Download or read book Classic American Crime Fiction of the 1920s written by Leslie S Klinger and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2018-10-02 with total page 524 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Classic American Crime Writing of the 1920s—including House Without a Key, The Benson Murder Case, The Tower Treasure, The Roman Hat Mystery, The Tower Treasure, and Little Caesar—offers some of the very best of that decade’s writing. Earl Derr Biggers wrote about Charlie Chan, a Chinese-American detective, at a time when racism was rampant. S. S. Van Dine invented Philo Vance, an effete, rich amateur psychologist who flourished while America danced and the stock market rose. Edwin Stratemeyer, a man of mystery himself, singlehandedly created the juvenile mystery, with the beloved Hardy Boys series. The quintessential American detective Ellery Queen leapt onto the stage, to remain popular for fifty years. W. R. Burnett, created the indelible character of Rico, the first gangster antihero. Each of the five novels included is presented in its original published form, with extensive historical and cultural annotations and illustrations added by Edgar-winning editor Leslie S. Klinger, allowing the reader to experience the story to its fullest. Klinger's detailed foreword gives an overview of the history of American crime writing from its beginnings in the early years of America to the twentieth century.
Download or read book The American Roman Noir written by William Marling and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 1998-10-01 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The American Roman Noir, William Marling reads classic hard-boiled fiction and film in the contexts of narrative theories and American social and cultural history. His search for the origins of the dark narratives that emerged during the 1920s and 1930s leads to a sweeping critique of Jazz-Age and Depression-era culture. Integrating economic history, biography, consumer product design, narrative analysis, and film scholarship, Marling makes new connections between events of the 1920s and 1930s and the modes, styles, and genres of their representation. At the center of Marling's approach is the concept of "prodigality": how narrative represents having, and having had, too much. Never before in the country, he argues, did wealth impinge on the national conscience as in the 1920s, and never was such conscience so sharply rebuked as in the 1930s. What, asks Marling, were the paradigms that explained accumulation and windfall, waste and failure? Marling first establishes a theoretical and historical context for the notion of prodigality. Among the topics he discusses are such watershed events as the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti and the premiere of the first sound movie, The Jazz Singer; technology's alteration of Americans' perceptive and figurative habits; and the shift from synecdochical to metonymical values entailed by a consumer society. Marling then considers six noir classics, relating them to their authors' own lives and to the milieu of prodigality that produced them and which they sought to explain: Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest and The Maltese Falcon, James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity, and Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep and Farewell My Lovely. Reading these narratives first as novels, then as films, Marling shows how they employed the prodigality fabula's variations and ancillary value systems to help Americans adapt--for better or worse--to a society driven by economic and technological forces beyond their control.
Download or read book The Best Crime Stories Ever Told written by Dorothy L. Sayers and published by Skyhorse Publishing Inc.. This book was released on 2012-09 with total page 577 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Compiles detective, mystery, and horror stories by such famous authors as Stephen Crane, Herman Melville, and Edgar Allan Poe.
Download or read book The Roman Hat Mystery written by Ellery Queen and published by . This book was released on 1977 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Great Gatsby written by F. Scott Fitzgerald and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 2023-10-04 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reproduction of the original. The publishing house Megali specialises in reproducing historical works in large print to make reading easier for people with impaired vision.
Download or read book The House Without a Key written by Earl Derr Biggers and published by BoD - Books on Demand. This book was released on 2022-08-03 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The novel, which takes place in the 1920s Hawaii, spends time acquainting the reader with the look and feel of the islands of that era from the standpoint of both white and non-white inhabitants, and describes social class structures and customs which have largely vanished in the 21st century. The novel deals with the murder of a former member of Boston society who has lived in Hawaii for a number of years. The main character is the victim's nephew, a straitlaced young Bostonian bond trader, who came to the islands to try to convince his aunt Minerva, whose vacation has extended many months, to return to Boston. The nephew, John Quincy Winterslip, soon falls under the spell of the islands himself, meets an attractive young woman, breaks his engagement to his straitlaced Bostonian fiancee Agatha, and decides after the murder is solved to move to San Francisco. In the interval, he is introduced to many levels of Hawaiian society and is of some assistance to Detective Charlie Chan in solving the mystery.
Download or read book The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps written by Otto Penzler and published by Vintage Crime/Black Lizard. This book was released on 2008-12-24 with total page 1170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 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.
