James M Cain

"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: a yen for shiftless men, and an unreasoning devotion to a monstrous daughter. Out of these elements, Cain creates a novel of acute social observation and devastating emotional violence, with a heroine whose ambitions...

A rerelease of a classic tale by the New Yorker journalist and author of The Postman Always Rings. Following her husband's death in a suspicious car accident, beautiful young widow Joan Medford is forced to take a job serving drinks in a cocktail lounge to make ends meet and to have a chance of regaining custody of her young son. At the job she encounters two men who take an interest in her, a handsome young schemer who makes her blood race and a...

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 collection of stories, both early and late, that show how James M. Cain made his name There is a hungry tiger loose in the house, and that is not good news for anyone. A jealous husband let the animal out of his cage hoping he would eat his wife alive, but tigers aren't used to taking orders. This jungle cat will get his meal, and he doesn't care where it comes from. "The Baby in the Icebox" begins with a murdered wildcat and ends with a dead human-and...

While searching for her real father, a runaway stumbles into a deadly mess in this gritty noir novel by the author of The Postman Always Rings Twice. With just seventy-four bucks in her pocket, Mandy packs her things and buys the bus ticket that will get her away from the stepfather who's been abusing her for years-and the mother who lets it happen. She plans to head to Baltimore and find her biological father-someone she hopes will finally stand...

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 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

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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 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 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...