A couple of missing wives—one a rich man's and one a poor man's—become the objects of Marlowe's investigation. One of them may have gotten a Mexican divorce and married a gigolo and the other may be d…
British Secret Service agent James Bond, a.k.a. 007, is sent to France to play in a high-stakes baccarat game in an effort to take down Le Chiffre, a financier for the villainous SMERSH. Things get mo…
When the last honest citizen of "Poisonville" was murdered, the Continental Op stayed on to punish the guilty—even if that meant taking on an entire town.
The atomic submarine 'Dolphin' has impossible orders: to sail beneath the ice-floes of the Arctic Ocean to locate and rescue the men of weather-station Zebra, gutted by fir…
A long-distance call from a Texas city on his birthday gives Benjamin Dill the news that his sister—it's her birthday, too, they were born exactly ten years apart—has died in a car bomb explosion. It'…
"Listen, Bond," said Tiffany Case. "It’d take more than Crabmeat Ravigotte to get me into bed with a man. In any event, since it’s your check, I’m going to have caviar, and what the English call 'cutl…
Naked Lunch is one of the most important novels of the twentieth century, a book that redefined not just literature but American culture. An unnerving tale of a narcotics addict unmoored in New York, …
Dashiell Hammett is the true inventor of modern detective fiction and the creator of the private eye, the isolated hero in a world where treachery is the norm. The Continental Op was his great first c…
"The girl looked him up and down. He had dark, rather cruel good looks and very clear, blue-grey eyes. He was wearing a very dark-blue lightweight single-breasted suit over a cream silk shirt and a bl…
Mob-connected loan shark Chili Palmer is sick of the Miami grind—plus his “friends” have a bad habit of dying there. So when he chases a deadbeat client out to Hollywood, Chili figures he might like t…
It all began with the phone call asking former porn star Angel Dare to do one more movie. Before she knew it, she'd been shot and left for dead in the tr…
