Anita Desai

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Martin Amis

Everyone is always out there searching for someone and something, usually for a lover, usually for love. And this is a love story. 
 
But the murderee - Nicola Six - is searching for something and someone else: her murderer. She knows the time, she knows the place, she knows the motive, she knows the means. She just doesn't know the man. 
 
London Fields is a brilliant, funny and multi-layered novel. It is a book in which the narrator, Samson Young, enters the Black Cross, a thoroughly undesirable public house, and finds the main players of his drama assembled, just waiting to begin. It's a gift of a story from real life...all Samson has to do is write it as it happens.

London Fields

James Ellroy

American Tabloid gives us John F. Kennedy's rise and fall from an insider's perspective. We're there for the rigged 1960 election and for the Bay of Pigs fiasco. We're the eyes and ears and souls of three rogue cops who've signed on for the ride and come to see Jack as their betrayer. And we're there in Dallas in 1963 where it all comes to a brutal end. 
The Cold Six Thousand the cover-up for the Kennedy assassination begins. This time the ride takes us from Dallas to Vietnam to Las Vegas to Memphis to Cuba to the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in L.A. We're rubbing shoulders Klansmen and mafiosi, killers, hoods and provocateurs. WIth Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King. And of course a lot of corrupt policemen. 
Blood's a Rover takes us into the 70s. RFK and MLK are dead. A kid private eye clashes with a mob goon and an enforcer for FBI director Edgar Hoover in L.A. There's an armoured-car heist and a cache of missing emeralds. Revolution brews in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Amidst all this, all three anti-heros fall for Red revolutionary Joan Rosen Klein. Each will pay 'a dear and savage price to live History'. 
The American dream as Nightmare.

American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand

Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy Vol.1

Raymond Chandler

Creator of the famous Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler elevated the American hard-boiled detective genre to an art form. His last four novels, published here in one volume, offer ample opportunity to savour the unique and compelling fictional world that made his works modern classics. 
 
The Lady in the Lake moves Marlowe out of his usual habitat of city streets and into the mountains outside Los Angeles in his strange search for a missing woman. 
 
The Little Sister takes Marlowe to Hollywood, where he tries to find a sweet young thing’s missing brother, uncovering on the way a little blackmail, a lot of drugs, and more than enough murder. 
 
In The Long Goodbye, a case involving a war-scarred drunk and his nymphomaniac wife has Marlowe constantly on the move: a psychotic gangster’s on his trail, he’s in trouble with the cops, and more and more corpses keep turning up. 
 
Playback features a well-endowed redhead who leads Marlowe to the California coast to solve a tale of big money and, of course, murder. 
 
Throughout these masterpieces, Marlowe’s wry humour and existential sense of his job prove yet again why he has become one of the most recognized and imitated characters in fiction.

The Lady in the Lake, The Little Sister, The Long Goodbye, Playback

Volume 2

Chester himes

A friend and contemporary of Richard Wright and James Baldwin - and every bit their equal - Chester Himes was the acclaimed author of literary novels, stories and essays, as well as the classic crime fiction series for which he is best known, featuring detectives Coffin Ed Johnson and Gravedigger Jones. 
Himes wrote nine novels in the Harlem Detectives series, and in these four popular, accomplished instalments, his cold, wise-cracking sleuths are thrown into a brutal, murderous world peopled with conniving con men, gut-toting gangsters and opium-smoking preachers. Himes's vision of Harlem's criminal underground, enriched by deft plotting and scintillating dialogue, is both riotous entertainment and penetrating enquiry into the fraught tensions of race in postwar America.

The Essential Harlem Detectives

Umberto Eco

Who is killing monks in a great medieval abbey famed for its library - and why? Brother William of Baskerville is sent to find out, taking with him the assistant who later tells the tale of his investigations. Eco's celebrated story combines elements of detective fiction, metaphysical thriller, post-modernist puzzle and historical novel in one of the few twentieth-century books which can be described as genuinely unique. 
The Name of the Rose was made into a film in 1986, starring Sean Connery and Christian Slater and directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud.

The Name of the Rose

Colson Whitehead

'A thrilling blend of noir and fantasy.'Guardian. 
In an unnamed city - a hardboiled pre-Civil Rights New York sort of city -heroine Lila Mae has succeeded in becoming the very first Black female elevator inspector. In Whitehead's darkly comic otherworld, this is a job imbued with an almost mystical significance. But the illustrious Department of Elevator Inspectors is in crisis, bitterly divided between the Empiricists (check the machinery) and the Intuitionists (tune in to the vibes). Lila is an Intuitionist and so much better at her job than anyone else that surely it must be those 'good-old-boy' Empiricists who have set up the serious accident which occurs on her watch - and just before the Departmental elections, too. Lila sets out to clear her name (and discover the secret formula of the Perfect Elevator at the same time), and the author keeps us on our toes guessing the outcome as he cleverly tweaks and twists his plot, catching everybody out. At the same time the story is almost certainly an allegory but of what, exactly, readers may work out for themselves. A teasing, challenging and entertaining read.

