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

Nothing. That’s what his life was. No job. No money. No girl. He grubbed handouts, shot pool, and swilled cheap whiskey. The days stretched out, gray and unending, filled with the ache of desires dammed up. And then he met her. She came to him out of the bitter cold and rot of the narrow streets, rich and warm and willing. And suddenly there she was in his arms, a no-good tramp who tore his life apart and gave him— EVERYTHING

When racketeer Jimmie Renzelli was found bumped off in an alley, the murder wasn’t as simple to solve as it looked!

Once in a while on Vernon Street, that blind alley of tired sin and lost hopes, someone reaches for the moon. Like Kerrigan, the stevedore, the old-young man with the strength of three and the secret dreams of a life away from the hell of Vernon Street. He met Loretta Channing, the slummer, the girl who drove an MG down Kerrigan's street. They fell in love and they would have been all right, except for Vernon Street. It stood between them, this crooked length of scarred, cracked asphalt — an abyss that held them worlds apart

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