James M Cain

In Mildred Pierce, noir master James M. Cain creates a novel of acute social observation and devasting emotional violence, with a heroine whose ambitions and sufferings are never less than recognizable.
Mildred Pierce had gorgeous legs, a way with a skillet, and a bone-deep core of toughness. She used those attributes to survive a divorce and poverty and to claw her way out of the lower middle class. But Mildred also had two weaknesses:...

An ambitious Reno salesman. A wealthy would-be divorcée. An insurance policy. It's a toxic combination in this noir thriller by an MWA Grand Master . . . If Las Vegas is a city of lovers, in Reno, the business is divorce. Six weeks in Reno can erase the darkest marriages, and the only question is how to pass the time-craps or roulette? Jane Delavan is a roulette woman, a stately beauty from back East who is too classy for the motel where she's...

A money-hungry ex-soldier in Civil War New Orleans is seduced into a web of treason and temptation in this novel by "one of the greats of American noir" (The Guardian). The Union has captured New Orleans, and Bill Cresap has come to reap the profits. A school friend has a line on some easy money, and Cresap is eager to make his fortune. But when he lands in the Crescent City, still nursing a leg wound from Chancellorsville, he finds that his friend...

Insurance salesman Walter Huff finds himself a partner in a plot to kill the wealthy husband of Phyllis Nirdlinger, the wife of one of his clients, and make it look like an accident so Phyllis can collect her husband's life insurance.

Grieving widow or black widow? The day Joan Medford buried her husband was a fateful one-because before the day was out she'd meet the two men who would change her life forever. Forced to take a job waitressing to support herself and her child, Joan finds herself caught between the handsome young schemer whose touch she comes to crave and the wealthy older man whose touch repels her…but who otherwise would make a tempting husband number two. It's...

A bank employee's wife teams up with his boss-with fatal results-in this noir novella by the legendary author of The Postman Always Rings Twice. Despite an ulcer that requires surgery, workaholic Charles Brent doesn't want to take time off from his job as a head teller at the bank. What eventually convinces him to give in and take a break is the prospect of his young wife, Sheila, temporarily taking over his responsibilities. Then, in Charles's...

A twisted tale of heinous crimes and hidden motives by the legendary author of Double Indemnity. Graham meets Sonya outside of his real estate office. She is sixteen, beautiful, and drops a bombshell-she's there because Graham's half-brother, Burl, raped her, leaving her frightened, pregnant, and very much alone. All she wants is the $1,111 it will cost to hide out for the next few months in a convalescent home before she gives the baby up for...

A down-on-his-luck boxing trainer finds a woman worth fighting for in this "assured" novel by an MWA Grand Master Award winner (Kirkus Reviews). It took some doing, but Duke Webster is out of prison. Val Valenty arranged the parole, and now the onetime prizefighter and boxing coach is his puppet, breaking his back on Valenty's farm in exchange for a pittance. But Valenty is about to find out that boxing men never take orders without a scrap. The...

For the love of a beautiful waitress, a meat salesman will turn butcher in this crime thriller by "one of the greats of American noir" (The Guardian). Clay Lockwood. is a top distributing executive with Grant's Meats, and the contract with the Portico restaurant chain is only the latest in a long line of boardroom coups. He arrives at the Portico for lunch, and eats his fill of his company's beef, but leaves with an entirely different hunger gnawing...

A Bad Woman (originally titled Sinful Woman) is James M. Cain's little gem of a hard-boiled novel, set in the post-War 1940s of Reno, Nevada. Film star Sylvia Shoreham is wowing the dusty gambling town and is hell-bent on divorcing her conniving user of a husband, a foreigner with a slick tongue and a heavy accent. But the husband has other ideas, threatening to marry Miss Shoreham's neurotic sister if she divorces him. Hollywood bigwigs want to keep...