Penguin Modern Classics – Crime & Espionage

A preacher called Deke O'Malley's been selling false hope: the promise of a glorious new life in Africa for just $1,000 a family. But when thieves with machine guns steal the proceeds - and send one man to the morgue - the con is up. Now Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed, highly unorthodox and gun-happy detectives, mean to bring the good people of Harlem back their $87,000, however many corpses they have to climb over to get it.

Cotton Comes to Harlem is a non-stop ride, with violence, sex, double-crosses, and the two baddest detectives ever to wear a badge in Harlem.

When Maude Slocum - beautiful, frightened and angry - comes to Lew Archer's office with a poison pen letter intended for her husband, he reluctantly agrees to help her. As he follows the Slocums around, Archer finds that Mrs Slocum might have the least of the family's troubles: her teenage daughter is desolate, her husband is in the closet and her mother-in-law has just come to an unpleasant end in the swimming pool. But why is their handsome ex-chauffeur still hanging around? And what does the sinister Pacific Refinery Company have to do with the all the bloodshed?

Marion Sharpe and her mother are quiet and ordinary villagers, enjoying a peaceful life in their country home, the Franchise. Everything changes when a local schoolgirl accuses them of kidnap and abuse, describing the attic room of the house as her prison. Scotland Yard inspector Alan Grant is called to solve the mystery of the Franchise, but will he fall right in the middle of nightmarish affair that will change a town, and its locals' lives, forever?

After the war, cynical veteran Dix Steele has moved to L.A., a city terrified by a strangler preying on young women. Bumping into an old friend, now a detective working on the case, Dix is thrilled by closely following the progress of the police. And meeting his new neighbour, sultry and beautiful actress Laurel Gray, brings even more excitement into his life. But the strangler is still prowling the streets - and Laurel may be in more danger than she realises...

It is 1940 and Mr Graham, a quietly-spoken engineer and arms expert, has just finished high-level talks with the Turkish government. And now somebody wants him dead. The previous night three shots were fired at him as he stepped into his hotel room, so, terrified, he escapes in secret on a passenger steamer from Istanbul. As he journeys home - alongside, among others, an entrancing French dancer, an unkempt trader, a mysterious German doctor and a small, brutal man in a crumpled suit - he enters a nightmarish world where friend and foe are indistinguishable. Graham can try to run, but he may not be able to hide for much longer...

The discovery of a dismembered body in the Canal Saint Martin leads Maigret into a tangled, baffling case involving a taciturn bistro-owner and a mysterious inheritance. This is a matchless description of a harsh, grim part of Paris a long way from the tourist trail, and a perfect example of Maigret's forensic police-work.

'What kind of a man would have his fingers tattooed that way? ... What kind of a man? What kind of a preacher?'

One of the great chase novels, The Night of the Hunter centres on the ferocious, unforgettable figure of Preacher, a psychopath who relentlessly pursues two children who may or may not know the secret of where the money from a bank raid is hidden.

Set in a brilliantly rendered Depression-era American river town, Grubb's novel is both a study of innocence and evil and a savage picture of human failings as, one by one, the adults who have it in their power to protect the children fall for Preacher's wiles.

It is 1941 and Germany has won the war. Britain is occupied, Churchill executed and the King imprisoned in the Tower of London. At Scotland Yard, Detective Inspector Archer tries to do his job and keep his head down. But when a body is found in a Mayfair flat, what at first appears to be a routine murder investigation sends him into a world of espionage, deceit and betrayal.

Judge Dee is again in relentless pursuit of evil in one of van Gulik's most strange, atmospheric and ingenious murder mysteries. Set in a remote, freezing part of China, the novel twists together a girl's disappearance, the theft of some jewels and a horrifying beheading. And, just to make things worse, there seems to be some link with these events and a 'Seven Board', a popular game in the region.

There are so many pleasures in the Judge Dee stories. Van Gulik was a great connoisseur of Tang Dynasty China and he brings this expertise to bear brilliantly in The Chinese Nail Murders.

Sailor, former henchman and trouble-accruing gangster, travels from Chicago to Santa Fe, New Mexico, looking for revenge and for money. But it's hard to make a dishonest buck when everything seems to be against him. It is Fiesta, it is hot, thousands of people are crowding into town, Sailor has nowhere to stay, the odds are stacked against him - and some important and very violent people are in town, only one of whom he wants to meet. Heat-struck and high-energy, one of Hughes’ most brilliant novels, Ride the Pink Horse transplants noir to an America of vivid colours and bright sunlight, with startling results.

Charlie Heller is a cryptographer not a spy, let alone an assassin. But the murder of his fiancée and the failure of the CIA to follow up on the case makes everything different. Heller uses his contacts to get behind the Iron Curtain himself and to pursue the three men who killed her. A richly enjoyable thriller about a man with no spy craft taking on the spy world, it demands how far a dangerous game can be played - if a man only knows the rules. Can this amateur outwit his enemies, both in the Warsaw Pact and in the CIA itself?

One balmy spring evening on the outskirts of Milan, a Fiat with two passengers plunges into a canal. At first, their deaths are registered as an accident. But the suave Duca Lamberti, a doctor-turned-detective, suspects there’s more to it than that. Because that same canal has been the scene of other deaths, and all the incidents have one man in a lawyer with a murky past stretching all the way back to World War II—a man who, in fact, once shared a prison cell with Lamberti. Winner of the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière in 1968, Traitors to All lays bare the connections between Milan’s troubled history during the war and its swinging sixties affluence, as well as an utterly absorbing tale of betrayal and revenge.

Decoded tells the story of Rong Jinzhwen, one of the great code-breakers in the world. A mathematical genius, Jinzhen is recruited to the cryptography department of China's secret services, Unit 701, where he is assigned the task of breaking the elusive 'Code Purple'. Jinzhen rises through the ranks to eventually become China's greatest and most celebrated code-breaker; until he makes a mistake. Then begins his descent through the unfathomable darkness of the world of cryptology into madness.

Decoded was an immediate success when it was published in 2002 in China. Taking place in the shadowy world of Chinese secret security, where Mai Jia worked for decades, it introduces us to a place that is unfamiliar, intriguing and authentic. And with Rong Jinzhen, a character who is deeply flawed yet possessing exceptional intelligence, it tells a gripping story of genius, brilliance, insanity and human frailty.

Hidden deep in the mountains, the recruits at 'Unit 701', China's secret services, operate in a dark, shadowy world. There is the 'wind-listener', a blind surveillance officer who can hear sounds from miles away; the beautiful, unstable maths genius who meets a violent end; the old man who deciphers codes in his dreams; the spy who recounts a dangerous mission from beyond the grave.

In this story of conspiracies, geniuses, revolutionaries and terrible moral choices, people sacrifice everything for a world of secrets - until, ultimately, it destroys them.