Vintage Crime

"Double Indemnity is adapted from the James M. Cain novel by director Wilder and novelist Raymond Chandler, and tells the story of an insurance salesman, played by Fred MacMurray, who is lured into a murder-for-insurance plot by Barbara Stanwyck, in an archetypal femme fatale role. From its grim story to its dark, atmospheric lighting, Double Indemnity is a definitive example of World War II-era film noir. Wilder's approach is everywhere evident: in the brutal cynicism the film displays, the moral complexity, and in the empathy we feel for the killers. The film received almost unanimous critical success, garnering seven Academy Award nominations. More than fifty years later, most critics agree that this classic is one of the best films of all time. The collaboration between Wilder and Raymond Chandler produced a masterful script and some of the most memorable dialogue ever spoken in a movie.". "This facsimile edition of Double Indemnity contains Wilder and Chandler's original - and quite different - ending, published here for the first time. Jeffrey Meyers's introduction contextualizes the screenplay, providing hilarious anecdotes about the turbulent collaboration, as well as background information about Wilder and the film's casting and production."--BOOK JACKET.

One of Thompson's most outrageous works of fiction, the Golden Gizmo incorporates elements of the classic American tall tale with descriptions of the particularly hardboiled criminal underclass of 1950's L.A.. Toddy Kent is a hustler, seeking out sources of easy money in the most unlikely places thanks to a sixth-sense he has, known as a 'gizmo,' after the G.I. term for something unidentifiable. He does not know how it works; if he did than maybe he could prevent the inconvenient inconsistencies that often leave him high and dry at the worst times. A transient life leaves Toddy with an extensive rap sheet and a runaround wife, eventually landing him on the gray side of legal in LA county. Then, his gizmo strikes with a hunch he cannot ignore, leading him to an unknown source of gold. Of course it comes at a price to Toddy. His wife turns up dead--murdered--and he finds himself stalked by a chinless man with a talking doberman that sings hymns before it kills. Thomspon's portrayal of the incurable criminal who has no control over his situation goes from hilarious to horrifying. Through Toddy's attempts to understand his situation, the reader is lead through the strip joints, brothels and seedy bars of a different era, when L.A. was capital of the world of illusion.

Old Lincoln Fargo has spent his life engaging in almost every vice imaginable--and his only regret is that he once stole a horse. His son Grant, a shiftless dandy with a resemblance to Edgar Allan Poe, is conducting an affair with his voluptuous and volatile cousin. And behind everyone's back, Grandmother Pearl has just signed the family property over to the Almighty. In the literature of the American prairie, few families are as brawling, as benighted, or as outrageously vital as the Fargos of Verdon, Nebraska. And when Jim Thompson chronicles their life and times, the result suggest Willa Cather steeped in rotguut--and armed with a .45.

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.

In his characteristic style, Jim Thompson creates a world in which nothing is as it seems. With her stunning beauty and overwhelming charm, Manuela Aloe seemed like perfect girlfriend material, but when many strange things occur, Britt Rainstar begins to have second thoughts about his angelic--or demonic--love. If he can survive the attacks of a devil-possessed dog, a trigger-happy skeleton, and a mystery person who pushes his wheelchair down the stairs, then maybe Britt can escape Manuela and the evil that followers her.

Lou Ford is the deputy sheriff of a small town in Texas. The worst thing most people can say against him is that he's a little slow and a little boring. But, then, most people don't know about the sickness--the sickness that almost got Lou put away when he was younger. The sickness that is about to surface again.

Sometimes a man and woman love and hate each other in equal measure that they can neither stay together nor break apart. Some marriages can only end in murder and some murders only make the ties of love and hatred stronger. This book proves just that.

The Maltese Falcon is a gripping tale of greed, betrayal, and murder that redefined detective fiction. When hard-boiled private investigator Sam Spade takes on a case involving a missing partner and a mysterious femme fatale, he’s drawn into a deadly hunt for a priceless, jewel-encrusted falcon. As double-crosses mount and dangerous criminals close in, Spade must navigate a treacherous web of lies and deception. Packed with sharp dialogue, relentless suspense, and moral ambiguity, Dashiell Hammett’s noir masterpiece is a must-read for mystery lovers and crime fiction fans.

First class criminal Carl Bigelow has a difficult job ahead of him. How can he kill one-time hoodlum Jake Winroy without making it look like a hit? The man is about to turn evidence in to the authorities, threatening to bring the law down on the powerful crime syndicate that runs the city. Allowing Jake Winroy to live could be very bad for the career of Carl's Boss, not to mention several prominent but corrupt Long Island politicians. Luckily for Carl, Winroy's beautiful wife is bored with his drunken behavior and anxious to become a widow. It seems that she could easily be implicated in the plot by her eagerness to take up with Carl, the handsome young hoodlum.

