Download or read book Crime Novels Four Classic Thrillers 1964 1969 LOA 371 written by Margaret Millar and published by Library of America. This book was released on 2023-09-12 with total page 847 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 1960s the masters of crime fiction expanded the genre’s literary and psychological possibilities with audacious new themes, forms, and subject matter—here are four of their finest works This is the second of two volumes gathering the best American crime fiction of the 1960s, nine novels of astonishing variety and inventiveness that pulse with the energies of that turbulent, transformative decade. In Margaret Millar’s The Fiend (1964) a nine-year-old girl disappears and a local sex offender comes under suspicion. So begins a suspenseful investigation of an apparently tranquil California suburb which will expose a hidden tangle of fear and animosity, jealousy and desperation. Ed McBain (a pen name of Evan Hunter) pioneered the multi-protagonist police procedural in his long-running series of 87th Precinct novels, set in a parallel Manhattan called Isola. Doll (1965) opens at a pitch of extreme violence and careens with breakneck speed through a tale that mixes murder, drugs, the modeling business, and psychotherapy with the everyday professionalism of McBain’s harried cops. The racial paranoia of a drunken police detective in Run Man Run (1966) leads to a double murder and the relentless pursuit of the young Black college student who witnessed it. In Chester Himes’s breathless narrative, New York City is a place with no safe havens for a fugitive whom no one wants to believe. In Patricia Highsmith’s The Tremor of Forgery (1969) a man whose personality is disintegrating is writing a book called The Tremor of Forgery about a man whose personality is disintegrating, “like a mountain collapsing from within.” Stranded unexpectedly in Tunisia, Howard Ingham struggles to hold on to himself in a strange locale, while a slightly damaged typewriter may be the only trace of a killing committed almost by accident. Volume features include an introduction by editor Geoffrey O'Brien (Hardboiled America), newly researched biographies of the writers and helpful notes, and an essay on textual selection.
Download or read book Crime Novels of the 1960s Crime novels four classic thrillers 1964 1969 written by Geoffrey O'Brien and published by . This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The masters of 1960s crime fiction expanded the genre's literary and psychological possibilities with audacious new themes, forms, and subject matter. [Volume 1]: Fredric Brown's The murderers, a darkly comic look at a murderous plot hatched on the hip fringes of Hollywood; Dan J. Marlowe's terrifying The name of the game is death, about a nihilistic career criminal on the run; Charles Williams's Dead calm, a masterful novel of natural peril and human evil on the high seas; Dorothy B. Hughes's The expendable man, an unsettling tale of racism and wrongful accusation in the American Southwest; and Richard Stark's taut The score, in which the master thief Parker plans the looting of an entire city with the cool precision of an expert mechanic; [Volume 2]: The fiend, in which Margaret Millar maps the interlocking anxieties of a seemingly tranquil California suburb through the rippling effects of a child's disappearance; Ed McBain's classic police procedural Doll, a story that mixes murder, drugs, fashion models, and psychotherapy with the everyday professionalism of the 87th Precinct; Run man run, Chester Himes's nightmarish tale of racism and police violence that follows a desperate young man seeking safe haven in New York City while being hunted by the law; and Patricia Highsmith's ultimate meta-thriller, The tremor of forgery, a novel in which a displaced traveler finds his own personality collapsing as he attempts to write a novel about a man coming undone." -- From back covers.
Download or read book Crime Novels Five Classic Thrillers 1961 1964 LOA 370 written by Fredric Brown and published by Library of America. This book was released on 2023-09-12 with total page 867 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 1960s the masters of crime fiction expanded the genre’s literary and psychological possibilities with audacious new themes, forms, and subject matter—here are five of their finest works This is the first of two volumes gathering the best American crime fiction of the 1960s, nine novels of astonishing variety and inventiveness that pulse with the energies of that turbulent, transformative decade. In The Murderers (1961) by Fredric Brown, an out-of-work actor, hanging out with Beat drifters on the fringes of Hollywood, concocts a murder scheme that devolves into nightmare. This late work by a master in many genres is one of his darkest and most ingenious. Dan J. Marlowe’s The Name of the Game Is Death (1962) channels the inner life of a violent criminal who freely acknowledges the truth of a prison psychiatrist’s diagnosis: “Your values are not civilized values.” Written with unnerving emotional authenticity, the story hurtles toward an annihilating climax. Charles Williams drew on his experience in the merchant marine for his thriller Dead Calm (1963). A newlywed couple alone on a small yacht find themselves at the mercy of the mysterious survivor they have rescued from a sinking ship, in a suspenseful story that chillingly evokes the perils of the open ocean. In the beautifully told and sharply observant The Expendable Man (1963), Dorothy B. Hughes’s final masterpiece of suspense, a young man in the American Southwest runs afoul of racial assumptions after he picks up a hitchhiker who soon turns up dead. In twenty-four brilliantly constructed novels, Richard Stark (a pen name of Donald Westlake) charted the career of Parker, a hard-nosed professional thief, with rigorous clarity. The Score (1964), a stand-out in the series, finds Parker and his criminal associates hatching a plot to rob simultaneously all the jewelry stores, payroll offices, and banks in a remote Western mining town, only to come up against the human limits of even the most intricate planning. Volume features include an introduction by editor Geoffrey O'Brien (Hardboiled America), newly researched biographies of the writers and helpful notes, and an essay on textual selection.
