We don't just look at buildings: their facades, beautiful or ugly, conceal the spaces where we live. We are born, work, love, and die in architecture. We buy and sell it, rent and squat it, create and destroy it. All of these aspects of buildings-economic, erotic, political, and psychological-are crucial if we are to understand architecture properly. And because architecture molds us just as much as we mold it, understanding architecture helps us to understand our lives and our world....

At the age of fourteen, György Köves is plucked from his home in a Jewish section of Budapest and, without any particular malice, placed on a train to Auschwitz. He does not understand the reason for his fate. He doesn’t particularly think of himself as Jewish. And his fellow prisoners, who decry his lack of Yiddish, keep telling him, “You are no Jew.” In the lowest circle of the Holocaust, György remains an outsider.The genius of Imre Kertész’s unblinking novel lies in its refusal...

It’s San Francisco, 1928, and Sam Spade is a wisecracking, womanising Private Investigator. Missing husbands and unfaithful wives are his usual stock-in-trade, but when the beautifully distressed Miss Wonderley calls he gets involved in a dangerous caper most people would run a mile from. Miss Wonderley asks Sam’s partner, Miles Archer, to shadow Floyd Thursby, whom she maintains has kidnapped her sister. But then Archer is shot dead, and Miss Wonderley’s story turns out to be a lie – just...

The godfather of the hard-boiled detective novel, Dashiell Hammett is widely acknowledged as one of America's greatest mystery writers. This collection brings together the BBC radio adaptations of his works for the first time, including the iconic The Maltese Falcon featuring his most famous character: Sam Spade.The Maltese FalconSan Francisco, 1928. When his partner is murdered on an assignment, private detective Sam Spade is drawn into a ...

Five BBC Radio 4 full-cast crime dramas featuring DI Charlie Resnick'John Harvey is one of the all-time greats and remains one of my favourite writers.' - Ian RankinJazz-loving policeman Charlie Resnick is one of the most popular characters in contemporary crime fiction. This thrilling collection brings together three dramatisations and two original radio stories starring the Nottingham-based detective, all scripted by his creator,...

Tautly narrated and excruciatingly suspenseful, Double Indemnity gives us an X-ray view of guilt, of duplicity, and of the kind of obsessive, loveless love that devastates everything it touches. First published in 1936, this novel reaffirmed James M. Cain as a virtuoso of the roman noir.Performed by James Naughton

When Sam Spade gets drawn into the Maltese Falcon case, we know what to expect: straight talk, hard questions, no favors, and no way for anyone to get underneath the protective shell he wears like a second skin. We know that his late partner, Miles Archer, was a son of a bitch; that Spade is sleeping with Archer’s wife, Iva; that his tomboyish secretary, Effie Perine, is the only innocent in his life. What we don’t know is how Spade became who he is. Spade & Archer completes the p...

Here's Mickey Spillane and Mike Hammer in their roughest and readiest—a double-strength shot of sex, violence, and action that is vintage Spillane all the way. It's a tough-guy mystery to please even the most bloodthirsty of fans!

No dame is pretty with a gun in her hand. But at least this one was alive. The last time Mike Hammer met up with a blonde she ended up dead, and Hammer inherited a war with the Mob. As he digs deeper, he discovers that about fifteen years ago the Mafia had been double crossed. Now, people are dying because of it and the girl with the gun is a crucial witness in the case. While Hammer's enemies are searching the city for him, he is ready to go after them. Along the way, he'll find out just ...

If any writer can be said to have inherited the mantel of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, it was Ross Macdonald. Between the late 1940s and his death in 1983, he gave the American crime novel a psychological depth and moral complexity that his predecessors had only hinted at. And in the character of Lew Archer, Macdonald redefined the private eye as a roving conscience who walks the treacherous frontier between criminal guilt and human sin.A hard-faced woman clad in a blue m...

Meeting an anonymous client late on a sizzling summer night is asking for trouble. But trouble is Chicago private eye V. I. Warshawski's specialty. Her client says he's the prominent banker John Thayer. Turns out he's not. He says his son's girlfriend, Anita Hill, is missing. Turns out that's not her real name.V. I.'s search turns up someone soon enough—the real John Thayer's son, and he's dead. Who's V. I.'s client? Why has she been set up and sent out on a wild-goose chase? By th...

The second novel in The Raj Quartet: the arrest by British police of Mohammed Ali Kasim, who is known to sympathise with the Quit India movement, signifies a further deterioration in Anglo-India relations. For families such as the Laytons, who have lived and served in India for generations, the immediate social and political realities are both disturbing and tragic. With growing confusion and bewilderment, the British are forced to confront the violent and often brutal years that lie ahead...