Penguin Modern Classics – Crime & Espionage

Serendipity Dahlquist is a headstrong roller-blading teenager living in LA who has lost her dog. She asks private investigator Leo Bloodworth to help her find the missing pet. In what proves to have been a moment of madness, Bloodworth agrees to take on the case, unleashing an appalling--but also extremely entertaining--series of extremely homicidal events.

Sleeping Dog remains, almost 40 years after its publication, one of the most wonderful crime debuts: by turns charming, hilarious and pathological, Lochte's novel is a great celebration of everything that is most deplorable and hair-raising about California in the 1980s.

George Smiley, who is a troubled man of infinite compassion, is also a single-mindedly ruthless adversary as a spy.

The scene which he enters is a Cold War landscape of moles and lamplighters, scalp-hunters and pavement artists, where men are turned, burned or bought for stock. Smiley's mission is to catch a Moscow Centre mole burrowed thirty years deep into the Circus itself.

A reclusive writer of detective stories, Oe Shundei, has gone missing, leaving behind a suspicious trail of blackmailing letters to a former lover. Another detective novelist, his rival, is the only one who can find him. A sequence of macabre and appalling events follows.

After a routine security check by George Smiley, civil servant Samuel Fennan apparently kills himself. When Smiley finds Circus head Maston is trying to blame him for the man's death, he begins his own investigation, meeting with Fennan's widow to find out what could have led him to such desperation. But on the very day that Smiley is ordered off the enquiry he receives an urgent letter from the dead man. Do the East Germans - and their agents - know more about this man's death than the Circus previously imagined?

Le Carré's debut novel, Call for the Dead, introduced the tenacious and retiring George Smiley in a gripping tale of espionage and deceit.

A preacher called Deke O'Malley's been selling false hope: the promise of a glorious new life in Africa for just $1,000 a family. But when thieves with machine guns steal the proceeds - and send one man to the morgue - the con is up. Now Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed, highly unorthodox and gun-happy detectives, mean to bring the good people of Harlem back their $87,000, however many corpses they have to climb over to get it.

Cotton Comes to Harlem is a non-stop ride, with violence, sex, double-crosses, and the two baddest detectives ever to wear a badge in Harlem.

When Maude Slocum - beautiful, frightened and angry - comes to Lew Archer's office with a poison pen letter intended for her husband, he reluctantly agrees to help her. As he follows the Slocums around, Archer finds that Mrs Slocum might have the least of the family's troubles: her teenage daughter is desolate, her husband is in the closet and her mother-in-law has just come to an unpleasant end in the swimming pool. But why is their handsome ex-chauffeur still hanging around? And what does the sinister Pacific Refinery Company have to do with the all the bloodshed?

Marion Sharpe and her mother are quiet and ordinary villagers, enjoying a peaceful life in their country home, the Franchise. Everything changes when a local schoolgirl accuses them of kidnap and abuse, describing the attic room of the house as her prison. Scotland Yard inspector Alan Grant is called to solve the mystery of the Franchise, but will he fall right in the middle of nightmarish affair that will change a town, and its locals' lives, forever?

After the war, cynical veteran Dix Steele has moved to L.A., a city terrified by a strangler preying on young women. Bumping into an old friend, now a detective working on the case, Dix is thrilled by closely following the progress of the police. And meeting his new neighbour, sultry and beautiful actress Laurel Gray, brings even more excitement into his life. But the strangler is still prowling the streets - and Laurel may be in more danger than she realises...

It is 1940 and Mr Graham, a quietly-spoken engineer and arms expert, has just finished high-level talks with the Turkish government. And now somebody wants him dead. The previous night three shots were fired at him as he stepped into his hotel room, so, terrified, he escapes in secret on a passenger steamer from Istanbul. As he journeys home - alongside, among others, an entrancing French dancer, an unkempt trader, a mysterious German doctor and a small, brutal man in a crumpled suit - he enters a nightmarish world where friend and foe are indistinguishable. Graham can try to run, but he may not be able to hide for much longer...

The discovery of a dismembered body in the Canal Saint Martin leads Maigret into a tangled, baffling case involving a taciturn bistro-owner and a mysterious inheritance. This is a matchless description of a harsh, grim part of Paris a long way from the tourist trail, and a perfect example of Maigret's forensic police-work.

'What kind of a man would have his fingers tattooed that way? ... What kind of a man? What kind of a preacher?'

One of the great chase novels, The Night of the Hunter centres on the ferocious, unforgettable figure of Preacher, a psychopath who relentlessly pursues two children who may or may not know the secret of where the money from a bank raid is hidden.

Set in a brilliantly rendered Depression-era American river town, Grubb's novel is both a study of innocence and evil and a savage picture of human failings as, one by one, the adults who have it in their power to protect the children fall for Preacher's wiles.

It is 1941 and Germany has won the war. Britain is occupied, Churchill executed and the King imprisoned in the Tower of London. At Scotland Yard, Detective Inspector Archer tries to do his job and keep his head down. But when a body is found in a Mayfair flat, what at first appears to be a routine murder investigation sends him into a world of espionage, deceit and betrayal.

Decoded tells the story of Rong Jinzhwen, one of the great code-breakers in the world. A mathematical genius, Jinzhen is recruited to the cryptography department of China's secret services, Unit 701, where he is assigned the task of breaking the elusive 'Code Purple'. Jinzhen rises through the ranks to eventually become China's greatest and most celebrated code-breaker; until he makes a mistake. Then begins his descent through the unfathomable darkness of the world of cryptology into madness.

Decoded was an immediate success when it was published in 2002 in China. Taking place in the shadowy world of Chinese secret security, where Mai Jia worked for decades, it introduces us to a place that is unfamiliar, intriguing and authentic. And with Rong Jinzhen, a character who is deeply flawed yet possessing exceptional intelligence, it tells a gripping story of genius, brilliance, insanity and human frailty.

Joe LaBrava is a photographer documenting the street life of Miami. But before he was a photographer, he was a Secret Service agent. And before that he was a twelve-year-old boy, crazy in love with movie star Jean Shaw. When his pal Maurice Zola asks for his help in sorting out a problem for a friend, and that friend turns out to be the now-retired Jean Shaw, LaBrava's all in - even when the problem in question is blackmail.

Robbie Daniels, Palm Beach playboy, loves living the good life on his inherited millions. He likes women. He likes golf. He likes guns. When he shoots and kills a Haitian refugee who has broken into his home, he calls it 'practice' - for the life he longs to live, blasting bad guys. But homicide detective Bryan Hurd has other ideas about justifying murder, even if he has to interrupt his holiday to put them into practice. An elctrifying noir from the legendary crime writer, Split Images is 'top-notch' (New York Times).

An injured, housebound man believes he might have witnessed a murder and must uncover the plot without leaving his apartment. An accidental killer hides the corpse of his neighbour in a fold-down bed - just as his landlord decides to start holding viewings. An innocent youth accused of murder goes on the run, only to discover he has an unexpected aptitude for crime. In this new selection of his best short stories - including the one that inspired Alfred Hitchcock - Cornell Woolrich shines as one of the twistiest, smartest and most thrilling crime writers of the 20th century.