Stanley Donen’s Charade, released in 1963, is a deft, light, and witty thriller starring Audrey Hepburn at her most glamorous opposite a seasoned and mature Cary Grant.Hepburn plays Regina “Reggie” Lampert, a woman dissatisfied with her wealthy but secretive husband, whom she’s decided to divorce. At a skiing resort in the French Alps, she meets the dashing Peter Joshua (Cary Grant).Both Reggie and Peter fly back to Paris on the same day. Reggie fi...

Eye of the Beholder is a cult classic that inspired both French and English film adaptations. Joanne Eris has a bad habit of marrying men that wind up dead. An unnamed private detective, simply known as "The Eye" is hired to investigate the death of her husband. The novel charts the development of the detective's dangerous obsession with a femme fatale, as he pursues her across the United States.

Considered a modern classic in France, Afraid to Death is a chilling psychological thriller with a hallucinogenic quality. Joe Egan is on the run. A mysterious blonde appears to him whenever someone close to him dies. He lives his life in fear of her, but at the same time develops a strange fascination with her. Who is the blonde woman? Is she a figment of his imagination, the angel of death, or even the devil incarnate?

"Insanely evocative and extremely satisfying." — The Times (UK)Joe Egan has spent his life on the run. When he was a child, he thought he saw the angel of death. Now every time someone close to him dies, a mysterious blonde woman appears and he's forced to retreat, abandoning jobs and relationships in a never-ending flight across a hallucinatory version of the United States. Is the woman real, a figment of his imagination, or a supernatural apparition — perhaps even the de...

"One of the most remarkable combinations of a private-eye novel and psychological suspense story, with an entirely new slant, that has ever been published." — The New York Times Book ReviewAt the center of this genre-bending tale of sex, death, and parental love is a private investigator known as The Eye, who has been seeking his missing daughter for many years. In the course of his search, he encounters a mysterious femme fatale who routinely attracts, robs, and murders w...

Charade is a 1963 American romantic screwball comedy mystery film, shot on location in Paris, produced and directed by Stanley Donen, written by Peter Stone and Marc Behm, and starring Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn. The cast also features Walter Matthau, James Coburn, George Kennedy, Dominique Minot, Ned Glass and Jacques Marin. It spans three genres: suspense thriller, romance and comedy. Charade was praised by critics for its screenplay and the chemistry between Grant and Hepburn. The fo...

This "impressive crime anthology" presents a century of American greed, crime and comeuppance by some of the genre's greatest authors ( Publishers Weekly, starred review).James Ellroy, the author of such noir classics as The Black Dahlia and L.A. Confidential, joins forces with award-winning editor Otto Penzler to present this treasure trove of stories. Ranging from the 1920s to the present day, this collection represents noir at its best...

THE MAN FROM THE SOUTHIt was getting on toward six o'clock so I thought I'd buy myself a beer and go out and sit in a deck chair by the swimming pool and have a little evening sun.I went to the bar and got the beer and carried it outside and wandered down the garden toward the pool.It was a fine garden with lawns and beds of azaleas and tall coconut palms, and the wind was blowing s...

This original anthology of noir fiction set across the Big Easy includes new stories by Ace Atkins, Laura Lippman, Maureen Tan, and more.New Orleans has always the home of the lovable rogue, the poison magnolia, the bent politico, and the heartless con artist. And in post-Katrina times, it's the same old story—only with a new breed of carpetbagger thrown in. In other words, it's fertile ground for noir fiction. This sparkling col...

“The Walt Whitman of Los Angeles.”—Joyce Carol Oates, bestselling author“He brought everybody down to earth, even the angels.”—Leonard Cohen, songwriterMockingbird Wish Me Luck captures glimpses of Charles Bukowski's view on life through his poignant poetry: the pain, the hate, the love, and the beauty. He writes of lechery and pain while finding still being able to find its beauty.This is the gutter and the stars, seen through the bottom of a glass.

Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac, known as Jack Kerouac, was an American novelist and poet who, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, was a pioneer of the Beat Generation. Of French-Canadian ancestry, Kerouac was raised in a French-speaking home in Lowell, Massachusetts. He "learned English at age six and spoke with a marked accent into his late teens." During World War II, he served in the United States Merchant Marine; he completed his first novel at the time, which was publishe...

From the lamppost something was hanging. A shapeless dark bundle, swinging a little with the wind. Like a dummy of some sort. Loyce rolled down his window and peered out. What the hell was it? A display of some kind? Sometimes the Chamber of Commerce put up displays in the square.