Lew Archer #19No matter what cases private eye Lew Archer takes on – a burglary, a runaway, or a disappeared person – the trail always leads to tangled family secrets and murder. Widely considered the heir to Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, Archer dug up secrets and bodies in and around Los Angeles. Here, The Archer Files collects all the Lew Archer short stories ever published, along with thirteen unpublished “case notes” and a fascinating biographical profile of Archer by Edgar Award finalist Tom Nolan. Ross Macdonald’s signature staccato prose is the real star throughout this collection, which is both a perfect introduction for the newcomer and a must-have for the Macdonald aficionado. – From the Trade Paperback edition.

Lew Archer #6

The beautiful, high-diving blonde had Hollywood dreams and stars in her eyes but now she seems to have disappeared without a trace. Hired by her hotheaded husband and her rummy “uncle,” Lew Archer sniffs around Malibu and finds the stink of blackmail, blood-money, and murder on every pricey silk shirt. Beset by dirty cops, a bumptious boxer turned silver screen pretty boy and a Hollywood mogul with a dark past, Archer discovers the secret of a grisly murder that just won’t stay hidden. Lew Archer navigates through the watery, violent world of wealth and privilege, in this electrifying story of obsession gone mad.

Two children are found dead in a basement. Four years later their murderer escapes from prison. The police know if he is not found quickly, he will kill again.But when their worst fears come true and another child is murdered in the nearby town of Strengnas, the situation spirals out of control. In an atmosphere of hysteria whipped up by the media, Fredrik Steffansson, the father of the murdered child, decides he must take revenge. His actions will have devastating consequences. As anger spreads across the whole country, the two detectives assigned to the case – Ewert Grens and Sven Sunkist – find themselves caught up in a situation of escalating violence.A powerful and at times profoundly shocking novel, The Beast has been likened to both Hitchcock and le Carre. It is also an important and timely exploration of what can happen when we take the law into our own hands. It has been shortlisted for Glasnyckeln 2005 (The Glass Key 2005) for Best Scandinavian Crime Novel of the Year.

The Big Sleep was an instant success when first published in 1939. It centers around a paralyzed California millionaire with two psychopathic daughters; he involves Marlowe in a case of blackmail that turns into murder.

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.

Lew Archer #18

The desert air is hot with sex and betrayal, death and madness and only Detective Lew Archer can make sense of a killer who makes murder a work of art.

Finding a purloined portrait of a leggy blonde was supposed to be an easy paycheck for Archer, but that was before the bodies began piling up. Suddenly, Archer find himself smack in the middle of a decades-long mystery of a brilliant artist who walked into the desert and simply disappeared. He left behind a bevy of muses, molls, dolls, and dames – each one scrambling for what they thought was rightfully theirs.

Lew Archer #11

Private detective Lew Archer has better things to do than take on an investigation for Alex Kincaid, a young man claiming that his new bride, Dolly, has gone missing. Snapped by a hotel photographer on the day of their wedding, the beautiful girl vanished only hours after and Alex has heard nothing since. But when Archer begins digging, he finds evidence that links Dolly to brutal murders that span two decades, and a terrible secret.

In this byzantine and compelling tale, Ross Macdonald explores the darkest experiences that can bind a family together – and tear it apart.

Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer mysteries rewrote the conventions of the detective novel with their credible, humane hero, and with Macdonald’s insight and moral complexity won new literary respectability for the hardboiled genre previously pioneered by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. They have also received praise from such celebrated writers as William Goldman, Jonathan Kellerman, Eudora Welty and Elmore Leonard.

Lew Archer #11

Private detective Lew Archer has better things to do than take on an investigation for Alex Kincaid, a young man claiming that his new bride, Dolly, has gone missing. Snapped by a hotel photographer on the day of their wedding, the beautiful girl vanished only hours after and Alex has heard nothing since. But when Archer begins digging, he finds evidence that links Dolly to brutal murders that span two decades, and a terrible secret.

In this byzantine and compelling tale, Ross Macdonald explores the darkest experiences that can bind a family together – and tear it apart.

Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer mysteries rewrote the conventions of the detective novel with their credible, humane hero, and with Macdonald’s insight and moral complexity won new literary respectability for the hardboiled genre previously pioneered by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. They have also received praise from such celebrated writers as William Goldman, Jonathan Kellerman, Eudora Welty and Elmore Leonard.

In a new short story available exclusively as an ebook, Jack Reacher’s spending the holidays in California. The last thing he expects is a blizzard – or a visit from the world’s deadliest assassin. On Christmas Eve, Jack Reacher stumbles into a no-name bar in the California desert, desperate to take refuge from an unexpected snowstorm. Reacher came to Barstow for a little R&R. Instead, he’s sequestered in a dark little roadhouse with a bartender, a bewildered elderly couple – and two members of Britain’s Royal Military Police. They tell Reacher they were escorting a VIP to a top-secret meeting at a U.S. military base when they became separated from their charge. That’s when the threat came in from a notorious assassin: the Christmas Scorpion. Now they need a miracle to save the day. Or maybe all they need is Jack Reacher.

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.”

The Continental Op made his debut in an October 1923 issue of Black Mask, making him one of the earliest hard-boiled private detective characters to appear in the pulp magazines of the early twentieth century.Short, thick-bodied, mulishly stubborn, and indifferent to pain, Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op was the prototype for generations of tough-guy detectives.

One of the Continental Op\'s most bizarre cases as he is faced with Miss Gabrielle Dain Leggett who has an unfortunate effect on the people around her: they die violently. FROM THE PUBLISHER The Continental Op is a short, squat, and utterly unsentimental tank of a private detective. Miss Gabrielle Dain Leggett is young, wealthy, and a devotee of morphine and religious cults. She has an unfortunate effect on the people around her: they have a habit of dying violently. Is Gabrielle the victim of a family curse? Or is the truth about her weirder and infinitely more dangerous? The Dain Curse is one of the Continental Op\'s most bizarre cases, and a tautly crafted masterpiece of suspense.

On the home front, two wartime lovers reunite under a cloud of paranoiaIn 1937 Munich, an American must be careful when he smokes his pipe. Robert Branch, a careless academic, makes the mistake of lighting up when the Füchrer is about to begin a procession, and nearly gets pummeled for his mistake. Only the timely intervention of Ruth Esch, a flame-haired actress, saves him. So begins a month-long romance between East and West – a torrid affair that ends when the lovers make the mistake of defending a Jew, earning Branch a beating and Esch a trip to a concentration camp. Six years later, Esch escapes to Vichy and makes her way to Detroit. To her surprise, Branch is waiting for her. He is a professor, working for the war effort, and his paranoia about a spy inside the Motor City War Board sours their reunion. Once again, a dangerous net is encircling these lovers – a reminder that, in this war, love always comes second to death.

In his first book in almost nine years, Mickey Spillane proves conclusively that he is still the unequalled master of the style he invented. The Deep has all the elements that made Spillane the bestselling mystery writer of all time: dramatic scenes, splashed with color; a masterful new protagonist; a beautiful and desirable girl; and all the action and violence Spillane’s most ardent fan could ask.Deep was back in town after a twenty-five year exile — to inherit an empire and avenge a death. He and Bennett had made the inheritance pact when they were kids — blood brothers in crime. They had known then that even New York was too small for them both to share, and so they had tossed a coin to determine who would stay and who would build his organization in another town. Deep had lost and gone.But now Bennett has lost — been murdered in his own home — and Deep is ready to prove lie is strong enough to take over. Deep wants Bennett’s killer; the others want Bennett’s job. And all too many of them — including the beautiful Irish — want Deep dead.The Deep is the mastermind in one of the most exciting stories Spillane has ever written — a breathtaking tale of violence in action.

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.

Johnny Jerome is a hard-nosed Private Detective in a city plagued with crime

and vice. When a simple missing person case suddenly escalates into a run in

with the local mob and a whole heap of trouble… And that’s when the vampires

show up…Classic noir/pulp/hard-boiled detective fiction with a paranormal twist.