James M Cain

A rerelease of a classic tale by the New Yorker journalist and author of The Postman Always Rings. Following her husband's death in a suspicious car accident, beautiful young widow Joan Medford is forced to take a job serving drinks in a cocktail lounge to make ends meet and to have a chance of regaining custody of her young son. At the job she encounters two men who take an interest in her, a handsome young schemer who makes her blood race and a...

The sultry young wife of a diner owner conspires with an aimless drifter to murder her husband.

As Mildred pulls herself up by the bootstraps, first as an unflappable waitress and eventually as the well-heeled owner of a successful restaurant chain, the ingratitude of her materialistic firstborn becomes a venomous serpent's tooth, setting in motion an endless cycle of desperate overtures and heartless recriminations.

Frank Chambers (John Garfield) is a drifter who lands at a roadside gas station owned by jolly old Nick Smith (Cecil Kellaway) and his young, blonde wife Cora (Lana Turner). In a matter of minutes, Frank and Cora fall in love, and plot to murder Nick. Eventually wedding bells ring, the body count rises, and the gavel slams-of course, nothing ever goes as planned. Part of what makes the film noir is watching the characters react, as their plans are...

"This adventurous volume, with its companion devoted to the 1950s, 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,...