Nick and Nora Charles are Hammett's most enchanting creations, a rich, glamorous couple who solve homicides in between wisecracks and martinis. At once knowing and unabashedly romantic, The Thin Man is a murder mystery that doubles as a...
It is said that everyone over a certain age can remember distinctly what they were doing when they heard that President Kennedy had been assassinated, or that Princess Diana had been killed in a Paris car crash, but I, for one, could recall all too...
Sniper opens in October 1998 near Buffalo, NY. A man is alone in the dark in a forest. He clutches an assault rifle and is thinking about his mission. “You can cut holes in the fences around the death camps,” he thinks. “A trickle of relief in...
All are familiar with the well-known plot of the man who commits murder and then attempts to make the crime appear to be suicide. In There’s Always a Price Tag, James Hadley Chase turns this old plot inside out and gives us a new and electrifying...
The Editor of a monthly crime and detection magazine assigns to two of his staff writers, Sladen and Low, the investigation of the strange disappearance of an unknown showgirl. The disappearance was reported fourteen months earlier, but the trail is...
Most of the translations from foreign languages in the text are my own, but for the quotation from Machiavelli’sThe Prince and the quotation from Virgil’s The Eclogues (though I have adapted the latter very slightly). I am indebted to the late...