In Chandler's final novel, Marlowe is hired by an influential lawyer he's never heard of to tail a gorgeous redhead, but decides he prefers to help out the redhead. She's been acquitted of her alcoholic husband's murder, but her father-in-law prefers not to take the court's word for it.

Outside the apartment where a wake is going on, the manager of the A & P across the street is robbed. Reverend Short, a storefront preacher addicted to opium and brandy, is watching from a bedroom window in the flat. He leans too far and falls out; a bread basket, sitting outside the bakery below, saves him. Back inside, he says he sees a vision of a dead man. Outside, in the very basket Short landed in, lies the body of Valentine Haines. Who murdered Val? It is up to Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson to find out.

Thompson's classic novel describes the underworld of desperate men that inhabited the part of Texas known as "South of Heaven" in the 1920's. Laying a gas pipeline with a motley work crew of hoboes, alcoholics, jail-birds and petty criminals, Tommy Burwell knows that he isn't doing himself any favors. But he cannot extricate himself from the cycle of violence and ruthlessness that ties him to the six-hundred other transients whose fate he shares.

Luane Devore's days are numbered. All her neighbors in the declining seaside resort town of Manduwoc want her dead. Some, like her young husband Ralph and his girlfriend Danny, want the thousands of dollars she keeps hidden under the mattress she spends her days resting on. Others want her to stop her malicious gossip--some of which could ruin lives.

A frightened and hurt woman appears at the door of an isolated house where she is taken in. Other strangers come looking for her with an aura of violence.

"From the start, nothing goes right for Coffin Ed and Grave Digger Jones. They are disciplined for use of excessive force. Grave Digger is shot and his death announced in a hoax radio bulletin. Bodies pile up faster than Coffin Ed and Grave Digger Jones can run."--Back cover.

Roughneck is pulp noir master Jim Thompson's quasi-autobiography of the wandering wild days of one of America's wildest wandering authors. Follow Thompson through the Great Depression, his young adulthood, marriage and family but with the apocryphal dark wit that is his trademark. He goes from riding the rails in the 30's to getting drunk while working in a morgue only to move on to odd jobs as a baker, a collector, even as a writer of labor history for the W.P.A. Absurd scenarios swirl around this man like the savage dust storms sweeping over the dried out prairie states he traveled. He tries to write the Great American Novel with the help of a prostitute with a heart of gold, hustles deadbeats, has bull sessions with bunglers and bagmen, con men and corpses. He'll take you through a tour of all the lowlife characters America has to offer. These are the people that make his fiction so real and vibrant. Roughneck is a brilliant tell-all, a sharp character study, and a unique look into the life of a true American original. Thompson may even be the best character in his long career of creating supremely rich characters. Thompson's life in Thompson's own words is as frightening and humorous a memoir as they come.

Dr. Peter S. Murphy runs a clinic to cure alcoholics. But his charges believe that the only thing that will fix them is another drink. To this bitter struggle of wills, add an orderly who doubles as a quack practitioner, a nurse who is both alluring and ingeniously sadistic, and a misplaced patient whose main problem is his lack of a frontal lobe, and the result is one of Jim Thompson's most harrowingly funny yet deeply sympathetic novels.

"New York is sweltering in the summer heat, and Harlem is close to the boiling point. To Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones, at times it seems as if the whole world has gone mad. Trying, as always, to keep some kind of peace, their legendary nickel-plated Colts very much in evidence, Coffin Ed and Grave Digger find themselves pursuing two completely different cases through a maze of knifings, beatings, and riots that threaten to tear Harlem apart."--Back cover.

Clinton Brown is smart, good-looking, and the best rewrite man on the Pacific City Courier. The wife he divorced is still in love with him, as is the alluring and well-heeled widow who will do anything to make him happy. But Brown is missing something, and without that one thing there's no possibility of happiness--no possibility of anything but knocking back the booze and punishing anyone foolish enough to try to take away his loneliness. What Clinton Brown lacks may be enough to make him murder.

Mitch Corley has a girlfriend with expensive tastes and a ruthless wife who refuses to become an "ex" without major compensation. He needs big money and he needs it fast. Which makes Texas Mitch's natural destination, since nowhere are rich men more inclined to stake huge sums on a roll of the dice. The only problem is that Texans are sore losers--and they have cruel and ingenious ways of getting back at anyone who cheats them.