Download or read book Crime Novels of the 1960s Crime novels five classic thrillers 1961 1964 written by Geoffrey O'Brien and published by . This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The masters of 1960s crime fiction expanded the genre's literary and psychological possibilities with audacious new themes, forms, and subject matter. [Volume 1]: Fredric Brown's The murderers, a darkly comic look at a murderous plot hatched on the hip fringes of Hollywood; Dan J. Marlowe's terrifying The name of the game is death, about a nihilistic career criminal on the run; Charles Williams's Dead calm, a masterful novel of natural peril and human evil on the high seas; Dorothy B. Hughes's The expendable man, an unsettling tale of racism and wrongful accusation in the American Southwest; and Richard Stark's taut The score, in which the master thief Parker plans the looting of an entire city with the cool precision of an expert mechanic; [Volume 2]: The fiend, in which Margaret Millar maps the interlocking anxieties of a seemingly tranquil California suburb through the rippling effects of a child's disappearance; Ed McBain's classic police procedural Doll, a story that mixes murder, drugs, fashion models, and psychotherapy with the everyday professionalism of the 87th Precinct; Run man run, Chester Himes's nightmarish tale of racism and police violence that follows a desperate young man seeking safe haven in New York City while being hunted by the law; and Patricia Highsmith's ultimate meta-thriller, The tremor of forgery, a novel in which a displaced traveler finds his own personality collapsing as he attempts to write a novel about a man coming undone." -- From back covers.
Download or read book Patricia Highsmith Selected Novels and Short Stories written by Patricia Highsmith and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2011 with total page 664 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The remarkable renaissance of Patricia Highsmith ("Strangers on a Train, The Talented Mr. Ripley") continues with the publication of "The Highsmith Reader," featuring two groundbreaking novels as well as a trove of penetrating short stories.
Download or read book Run Man Run written by Chester Himes and published by Vintage Crime/Black Lizard. This book was released on 2024-10-08 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this knockout standalone crime novel from the acclaimed author of the Harlem Detectives series, a white cop’s murderous outburst leads to a pulse-pounding chase to silence a witness A few days after Christmas, a white cop in New York is as drunk as he’s ever been. And he’s convinced his car has been stolen. He believes the thieves are the Black workers at a luncheonette on 37th and Fifth avenue, and when he staggers in, his .32 caliber goes off. But who would believe it was an accident? Now, two men are dead, and a witness has gotten away. What follows is a heart-stopping chase of epic proportions. A master of tension and a deft chronicler of racism in post-war America, Himes delivers here one of his most compelling, dramatic novels of suspense.
Download or read book Deep Water written by Patricia Highsmith and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2003-06-24 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The great revival of interest in Highsmith continues with "Deep Water, " set in the small town of Little Wesley. Vic and Melinda's loveless marriage is held together only by Melinda's extramarital affairs. Eventually, Vic tries to win her back by asserting himself through a tall tale of murder--one that soon comes true.
