Crime Masterworks
9 primary works
Book 5
Book 17
Book 27
Book 29
Book 31
Book 32
Book 34
Book 37
Book 40
He was 41 years old and as down-home polite as any man you'd want to meet. boyish grin, easy manners. Nice guy for a bank robber. In fact, there was hardly a person alive who didn't fall for Doc McCoy's charm. the ones who saw through him died hard and fast. Funny thing about Doc, his conscience was his gun.
Deputy Sheriff Lou Ford is a pillar of the community in his small Texas town, patient and thoughtful. Some people think he's a little slow and boring but that's the worst they say about him. But then nobody knows about what Lou calls his 'sickness'. It nearly got him put away when he was younger, but his adopted brother took the rap for that. But now the sickness that has been lying dormant for a while is about to surface again and the consequences are brutal and devastating. Tense and suspenseful, The Killer Inside Me is a brilliantly sustained masterpiece of the roman noir.
Because the Baptist minister's children in a small North Carolina town have difficulty conforming to the roles their father wishes them to play for public consumption, fifteen-year-old Neal feels he must hide his consuming interest in jazz music.
Roy Dillon is young, good-looking and devastatingly charming. He's also a completely amoral con man. Lily, his mother, works for the mob. Moira Langtry, Roy's mistress, is always looking for the main chance, and so is Carol Roberg, the nurse brought in to look after Roy when a bad choice of mark means he has an unfortunate encounter with a baseball bat and a bad case of internal bleeding. Together they make up a perverse quadrangle of love and greed in a coruscating novel of corruption.
Young, beautiful, and fearfully abused, Mona was the kind of girl even a hard man like Dillon couldn't bring himself to use. But when Mona told him about the vicious aunt who had turned her into something little better than a prostitute--and about the money the old lady has stashed away--Dillon found it surprisingly easy to kill for her.
The Manson looked like a respectable hotel; Dusty Rhodes looked like a selfless young man working as a bellhop; and the woman on the tenth floor who arrived on the midnight train looked like a slumming angel. But appearances can be deceptive - deceptive enough to lead to robbery, treachery and murder ...
Charlie Biggers comes to Pearsdale, Long Island, under the name Carl Bigelow, to stay at Jake Winroy's boarding house. Jake is recently out of jail, about to testify against some organized crime figures. In this story of shifting identity and organized crime, Jim Thompson takes the term "plot twist" to a new level.
Bill Collins is young, good looking, agile and strong but he's a drifter with mild multiple neuroses, in and out of institutions, and dangerously violent on occasion. When he gets involved with the hard-drinking Fay Anderson and the deceptively pleasant ex-police officer everyone knows as Uncle Bud in a ruthless kidnap plot, everything goes to hell in a hurry, and the end, for Bill, is inevitable and shattering. This is a tour de force of paranoia and violence from the master of the crime noir novel.
Sometimes a man and woman love and hate each other in equal measure that they can neither stay together nor break apart. Some marriages can only end in murder and some murders only make the ties of love and hatred stronger. This book proves just that.