Bücher der Reihe Vintage Crime/Black Lizard Ann

Raymond Chandler's first novel, published in 1939, introduces the now-immortal Philip Marlowe, archetypal hard boiled detective and weary knight of the seamy side of the City of Angels in the 1930s. 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. But with Sternwood's two wild, devil-may-care daughters prowling LA's seedy backstreets, Marlowe's got his work cut out -- and that's before he stumbles over the first corpse.

"When Frank, an amoral young drifter, gets thrown off a hay truck in the California desert, he ends up at a diner run by Cora and her inconvenient husband, Nick. This chance meeting puts them all on a sure path to perdition. First published in 1934 and banned in Boston for its explosive mixture of violence and eroticism, The Postman Always Rings Twice is a classic of the roman noir. It established James M. Cain as a major novelist with an unsparing vision of America's bleak underside and was acknowledged by Albert Camus as the model for The Stranger." -- provided by publisher.

"On Valentine's Day, four members of the Coverdale family were murdered in the space of fifteen minutes. Their housekeeper, Eunice Parchman, shot them one by one in the blue light of a televised performance of Don Giovanni. When the police arrest Miss Parchman two weeks later, they discover a second tragedy: the key to the Valentine's Day massacre, a private humiliation Eunice Parchman has guarded all her life"--