For wise-cracking Private Eye Philip Marlowe, murder is all in a day's work...
There are no streets meaner than those of L.A.'s underworld - but luckily one detective has more than his fair share of street smarts. Here, in the first two novels featuring the immortal creation Philip Marlowe, we see the cynical sleuth taking on a nasty case of blackmail involving a Californian millionaire and his two devil-may-care daughters; then dealing with a missing nightclub crooner (plus several gangsters with a habit of shooting first and talking later).
A master criminal and a master detective are locked in battle. Who will win?
They call her the 'Dark Angel'. Queen of Tokyo's underworld, Mme Midorikawa is famed for her beauty, her jewels and the tattoo of a black lizard on her arm. Crime is so easy for her that she warns her victims in advance. When a wealthy jewel merchant receives letters saying his precious daughter Sanae is about to be kidnapped, he entrusts the renowned detective Akechi Kogoro to protect her. But he may have met his deadliest adversary yet...
An impostor has a fortune to win - but he may be in danger of losing his life...
Twenty-one-year-old Brat Farrar is an orphan, alone in the world without friends or family. So when he is offered the unexpected chance to impersonate Patrick Ashby, the long-lost heir to a vast fortune on a country estate, he agrees. Brat is the spitting image of Patrick, who disappeared years ago. At first it seems Brat can pull off this incredible deception, until he starts to realise that he is in far greater peril than he ever imagined.
For two secret agents, there's no such thing as a quiet life in the countryside...
In a peaceful Kent village, Mr Behrens lives with his aunt at the Old Rectory, where he plays chess and keeps bees. His friend Mr Calder lives nearby with Rasselas, a golden deerhound of unnatural intelligence. No one would suspect that they are in fact working for British Intelligence, carrying out the jobs that are too dangerous for anyone else to handle - whether it's wiping out traitors, Soviet spies or old Nazis - in these gloriously entertaining stories.
A stolen weapon. A troubled young man. A race against time...
Inspector Maigret receives a call from his wife to say he has a visitor at their apartment. But when he gets home, the young man has already gone, along with Maigret's prized Smith and Wesson .45. The trail to find the culprit - and the woman who may become his victim - takes Maigret across Paris and all the way to the Savoy Hotel in London. But getting to the truth may be even more complicated than he had first imagined.
A crime novelist has found the perfect subject - but it may cost him his life
English writer Charles Latimer is travelling in Istanbul when a police inspector tells him about the infamous master criminal Dimitrios, long wanted by the law, whose body has just been fished out of the Bosphorus. Immediately fascinated, Latimer decides to retrace Dimitrios' steps across Europe to gather material for a new book, but instead finds himself descending into a terrifying underworld of international espionage, Balkan drug dealers, unscrupulous businessmen and fatal treachery - one he may not be able to escape.
A First World War battlefield hides a deadly secret - one that some are willing to kill for
Paul Mitchell is a young military historian whose life is changed forever when two men, Dr Audley and Colonel Butler of the MOD, visit him with a fragment of a German trench map - and a lot of questions. Then somebody tries to kill him. Paul, his life now in danger, agrees to go underground on a mission to solve a dangerous mystery: what really happened during the battle of the Somme in 1916? And why does somebody want to keep it secret?
There is nothing more dangerous than a desperate man
Bank clerk William Marble is facing financial ruin - until a visit from a wealthy young relative, a bottle of Cyanide and a shovel offer him an unexpected solution. But there is no such thing as the perfect murder. Gradually Marble becomes poisoned by guilt and fear, and his entire family corrupted. Sooner or later his deed will catch up with him, as events spiral out of control in the most unpredictable of ways...
For the unlikely crime-busting duo Leo and Serendipity, a missing dog is only the start of their troubles...
Leo Bloodworth, 'the Bloodhound', is a world-weary L.A. gumshoe with a reputation for finding anything - and a low tolerance of precocious teenagers. Serendipity Dahlquist is a precocious teenager. When the headstrong, roller-skating fourteen-year-old asks Bloodworth to help track down her lost dog Groucho, it leads this oddest of odd couples into the dark criminal underworld of the Mexican mafia, and into more trouble than they'd bargained for.
