotheosis of noir. It was the magazine where the first hardboiled detective story, which was written by Carroll John Daly appeared. It was the slum in which such American literary titans like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler got their start, and it was the home of stories with titles like “Murder Is Bad Luck,” “Ten Carets of Lead,” and “Drop Dead Twice.” Collected here is best of the best, the hardest of the hardboiled, and the darkest of the dark of America’s finest crime fiction. This masterpiece collection represents a high watermark of America’s underbelly. Crime writing gets no better than this.

Featuring

• Deadly Diamonds

• Dancing Rats

• A Prize Fighter Fighting for His Life

• A Parrot that Wouldn’t Talk

Including

• Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon as it was originally published

• Lester Dent’s Luck in print for the first time

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.

Dashiell Hammett, the bestselling creator of Sam Spade, The Maltese Falcon, and The Thin Man, was one of America’s most influential and entertaining authors. In spite of his popularity, many Hammett stories — including some of his best — have been out of the reach of anyone but a handful of scholars and collectors — until now.

This collection rescues non-series and long-lost Hammett stories, all either never published in an anthology or unavailable for decades. Stories range from the first fiction Hammett ever wrote to his last. All stories have been restored to their initial texts, replacing often-wholesale cuts with the original versions for the first time.

Readers of Hammett’s famous mysteries will he surprised by the variety of stories here. They include Hammett’s first detective fiction, humorous satires, adventure yarns, a sensitive autobiographical piece, a Thin Man story told with photos, and a crime tale that Ellery Queen promises “is one of the most startling stories you have ever read.”

Twenty-one unknown works from America's hard-boiled legendA dogged P. I. who sees no reason to temper justice with mercy. A boxer whose fears lie outside the ring. A magician with a perilous dedication to his craft. An accidental hero struggling to redefine his identity. Lovers tangled in the attractions and regrets of their relationship. Sam Spade in the one murder mystery he'll never solve. These and other terrific tales make up The Hunter and Other Stories, a landmark literary publication from one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, Dashiell Hammett. This collection introduces a dozen never-before-published stories gleaned from Hammett’s archives, revives five seldom seen short-fiction narratives, unveils three screen treatments unearthed from film-industry files, and concludes with an unfinished Sam Spade adventure discovered in a private collection. Hammett is regarded as a pioneer and master of hard-boiled detective fiction, but these works show him in a broader light. His shrewd explorations of failed romance, hypocrisy, crass opportunism, and courage in the face of conflict will both reshape his legacy and reconfirm his extraordinary genius for dialogue, plot, and character.This book’s full-length screen treatments include "On the Make,” the basis for the rarely screened 1935 film Mr. Dynamite — with a corrupt detective who never misses an opportunity to take advantage of his clients rather than help them—and "The Kiss-Off," the story for City Streets (1931), starring Sylvia Sydney and Gary Cooper, who play two people caught in a romance complicated by racketeering’s obligations and temptations. Containing perceptive commentary from distinguished Hammett biographer Richard Layman and Hammett’s granddoughter Julie M. Rivett, The Hunter and Other Stories will be a beloved addition to the canon for longtime Hammett fans and an uniquing introduction a new generation to one of the most influential voices in American fiction.

Nighttime. A young woman appears at the door of an isolated house. She is frightened and hurt. She speaks with a foreign accent. The man and woman inside take her in. Other strangers appear, in obvious pursuit of the girl. There is menace in the air — some unspoken, unexplained aura of violence and misdeed...