Download or read book The So Blue Marble written by Dorothy B. Hughes and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2013-06-18 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A “delightful . . . nonstop action” thriller from the author of In a Lonely Place—“readers new to this forgotten classic are in for a treat” (Publishers Weekly). At the age of twenty-four, Griselda Satterlee has already lived two lifetimes. A star of the silver screen, she gives up Hollywood after a year, and moves to New York to become a designer. While her ex-husband, Con, is out of town, she is staying in his apartment. Walking back one night, she meets two cheerful young men who want to go home with her—and won’t take no for an answer. David and Danny are twins, and they are the most beautiful men Griselda has ever seen. They are also the most dangerous. They want something from her: a lustrous blue marble, which they insist is in Con’s apartment. Though they leave without hurting her, Griselda knows that next time, they won’t be so amiable. To save herself, she must discover the secret of the marble—a secret with death at its core.
Download or read book An American Tragedy written by Theodore Dreiser and published by e-artnow. This book was released on 2018-06-17 with total page 896 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ambitious, but ill-educated, naïve, and immature, Clyde Griffiths is raised by poor and devoutly religious parents to help in their street missionary work. As a young adult, Clyde must, to help support his family, take menial jobs as a soda jerk, then a bellhop at a prestigious Kansas City hotel. There, his more sophisticated colleagues introduce him to bouts of social drinking and sex with prostitutes. Enjoying his new lifestyle, Clyde becomes infatuated with manipulative Hortense Briggs, who takes advantage of him. After being in a car accident in which a young girl loses her life, Clyde is forced to run away from the town in search for the new life.
Download or read book The House Without a Key written by Earl Derr Biggers and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2018-07-02 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The House Without a Key Earl Derr Biggers The novel, which takes place in 1920s Hawaii, spends time acquainting the reader with the look and feel of the islands of that era from the standpoint of both white and non-white inhabitants, and describes social class structures and customs which have largely vanished in the 21st century. The novel deals with the murder of a former member of Boston society who has lived in Hawaii for a number of years. The main character is the victim's nephew, a straitlaced young Bostonian bond trader, who came to the islands to try to convince his aunt Minerva, whose vacation has extended many months, to return to Boston. The nephew, John Quincy Winterslip, soon falls under the spell of the islands himself, meets an attractive young woman, breaks his engagement to his straitlaced Bostonian fiancee Agatha, and decides after the murder is solved to move to San Francisco. In the interval, he is introduced to many levels of Hawaiian society and is of some assistance to Detective Charlie Chan in solving the mystery. We are delighted to publish this classic book as part of our extensive Classic Library collection. Many of the books in our collection have been out of print for decades, and therefore have not been accessible to the general public. The aim of our publishing program is to facilitate rapid access to this vast reservoir of literature, and our view is that this is a significant literary work, which deserves to be brought back into print after many decades. The contents of the vast majority of titles in the Classic Library have been scanned from the original works. To ensure a high quality product, each title has been meticulously hand curated by our staff. Our philosophy has been guided by a desire to provide the reader with a book that is as close as possible to ownership of the original work. We hope that you will enjoy this wonderful classic work, and that for you it becomes an enriching experience.
Download or read book Room to Swing written by Ed Lacy and published by Sourcebooks, Inc.. This book was released on 2022-10-04 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This 1958 Edgar Award winner for best novel from Lacy (1911–1968) masterfully combines a classic genre trope with a powerful depiction of the impact of racism in 1950s America."— Publishers Weekly, Starred Review "Though private investigators were the most popular figures in crime writing, especially in the work of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Ellery Queen, and Rex Stout, no one had created a Black hard-boiled private eye in a noir setting until Ed Lacy's Room to Swing."—Leslie Klinger, from Introduction College-educated and decorated war-veteran Toussaint Moore, finds that his employment options are limited as a Black man in 1950s America. With little choice, he seeks out a living as a private eye, serving Black clients in his hometown of Harlem. When hired by the television producers of a reality show called "You—Detective!" Touie must keep tabs on the whereabouts of an accused child molester. While waiting for the episode to air, Touie finds the man murdered and becomes the prime suspect in the investigation. Forced to flee, he goes to a small Ohio town where the deceased was wanted for his crime. "Lacy asks whether a Black man (in the late fifties) can go everywhere he needs to, with the freedom his job requires, in order to conduct the investigation necessary to crack a case."—Criminal Element
Download or read book 100 American Crime Writers written by S. Powell and published by Springer. This book was released on 2012-08-07 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 100 American Crime Writers features discussion and analysis of the lives of crime writers and their key works, examining the developments in American crime writing from the Golden Age to hardboiled detective fiction. This study is essential to scholars and an ideal introduction to crime fiction for anyone who enjoys this fascinating genre.
