Books about hardboiled

Sam Spade is hired by Miss Wonderley to track down her sister, who has eloped with a louse called Floyd Thursby. But Miss Wonderley is in fact the beautiful and treacherous Brigid O'Shaughnessy, and when Spade's partner is shot while on Thursby's trail, Spade finds himself both hunter and hunted.

Los Angeles PI Philip Marlowe is working for the Sternwood family. Old man Sternwood, crippled and wheelchair-bound, is being given the squeeze by a blackmailer and he wants Marlowe to make the problem go away. Marlowe's got his work cut out. But that's before he stumbles over the first corpse.

A warm day on Central Avenue, and Philip Marlowe's hunch about the man beside him is as vague as the heat waves that dance above the sidewalk. Moose Malloy stands six five and one-half and weighs two hundred and sixty-four pounds. After eight years in the pen, he wants little Velma back, and no cops or mobsters are ready to stand in his way.

Down-and-out drunk Terry Lennox has a problem: his millionaire wife is dead and he needs to get out of LA fast. So he turns to his only friend in the world: Philip Marlowe, Private Investigator. He's willing to help a man down on his luck, but later, Lennox commits suicide in Mexico and things start to turn nasty.

'An acknowledged literary landmark' Robert Graves

Philip Marlowe's on a case: his client wants him to recover a rare gold coin called a Brasher Doubloon, missing from her late husband's collection. It becomes complicated when Marlowe finds that everyone who handles the coin suffers a run of very bad luck: they always end up dead.

Mankind is strung out across interstellar space, and human consciousness is digitally freighted between the stars and downloaded into bodies, but some things never change, so when Takeshi is downloaded into the body of an ex-thug and presented with a catch-22 offer he shouldn't be surprised.

Her name is Orfamay Quest and she's come all the way from Manhattan, Kansas, to find her missing brother Orrin. Or least ways that's what she tells PI Philip Marlowe, offering him a measly twenty bucks for the privilege. But Marlowe's feeling charitable though it's not long before he wishes he wasn't so sweet.

Published on the centenary of Jim Thompson's birth, THE KILLER INSIDE ME has been an underground classic since its first publication in 1952.

This collection brings together the very best of Dashiell Hammett's early stories featuring the Continental Op, the dispassionate fat man working for the Continental Detective Agency whose only interest is in doing his job in a world of violence, passion, desperate action and great excitement.

Derace Kingsley's wife ran away to Mexico to get a divorce and marry a Chris Lavery. Trouble is, when Philip Marlowe asks Lavery about it he denies everything and sends the private investigator packing with a flea lodged firmly in his ear. But when Marlowe encounters Lavery, he's denying nothing on account of the two bullet holes in his heart.

The classic tale of an evil woman motivated by greed who corrupts a weak man motivated by lust. Walter Huff is an insurance investigator like any other until the day he meets the beautiful and dangerous Phyllis Nirdlinger and falls under her spell. Together they plot to kill her husband and split the insurance.

Phillip Marlowe is mixing business with pleasure - getting paid to follow a mysterious and lovely red-head named Eleanor King. And wherever Miss King goes, trouble seems to follow. But one dead body later and what started out as a lazy afternoon's snooping soon becomes a deadly cocktail of blackmail, lies, mistaken identity - and murder.

A classic novel from one of America's most famous detective writers, now available in Penguin's Read Red series.

Ex-policeman Bernie thought he'd seen everything on the streets of 1930s Berlin. Then he went freelance and each case he tackled sucked him further into the excesses of Nazi sub-culture. And even after the war Bernie uncovered a legacy that made the wartime atrocities look lily-white by comparison.

'Dashiell Hammett is an original. He is a master of the detective novel, yes, but also one hell of a writer' Boston Globe