A Russian mole has infiltrated the British establishment - and the spymaster Smiley must dig them out...
George Smiley, formerly of the Secret Intelligence Service, is contemplating his new life in retirement when he is called back on an unexpected mission. His task is to hunt down an agent implanted by Moscow Central at the very heart of the Circus - one who has been buried deep there for years. The dogged, troubled Smiley can discount nobody from being the traitor, even if it is one of those closest to him.
'The new crime and espionage series from Penguin Classics makes for a mouth-watering prospect' Daily Telegraph
A mystery writer turns detective to protect the woman he loves. But is he hunter or hunted?
The chance meeting between a crime novelist and a married woman blossoms into friendship. When she confides to him that she has been receiving threatening and sadistic letters from an ex-lover, who says he is watching her in the shadows, he knows he must help her. But the trail unexpectedly leads to another writer, Oe Shundei, the mysterious and secretive author of works of grotesque violence. Suddenly nothing is as it seems, and nobody is safe.
'The new crime and espionage series from Penguin Classics makes for a mouth-watering prospect' Daily Telegraph
An apparent suicide. A deepening mystery. A letter from a dead man...
Secret agent George Smiley is in trouble. A Foreign Office civil servant, Samuel Fennan, has killed himself, and Smiley realizes that Intelligence head Maston is going to set him up to take the blame. Beginning his own investigation, Smiley is shocked to receive an urgent letter from the dead man, and slowly uncovers a network of deceit and betrayal. Le Carré's debut novel was also the first of his many books to feature the tenacious, unassuming and singular George Smiley.
'The new crime and espionage series from Penguin Classics makes for a mouth-watering prospect' Daily Telegraph
A con-man is swindling the poor folk of Harlem out of their life savings - and now all hell's broken loose.
The 'Reverend' Deke O'Malley has just made $87,000 by duping his followers, only for white gunmen to hijack the rally and escape with the cash hidden inside a bale of cotton. Now ace detectives Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson must get the good people of Harlem their money back by any means necessary, in a raucous, breakneck adventure involving double-crosses, exotic dancers, a racist colonel and a whole pile of bodies...
'The new crime and espionage series from Penguin Classics makes for a mouth-watering prospect' Daily Telegraph
Maude Slocum is in trouble. But luckily trouble is Investigator Lew Archer's business.
A well-dressed, wealthy woman has arrived at Archer's L.A. office, having intercepted a poison pen letter accusing her of adultery. Reluctantly agreeing to help her find the culprit, he dives into the Slocums' moneyed, oil-rich California world. But when Maude's mother-in-law is found dead in the swimming pool, secrets come to the surface too. For the urbane, world-weary Archer, a case of blackmail soon becomes murder.
'The new crime and espionage series from Penguin Classics makes for a mouth-watering prospect' Daily Telegraph
Abducted, beaten, hidden in an attic, a young woman stages an audacious escape. But is her story everything she claims it to be?
Fifteen-year-old Betty Kane can recall every detail of the room where she says she was held at the country house known as The Franchise - even the crack in its round window. But her alleged kidnappers, a quiet-living mother and daughter, claim they have never seen her before. Somebody has to be lying. But who? As the case sparks a media frenzy, it is up to unassuming village solicitor Robert Blair to find out.
'The new crime and espionage series from Penguin Classics makes for a mouth-watering prospect' Daily Telegraph
Los Angeles, the late 1940's. A serial killer stalks the foggy streets at night ...
Dix Steele, a former fighter pilot, moved to L.A. after the war, looking for a new life. But the city is gripped by fear of a murderer in its midst. Dix, however, is not scared. And when he bumps into his old friend Brub, now a detective on the trail of the culprit, he is excited to follow the police's progress. A dark and terrible truth is revealed, in a noir novel like no other.