Download or read book The Big Book of Pulps written by Otto Penzler and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 1150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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. Featuring:- Three stories each by Raymond Chandler, Cornell Woolrich, Erle Stanley Gardner and Dashiell Hammett.- Plenty of reasons for murder, all of them good.- A never-before-published Dashiell Hammett story.- Why you should never buy a strange blonde a hamburger- Complete novels from Carroll John Daly, the man who invented the hard-boiled detective and Frederick Nebel, one of the masters of the form.- 3lbs of Pulp in three lethal installments: The Crimefighters, The Villains, and The Dames and three unstoppable introductions by Harlan Coben, Harlan Ellison and Laura Lippman.
Download or read book Gothic Classics The Castle of Otranto and The Old English Baron written by Horace Walpole and published by Sourcebooks, Inc.. This book was released on 2022-01-11 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Manfred, the lord of the castle of Otranto, has long lived in dread of an ancient prophecy: it's foretold that when his family line ends, the true owner of the castle will appear and claim it. In a desperate bid to keep the castle, Manfred plans to coerce a young woman named Isabella into marrying him. Isabella refuses to yield to Manfred's reprehensible plan. But once she escapes into the depths of the castle, it becomes clear that Manfred isn't the only threat. As Isabelle loses herself in the seemingly endless hallways below, voices reverberate from the walls and specters wander through the dungeons. Otranto appears to be alive, and it's seeking revenge for the sins of the past.
Download or read book The Call of Cthulhu And Other Stories written by H.P. Lovecraft and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2022-02-22 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essential literary collection of H. P. Lovecraft’s ten finest short stories, from the celebrated editor of the two-volume New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft. An indispensable collection of the best of one of literature’s “most critically fascinating and yet enigmatic figures” (Alan Moore), featuring H. P. Lovecraft’s most bone-chilling tales, including: “Dagon”, “The Outsider”, “The Music of Erich Zann”, “The Rats in the Walls”, “The Call of Cthulhu", “The Colour Out of Space”, “The Dunwich Horror”, “The Shadow over Innsmouth”, “The Shadow Out of Time” and “The Haunter of the Dark”. Though he died an unknown, dejected pulp-magazine writer in 1937, Howard Phillips Lovecraft is now considered the first great “genius of weird fiction” (Peter Straub). There is no better guide through the peculiarities of his universe than Leslie S. Klinger, whose work as annotator of the “exciting and definitive” (Danielle Trussoni, New York Times Book Review) New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft has proven him a leading Lovecraft scholar. Keenly aware of the author’s inspiration of “dozens—hundreds—of stories written by others playing in [his] galactic sandbox,” Klinger now presents this essential reader’s edition for both fanatics and newcomers to the canon. Equipped with explanatory annotations and sharp historical insight, this highly accessible?collection features Lovecraft’s ten most profound and unnerving short stories. From the early tale “Dagon” to the mature and sprawling “The Haunter of the Dark,” these expertly curated stories built a Lovecraftian sense of dread that has reverberated in the world of horror literature for generations: that all of us are “outsiders” in the universe.
Download or read book British Murder Mysteries 1880 1965 written by Laura E. Nym Mayhall and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-08-09 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: British Murder Mysteries, 1880-1965: Facts and Fictions conceptualizes detective fiction as an archive, i.e., a trove of documents and sources to be used for historical interpretation. By framing the genre as a shifting set of values, definitions, and practices, the book historicizes the contested meanings of analytical categories like class, race, gender, nation, and empire that have been applied to the forms and functions of detection. Three organizing themes structure this investigation: fictive facticity, genre fluidity, and conservative modernity. This volume thus shows how British detective fiction from the late-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century both shaped and was shaped by its social, cultural, and political contexts and the lived experience of its authors and readers at critical moments in time.
Download or read book Nobody written by Louis Joseph Vance and published by Good Press. This book was released on 2019-12-06 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Nobody" by Louis Joseph Vance is as adventure novel that takes readers on a high-stakes journey full of crime and chaos. A burglary that doesn't go according to plan, aliases, fraud, false witnesses, and a Machiavellian plot to do whatever it takes to make things turn out alright, in the end, are just some of the themes that continue to make this tale an exciting and action-packed romp for readers.