Download or read book The Postman Always Rings Twice Special Edition written by James M. Cain and published by Vintage Crime/Black Lizard. This book was released on 2022-08-09 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A special edition of The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain. Featuring an introduction by James Ellroy. When Frank, an amoral young drifter, gets thrown off a hay truck in the California desert, he ends up at a diner run by Cora and her inconvenient husband, Nick. This chance meeting puts them all on a sure path to perdition. First published in 1934 and banned in Boston for its explosive mixture of violence and eroticism, The Postman Always Rings Twice is a classic of the roman noir. It established James M. Cain as a major novelist with an unsparing vision of America's bleak underside and was acknowledged by Albert Camus as the model for The Stranger. A Vintage Crime/Black Lizard Special Edition
Download or read book Jane Bowles Collected Writings LOA 288 written by Jane Bowles and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2017-01-31 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For her centenary (February 22, 2017), the most complete edition ever published of the brilliant modernist writings and evocative letters of an LGBT pioneer. Though Jane Bowles published only one novel, one play, and a handful of stories, her genius for spare prose and vivid dialogue had an outsized influence on her contemporaries. Tennessee Williams called her "the most important writer of prose fiction in modern American letters"; for John Ashbery she was "one of the finest modern writers of fiction in any language." Now, on the occasion of her centenary, Library of America presents the most complete edition ever published of Bowles's incomparable fiction, along with an extensive selection of her frank, vivid, and funny letters. Two Serious Ladies (1943), based partly on her honeymoon in Mexico with her husband, the writer and composer Paul Bowles, follows two bourgeois American women in Panama as they jettison sexual and cultural norms in search of happiness: Christina Goering, a wealthy spinster who becomes a high-class prostitute; and newlywed Frieda Copperfield, who finds love and comfort in the arms of a young Panamanian girl. In The Summer House (1954), a play about two mothers, one selfish and ruthless, despising her dreamy daughter, the other gentle, dominated by her strong-minded daughter, was performed on Broadway in 1953 and reflects Bowles's complicated relationship with her own mother. The volume also includes five short stories, two song lyrics, a puppet play, and the nonfiction sketch "East Side: North Africa." (Paul Bowles's rewrite of "East Side: North Africa," published in 1966, under Jane's name, as the short story "Everything Is Nice," is also included as an appendix), as well as fragments from two abandoned novels, a section of Two Serious Ladies cut from an earlier draft, four abandoned stories, one unfinished play, and one autobiographical fragment. Rounding out the volume are 133 letters, including candid portraits of such friends and acquaintances as John Ashbery, William Burroughs, Ira Gershwin, Allen Ginsberg, Carson McCullers, Sylvia Plath, Paul Robeson, Susan Sontag, Gertrude Stein, Gore Vidal, Eudora Welty, and Tennessee Williams. The letters are introduced with headnotes by editor Millicent Dillon, plus 10 pages of photographs have been reproduced from the original edition of the letters. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
Download or read book Crime Novels written by Robert Polito and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 924 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This adventurous volume, with its companion devoted to the 1930s and 40s, presents a rich vein of modern American writing too often neglected in mainstream literary histories. Evolving out of the terse and violent hardboiled style of the pulp magazines, noir fiction expanded over the decades into a varied and innovative body of writing. Tapping deep roots in the American literary imagination, the novels in this volume explore themes of crime, guilt, deception, obsessive passion, murder, and the disintegrating psyche. With visionary and often subversive force, they create a dark and violent mythology out of the most commonplace elements of modern life. The raw power of their vernacular style has profoundly influenced contemporary American culture and writing. Far from formulaic, they are ambitious works which bend the rules of genre fiction to their often experimental purposes.
Download or read book Comeback written by Richard Stark and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2011-04-15 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After the bloodbath of Butcher’s Moon, the action-filled blowout Parker adventure, Donald Westlake said, "Richard Stark proved to me that he had a life of his own by simply disappearing. He was gone." And for nearly twenty-five years, he stayed away, while readers waited. But nothing bad is truly gone forever, and Parker’s as bad as they come. According to Westlake, one day in 1997, “suddenly, he came back from the dead, with a chalky prison pallor”—and the resulting novel, Comeback, showed that neither Stark nor Parker had lost a single step. Knocking over a highly lucrative religious revival show, Parker reminds us that not all criminals don ski masks—some prefer to hide behind the wings of fallen angels.
