The iconic first novel from crime fiction master Raymond Chandler, featuring Philip Marlowe, the "quintessential urban private eye" (Los Angeles Times).
A dying millionaire hires private eye Philip Marlowe to handle the blackmailer of one of his two... More details on The Big Sleep
IT WAS ABOUT ELEVEN O’CLOCK in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt...
In Dashiell Hammett's famous crime novel, we meet one of the detective-story master's most enchanting creations, Nick and Nora Charles, a rich, glamorous couple who solve homicides in between wisecracks and martinis. At once knowing and unabashedly r... More details on The Thin Man
1 I was leaning against the bar in a speakeasy on Fifty-second Street, waiting for Nora to finish her Christmas shopping, when a girl got up from the table where she had been sitting with three other ...
Detective-story master Dashiell Hammett gives us yet another unforgettable read in Red Harvest: When the last honest citizen of Poisonville was murdered, the Continental Op stayed on to punish the guilty-even if that meant taking on an entire town. R... More details on Red Harvest
I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte. He also called his shirt a shoit. I didn’t think anything of what he had done to the ci...
An amoral young tramp. A beautiful, sullen woman with an inconvenient husband. A problem that has only one grisly solution-a solution that only creates other problems that no one can ever solve.
First published in 1934 and banned in Boston for its ex... More details on The Postman Always Rings Twice
They threw me off the hay truck about noon. I had swung on the night before, down at the border, and as soon as I got up there under the canvas, I went to sleep. I needed plenty of that, after three w...
Short, thick-bodied, mulishly stubborn, and indifferent to pain, Dashiell Hammett's Continetal Op was the prototype for generations of tough-guy detectives. In these stories the Op unravels a murder with too many clues, looks for a girl with eyes the... More details on The Continental Op
Crime fiction master Raymond Chandler's sixth novel featuring Philip Marlowe, the "quintessential urban private eye" (Los Angeles Times).
In noir master Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye, Philip Marlowe befriends a down on his luck war veteran wit... More details on The Long Goodbye
The first time I laid eyes on Terry Lennox he was drunk in a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith outside the terrace of The Dancers. The parking lot attendant had brought the car out and he was still holding th...
James M. Cain, virtuoso of the roman noir, gives us a tautly narrated and excruciatingly suspenseful story in Double Indemnity, an X-ray view of guilt, of duplicity, and of the kind of obsessive, loveless love that devastates everything it touches. ... More details on Double Indemnity
I drove out to Glendale to put three new truck drivers on a brewery company bond, and then I remembered this renewal over in Hollywoodland. I decided to run over there. That was how I came to this Hou...
Crime fiction master Raymond Chandler's second novel featuring Philip Marlowe, the "quintessential urban private eye" (Los Angeles Times).
Philip Marlowe's about to give up on a completely routine case when he finds himself in the wrong place at the... More details on Farewell, My Lovely
IT WAS ONE OF THE MIXED BLOCKS over on Central Avenue, the blocks that are not yet all Negro. I had just come out of a three-chair barber shop where an agency thought a relief barber named Dimitrios A...
Dashiell Hammett virtually invented the hardboiled crime novel, and his creation 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... More details on The Dain Curse
It was a diamond all right, shining in the grass half a dozen feet from the blue brick wall. It was small, not more than a quarter of a carat in weight, and unmounted. I put it in my pocket and began ...
As any herpetologist will tell you, the fer-de-lance is among the most dreaded snakes known to man. When someone makes a present of one to Nero Wolfe, Archie Goodwin knows he's getting dreadully close to solving the devilishly clever murders of an im... More details on Fer-de-Lance
There was no reason why I shouldn’t have been sent for the beer that day, for the last ends of the Fairmont National Bank case had been gathered in the week before and there was nothing for me to do b...