When Gordon Cloade is killed in the London blitz a few weeks after getting married, his new bride is suddenly in sole possession of the family fortune. Other family members, though, have suspicions about his demise, especially when "spirits" claim the widow's first husband is still alive.

In the stories and novellas he wrote for Black Mask and other pulp magazines in the 1920s and 1930s, Dashiell Hammett took the detective story and turned it into a medium for capturing the jarring textures and revved-up cadences of modern American life. In this volume, The Library of America collects the finest of these stories: 24 in all, along with some revealing essays and an earlier version of his novel The Thin Man. Mixing melodramatic panache...

A collection of 34 detective stories, tracing the development of the genre from Edgar Allen Poe's The Murder in the Rue Morgue, through William Faulkner's An Error in Chemistry, up to the present.

When Mrs. Packington's husband begins keeping regular company with an office girl, she turns to Mr. Parker Pyne, master of the human soul, for help, in the first of a series of cases that take him from London to the Middle East.

"The hero - or perhaps anti-hero - of these two classic, genre-bending mysteries is, as Sven Birkerts describes him, "a detective at career's end ... no family, a domestic life no more furnished than Sam Spade's, with only gruff and grumbling ties to his colleagues on the Bern police force." Both mysteries follow Inspector Barlach as he moves through worlds in which the distinction between crime and justice has grown uncertain. In The Judge and His...