The Intuitionist

Blood's a Rover takes us into the 70s. RFK and MLK are dead. A kid private eye clashes with a mob goon and an enforcer for FBI director Edgar Hoover in L.A. There's an armoured-car heist and a cache of missing emeralds. Revolution brews in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Amidst all this, all three anti-heros fall for Red revolutionary Joan Rosen Klein. Each will pay 'a dear and savage price to live History'.

Blood's a Rover

Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy Vol. 2

Raymond Chandler’s first three novels, published here in one volume, established his reputation as an unsurpassed master of hard-boiled detective fiction. 
 
The Big Sleep, Chandler’s first novel, introduces Philip Marlowe, a private detective inhabiting the seamy side of Los Angeles in the 1930s, as he takes on a case involving a paralysed California millionaire, two psychotic daughters, blackmail and murder. 
 
In Farewell, My Lovely, Marlowe deals with the gambling circuit, a murder he stumbles upon, and three very beautiful but potentially deadly women. 
 
In The High Window, Marlowe searches the California underworld for a priceless gold coin and finds himself deep in the tangled affairs of a dead coin collector. 
 
In all three novels, Chandler’s hard-edged prose, colourful characters, vivid vernacular, and, above all, his enigmatic loner of a hero, establish his enduring claim to the heights of his chosen genre.

The Big Sleep, Farewell, My Lovely, The High Window

Volume 1

Patricia Highsmith

Three classic crime novels by a master of the macabre – The Talented Mr. Ripley, Ripley Under Ground, and Ripley's Game – appear here together in hardcover for the first time. Suave, agreeable, and completely amoral, Patricia Highsmith’s hero, the inimitable Tom Ripley, stops at nothing – not even murder – to accomplish his goals. In achieving the opulent life that he was denied as a child, Ripley shows himself to be a master of illusion and manipulation and a disturbingly sympathetic combination of genius and psychopath. Sent on a mission to Italy to coax an irresponsible young playboy back to his wealthy father in America, Ripley finds himself so fond of the young man that he sets out to be like him – exactly like him. The precarious charade that ensues is the first step to a life of elegance and ease – and perpetual danger. As she leads us through the mesmerizing tangle of Ripley’s deadly and sinister games, Highsmith turns the mystery genre inside out and takes us into the mind of a man utterly indifferent to evil.

The Talented Mr. Ripley, Ripley Under Ground, Ripley's Game

The Black Dahlia depicts the infrastructure of L.A.'s most sensational murder case. A young cop morphs into the obsessed lover and lust-crazed avenger. His rogue investigation is a one-way ticket to hell. 
 
The Big Nowhere blends the crime novel with the political novel. It is winter, 1950, and the L.A. authorities are targeting movieland Reds. The three cops assigned to the job are out to grab all the kudos they can. But a series of brutal sex killing intervenes ... 
 
L.A. Confidential plumbs the depths: political corruption, scandal-rag journalism, racism and gangland wars, savage slaughter in an all-night hash house. And the inglorious Los Angeles Police Department to disentangle the conspiracy that links it all together. 
 
White Jazz gives us the tortured confession of a cop who's gone to the bad - killer, slum landlord and parasitic exploiter. He's also a pawn in a police power struggle and beginning to realize it. But he's just met a woman and wants to claw his way out of the pit. Somehow.

The L.A. Quartet

Jonathan Lethem

Motherless Brooklyn is a compulsively readable riff on the classic noir detective novel. Brooklyn's self-appointed Human Freakshow, Lionel Essrog is an orphan whose Tourettic impulses drive him to rip apart our language in startling and original ways. Together with three other veterans of the St. Vincent's Home for Boys, he works for small-time mobster Frank Minna's limo service cum detective agency. But when Frank is fatally stabbed, Lionel's world is suddenly topsy-turvy, and he must untangle the threads of the case while trying to keep the words straight in his head. 
 
The Fortress of Solitude is the vividly told story of Dylan Ebdus growing up white and motherless in Brooklyn in the 1970s. In a neighbourhood where the entertainments include muggings and games of stoopball, Dylan has one friend, a black teenager, also motherless, named Mingus Rude. Through the knitting and unravelling of the boys' friendship, Lethem creates an overwhelmingly rich and emotionally gripping canvas of race and class, superheroes, gentrification, funk, hip-hop, graffiti tagging, loyalty, and memory. 
From the prize-winning author of Motherless Brooklyn, The Fortress of Solitude is a daring, riotous, sweeping novel that spins the tale of two friends and their adventures in late 20th-century America.

Motherless Brooklyn; Fortress of Solitude

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