The Black Dahlia is a police novel on an epic scale; a classic period piece that provides a startling conclusion to America’s most infamous unsolved murder mystery. Already hailed as a masterpiece, it establishes James Ellroy as this country’s most powerful living writer of noir fiction.

On January 15, 1947, the torture-ravished body of a beautiful young woman is found in a vacant lot in Los Angeles. The victim makes headlines as the Black Dahlia, and her murder sparks the greatest manhunt in California history.

Caught up in the investigation are Bucky Bleichert and Lee Blanchard: Warrants Squad cops, friends, and adversaries in love with the same woman. But both are obsessed with the Dahlia — driven by dark needs to know everything about her life, to capture her killer, to possess the woman even in death. Their quest will take them on a hellish journey through the underbelly of postwar Hollywood, to the core of the dead girl’s twisted life, past the extremes of their own psyches — into a region of total madness.

With the no-punches-held style that has become the trademark of a James Ellroy novel, this brilliant and savagely original author launches the reader on a roller-coaster ride through the violent world of the ’40s L.A. cop.

Logan McRae’s personal history is hardly squeaky clean, but now that he works for Professional Standards he’s policing his fellow officers.

When Detective Inspector Bell turns up dead in the driver’s seat of a crashed car it’s a shock to everyone. Because Bell died two years ago, they buried him. Or they thought they did.

As an investigation is launched into Bell’s stabbing, Logan digs into his past. Where has he been all this time? Why did he disappear? And what’s so important that he felt the need to come back from the dead?

But the deeper Logan digs, the more bones he uncovers — and there are people out there who’ll kill to keep those skeletons buried. If Logan can’t stop them, DI Bell won’t be the only one to die...

One mild summer evening Lily and her husband are enjoying a meal while their baby daughter sleeps peacefully in her pram beneath a maple tree. But when Lily steps outside she is paralysed with terror. The child is bathed in blood.Inspector Sejer is called to the hospital to meet the family. Mercifully the baby is unharmed, but her parents are deeply shaken. Sejer spends the evening trying to comprehend why anyone would carry out such a sinister prank.Then, just before midnight, somebody rings his doorbell. The corridor is empty, but the caller has left a small grey envelope on the mat. From his living room window, the inspector watches a figure slip across the car park and disappear into the darkness. Inside the envelope Sejer finds a postcard bearing a short message. Hell begins now.

A beautiful coed is raped and murdered. Only one clue is found, and that so small that it is invisible to the naked eye.

Here, Erle Stanley Gardner recounts how one tiny lead enabled the police to bring a murderer to justice.

Almost everyone knows that Stanley Ketchel was one of the great boxing champions of all time, but many have forgotten that he was murdered—and under baffling circumstances. All the evidence pointed to a gambling syndicate yet the case was obscured by a missing diamond stickpin, a lucky bracelet, and a pretty cook. Here Erle Stanley Gardner relates how this strange case was solved by not following the logical clues.

A new and different Gardner — featuring the State Police and forensic medicine.

It was there that Rob Trenton found himself on a blissful tour with the lovely, if mysterious, Linda Carroll. And it was there that the bumptious Merton Ostrander joined the twosome and, as far as Rob was concerned, made it a crowd.

But it was on a lonely road outside New York City that the real trouble began. For that was when Rob discovered the cache of dope cleverly concealed in Linda’s car — setting the scene for murder...

“She was as greedy as she was beautiful. She was also very dead. So she belonged to me. Why? Because I'm Detective Peter Selby of the New York City Police Department. The young ones, the pretty ones, the ugly ones are mine. Just so long as they're dead. Sometimes it's Park Avenue, sometimes it's Greenwich Village, sometimes it's a dingy West Side walk-up — but it's always murder.”