Download or read book The End and the Beginning written by Hermynia Zur Mühlen and published by Open Book Publishers. This book was released on 2010 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in Germany in 1929, The End and the Beginning is a lively personal memoir of a vanished world and of a rebellious, high-spirited young woman's struggle to achieve independence. Born in 1883 into a distinguished and wealthy aristocratic family of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, Hermynia Zur Muhlen spent much of her childhood travelling in Europe and North Africa with her diplomat father. After five years on her German husband's estate in czarist Russia she broke with both her family and her husband and set out on a precarious career as a professional writer committed to socialism. Besides translating many leading contemporary authors, notably Upton Sinclair, into German, she herself published an impressive number of politically engaged novels, detective stories, short stories, and children's fairy tales. Because of her outspoken opposition to National Socialism, she had to flee her native Austria in 1938 and seek refuge in England, where she died, virtually penniless, in 1951. This revised and corrected translation of Zur Muhlen's memoir - with extensive notes and an essay on the author by Lionel Gossman - will appeal especially to readers interested in women's history, the Central European aristocratic world that came to an end with the First World War, and the culture and politics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Download or read book The Killer Inside Me written by Jim Thompson and published by Mulholland Books. This book was released on 2011-11-01 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Killer Inside Me, America's "Dimestore Dostoevsky" Jim Thompson goes where few novelists have dared to go, giving us a pitch-black glimpse into the mind of the American Serial Killer years before Charles Manson and Brett Easton Ellis's American Psycho, in the novel that will forever be known as the master performance of one of the greatest crime novelists of all time. Everyone in the small town of Central City, Texas loves Lou Ford. A deputy sheriff, Lou's known to the small-time criminals, the real-estate entrepreneurs, and all of his coworkers — the low-lifes, the big-timers, and everyone in-between — as the nicest guy around. He may not be the brightest or the most interesting man in town, but nevertheless, he's the kind of officer you're happy to have keeping your streets safe. The sort of man you might even wish your daughter would end up with someday. But behind the platitudes and glad-handing lurks a monster the likes of which few have seen. An urge that has already claimed multiple lives, and cost Lou his brother Mike, a self-sacrificing construction worker fell to his death on the job in what was anything but an accident. A murder that Lou is determined to avenge — and if innocent people have to die in the process, well, that's perfectly all right with him.
Download or read book Ripley Under Ground written by Patricia Highsmith and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2008-09-17 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Ripley is an unmistakable descendant of Gatsby, that 'penniless young man without a past' who will stop at nothing."—Frank Rich Now part of American film and literary lore, Tom Ripley, "a bisexual psychopath and art forger who murders without remorse when his comforts are threatened" (New York Times Book Review), was Patricia Highsmith's favorite creation. In these volumes, we find Ripley ensconced on a French estate with a wealthy wife, a world-class art collection, and a past to hide. In Ripley Under Ground (1970), an art forgery goes awry and Ripley is threatened with exposure; in The Boy Who Followed Ripley (1980), Highsmith explores Ripley's bizarrely paternal relationship with a troubled young runaway, whose abduction draws them into Berlin's seamy underworld; and in Ripley Under Water (1991), Ripley is confronted by a snooping American couple obsessed with the disappearance of an art collector who visited Ripley years before. More than any other American literary character, Ripley provides "a lens to peer into the sinister machinations of human behavior" (John Freeman, Pittsburgh Gazette).
Download or read book True Crime An American Anthology written by Harold Schechter and published by . This book was released on 2008-09-18 with total page 824 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "True Crime: An American Anthology" offers a comprehensive look at the many ways in which American writers have explored crime in a multitude of aspects: the dark motives that spur it, the shock of its impact on society, and the effort to make sense of the violent extremes of human behavior.
Download or read book Crime Films written by Thomas Leitch and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2002-08-15 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book surveys the entire range of crime films, including important subgenres such as the gangster film, the private eye film, film noir, as well as the victim film, the erotic thriller, and the crime comedy. Focusing on ten films that span the range of the twentieth century, Thomas Leitch traces the transformation of the three leading figures that are common to all crime films: the criminal, the victim and the avenger. Analyzing how each of the subgenres establishes oppositions among its ritual antagonists, he shows how the distinctions among them become blurred throughout the course of the century. This blurring, Leitch maintains, reflects and fosters a deep social ambivalence towards crime and criminals, while the criminal, victim and avenger characters effectively map the shifting relations between subgenres, such as the erotic thriller and the police film, within the larger genre of crime film that informs them all.
Download or read book Overthrow written by Stephen Kinzer and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2007-02-06 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An award-winning author tells the stories of the audacious American politicians, military commanders, and business executives who took it upon themselves to depose monarchs, presidents, and prime ministers of other countries with disastrous long-term consequences.
