A riveting classic of American crime fiction

It’s the story of Ben Grace, a small-time chiseler in the rackets – not crooked, not straight, just in between – who, full of grievances, makes the most of his inside information as Sol Caspar’s chauffeur to aid and abet the opposing party’s upcoming mayoral election campaign. His ally (and soon-to-be lover) in the enemy camp is a very good-looking girl named June Lyons, who is also very dedicated to justice. It sounds predictable, but it Cain’s hands, it’s anything but. It may seem strange to say, but works of fiction are usually less complicated than the real world, as who would believe the twists and turns that real life can have? But when you think the story’s going one way, Cain heads it off in another. Or, perhaps, he lets it go off in another, on its own, as if he set the characters up, and then he let them find their own destiny, their own fate. Which, of course, they do

Four years after his sensational first novel, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Mr. Cain appears with a new one which definitely places him among the best story-tellers in America. The emphasis is hereby put upon the word story, for that, above everything else, is what this book is. It is an account of the lives of two men and one woman and of their relations with each other, which begins in a moment of tenseness and passion and moves forward with amazing speed, in the clipped and biting prose that Cain has made his own, to still greater heights — to emotion so taut that it must break in violence. The story is set in Mexico, Hollywood, and New York — a simple, primitive scene on the one hand, a brilliant, sophisticated one on the other. There are tenderness and beauty in the book, and also murder and vice. The arts of the film, the opera, and the bullfight are in it, and an incredible understanding of the strange nature of the human animal. But above all, a story is in it — a story full of fury and terror and love, which once begun must be finished and once read will be remembered

Best remembered for his sensational bestselling novels of the 1930s, James M. Cain may well be one of the most important, yet still misunderstood, of American authors. Among other writers and for certain critics, his reputation and singularity are unquestioned, resting on an extraordinary force of style and view of the human condition that have influenced a host of modern authors. Cain’s unique voice — hard-edged, caustically ironic, and impeccably controlled — was in fact forged through an extensive journalistic training and remains best exemplified in the compressed power of his short fiction. Here then, timed with a major revival of interest in Cain’s work, is the first book to collect the best of his shorter work — selected short stories and sketches together with one of his finest serials, the novella published at different times under the titles “Money and the Woman” and “The Embezzler.” As taut and brilliant in its way as Cain’s most famous serial, Double Indemnity, this ingenious example of Cain’s “love rack” fiction has been out of print for many years, but reads as immediately today as when first written more than three decades ago. Equally fascinating, especially when seen within Roy Hoopes’s tracings of the development of Cain’s work, are the entertaining sketches and dialogues Cain originally wrote for journalistic publication — beautiful models of efficiency and concision stamped with Cain’s characteristic irony. We are given ten of his best, out of hundreds he wrote for the New York World and H. L. Mencken’s American Mercury. Together with nine of his finest short stories — including those three Cain classics, “Pastorale,” “The Baby in the Icebox,” and “Dead Man” — this volume comprises both an ideal introduction to the work of this remarkable American author and a mandatory book for all James M. Cain fans

In his introduction to the The Best American Noir of the Century, James Ellroy writes, 'noir is the most scrutinized offshoot of the hard-boiled school of fiction. It's the long drop off the short pier and the wrong man and the wrong woman in perfect misalliance. It's the nightmare of flawed souls with big dreams and the precise how and why of the all-time sure thing that goes bad.' Offering the best examples of literary sure things gone bad, this collection ensures that nowhere else can readers find a darker, more thorough distillation of American noir fiction. James Ellroy and Otto Penzler, series editor of the annual The Best American Mystery Stories, mined one hundred years of writing - 1910-2010 - to find this treasure trove of thirty-nine stories. From noir's twenties-era infancy come gems like James M. Cain's 'Pastorale,' and its post-war heyday boasts giants like Mickey Spillane and Evan Hunter. Packing an undeniable punch, diverse contemporary incarnations include Elmore Leonard, Patricia Highsmith, Joyce Carol Oates, Dennis Lehane, and William Gay, with many page-turners appearing in the last decade

It is the story of a farmer, and of the daughter who came back to him years after he had almost forgotten her, and of the wife who had deserted him. and of the man who had stolen his wife. It is, inevitably, swiftly paced, suffused with passion, knife-like in its descriptive power. Around the astonishing quadrangle of this talc swirl contrasting moods of brutality and tenderness with ever- increasing violence right up to the dramatic end

Professor Lloyd Palmer loves a good biography. His fantasy is to start an institute to teach young scholars the biographical arts, and it will take old money to make his dreams come true. Around Washington, the oldest money is found not in the District, but in Delaware, a land of wealth so astonishing that even the Du Ponts are considered nouveau riche. But when the professor goes to Wilmington, he comes away not with old money, but young trouble. Her name is Hortense Garrett. She is his benefactor’s wife, a twenty-something beauty trapped in an unhappy marriage, whose good looks conceal the most cunning mind this side of the Potomac. She needs a ride to Washington, and Lloyd offers to give her a lift. They’ve barely left Delaware before he falls for her. By the time they hit the Beltway, his biography will be in her hands

In The Magician's Wife, Cain returns to his classic themes of lust and greed. Clay Lockwood, a business executive, falls in love with the irresistible Sally Alexis, wife of a professional magician

Pulp fiction has been looked down on as a guilty pleasure, but it offers the perfect form of entertainment: the very best storytelling filled with action, surprises, sound and fury. In short, all the exhiliration of a roller-coaster ride. The 1920s in America saw the proliferation of hundreds of dubiously named but thrillingly entertaining pulp magazines in America: Black Mask, Amazing, Astounding, Spicy Stories, Ace-High, Detective Magazine, Dare-Devil Aces. It was in these luridly-coloured publications, printed on the cheapest pulp paper, that the first gems began to appear. The one golden rule for writers of pulp fiction was to adhere to the art of storytelling. Each story had to have a beginning, an end, economically-etched characters, but plenty going on, both in terms of action and emotions. Pulp magazines were the TV of their day, plucking readers from drab lives and planting them firmly in thrilling make-believe, successors

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