There are sinners, and there are saints. Some folks are one, some the other. NOIR QUARTET: Sinners & Saints presents four tales of mystery and crime from the grim and shadowy netherworld of 'Noir'. Join the lovers and cheaters, the crooks and killers, the innocent and guilty while they prowl dark alleys and dance halls, nightclubs and nightmares searching for their own slice of heaven, but only holding hands on their way to hell. Yes, there are sinners and there are saints. But, which one are you? Whodunits? Not so much. The Noir Quartet series of short story collections by C.J. Thomas are compact reads offering four dark tales of murder, mystery and more, set in the 'then' and the 'now', celebrating classic Noir tropes and then reimagining them in fresh settings.

Ranging from Japanese silent films and women's films to French, Hong Kong, and Nordic New Waves, this book explores the influence of noir on international cinematic traditions and challenges prevailing film scholarship. It includes extensive bibliography and filmographies for recommended reading and viewing.

James Ellroy: Demon Dog of Crime Fiction is a study of all of Ellroy's key works, from his debut novel Brown's Requiem to the epic Underworld USA trilogy. This book traces the development of Ellroy's writing style and the importance of his Demon Dog persona to carving out his unique place in American crime fiction.

A rape. A war. A society where women are bought and sold but no one can speak of shame. Shanghai 1937. Violence throbs at the heart of The Dancing Girl and the Turtle.Song Anyi is on the road to Shanghai and freedom when she is raped and left for dead. The silence and shamethat mark her courageous survival drive her to escalating self-harm and prostitution. From opium dens to high- class brothels, Anyi dances on the edge of destruction while China prepares for war with Japan. Hers is the voice of every woman who fights for independence against overwhelming odds.The Dancing Girl and the Turtle is one of four interlocking novels set in Shanghai from 1929 to 1954. Through the eyes of the dancer, Song Anyi, and her brother Kang, the Shanghai Quartet spans a tumultuous time in Chinese history: war with the Japanese, the influx of stateless Jews into Shanghai, civil war and revolution. How does the love of a sister destroy her brother and all those around him?

Here in one volume is James Ellroy's first great body of work, an epic re-envisioning of postwar Los Angeles--etched in red and black and film-noir grays. The Black Dahlia depicts the secret infrastructure of L.A.'s most sensational murder case. A young cop morphs into obsessed lover and lust-crazed avenger. The Dahlia claims him. She is the deus ex machina of a boomtown in extremis. The cop's rogue investigation is a one-way ticket to hell. The Big Nowhere blends the crime novel and the political novel. It is winter, 1950--and the L.A. County Grand Jury is out to slam movieland Reds. It's a reverential shuck--and the three cops assigned to the job are out to grab all the glory they can. A series of brutal sex killings intervenes, and the job goes all-the-way bad. L.A. Confidential is the great novel of Los Angeles in the 1950s. Political corruption. Scandal-rag journalism. Bad racial juju and gangland wars. Six local stiffs slaughtered in an all-night hash house. The glorious and overreaching LAPD on an unprecedented scale. White Jazz gives us the tortured confession of a corrupt cop going down for the count. He's a slumlord, a killer, a parasitic exploiter. He's a pawn in a series of police power plays and starting to see that he's being had. He's just met a woman. Thus, he's determined to claw his way out of the horrifying world he's created--and he's determined to tell us everything. The L.A. Quartet is a groundbreaking work of American popular fiction.

Bobbie passes the one-time speakeasy on her way to and from an endless series of pointless job interviews that go nowhere. It's the mid-1960's, she's out of work and fellows seem to get all the 'real' jobs. Bobbie's degree doesn't count for much when all that's available is a waitress' uniform or carting a cocktail tray around a bar...a very peculiar bar. In a decaying old nightclub on a deserted block, the lights fade into deep purple shadows to hide decades of secrets. There's a whiff of something lavender in the smoky haze, glasses clinking at empty tables and a beautiful face staring back at her from the mirror behind the bar...with violet eyes. Figures emerge from the lilac fog: A man in black at a piano, a woman in orchid at a microphone, so real that Bobbie can almost hear them beckoning for her to join them. It's said that some have done just that. But some have vanished, some have even died...and Bobbie may be next. Welcome to Violet's.

CHICAGO, 1959: Big news a few months back when the press dubbed her "The Stiletto Gumshoe", Sharon Gardner (Real name? Sasha Garodnowicz, not that she'd ever tell you) struggles to get by on odd jobs for neighborhood insurance brokers. The ink's barely dry on her temporary P.I. license when Sharon lands her first real paying client, a missing person case that promptly leads her to a crew of out-of-work "fashion models" running a small time con. Till they tried to take down the wrong person, that is, and now the grifters are getting killed, the missing person doesn't want to be found, and Sharon's suddenly trapped between the cops, the mob and a dangerous old nemesis who'd love to see her dead. Sharon's never asked for much, just a comfy perch atop a cocktail lounge barstool, a tall cool highball and a twirl or two on a dance floor (or something, if the mood's right) with a real looker. After all, some people are just lovers. But some are killers. And Sharon's about to discover if maybe, she's a little of both. Lovers And Killers is the follow-up to Sharon Gardner's debut in The Stiletto Gumshoe, and once again gives a nod and a wink to 1950's/1960's private eye series, swapping that era's many iconic hard-boiled P.I.'s for a memorable, streetwise twenty-two year old just struggling to get by in Chicago's ethnic blue-collar bungalow rows. It's a mid-twentieth century man's world that may be right on the cusp of big social changes, but definitely isn't there yet!

CHICAGO, 1959: Meet Sharon Gardner (Real name? Sasha Garodnowicz, not that she'd ever tell you), more at home atop a cocktail lounge barstool than an office's steno chair. Still, what she really needs is a job. Any job. So, when she lands behind the reception desk at a one-man private detective firm, for double the money she's used to and working for a handsome charmer straight out of the lurid crime magazines she devours on the sly, it almost seems too good to be true. Because, of course, it is. Soon enough, vicious thugs with badges have her on the run in the south-side's dark alleys and bungalow rows, where Sharon's suddenly swept up in a deadly extortion scheme and widespread civic corruption. People have been murdered, and she just might be next. But it's tough to chase crooks and killers when you're running in heels. The Stiletto Gumshoe gives a nod to 1950's/1960's private eye series, swapping that era's many iconic hard-drinking, hard-fighting, hard-loving, hard-boiled P.I.'s for a memorable, streetwise twenty-two year old just struggling to get by in a mid-twentieth century man's world that may be right on the cusp of big social changes, but definitely isn't there yet!

Vienna 1913: The capital of a sprawling empire, Vienna is also one of the world’s most cultured and vibrant cities. It’s a city devoted to the swank//grand pursuit of life’s pleasures. But suddenly, the city is shaken when a vicious serial killer who targets young, attractive women starts a reign of terror. And leaves no useful clues behind. Before long, residents of Vienna are terrified that their city has spawned its own Jack the Ripper. Assigned to the case are two of Vienna’s top police inspectors, Julian Stebbel and Karl-Heinz Dörfner. Both excellent detectives, Stebbel and Dörfner also form an engaging odd couple. Another snag, besides this team’s unstable chemistry, is the fact that this is 1913, when fingerprinting is still a crude forensics tool in its infancy and the typewriter is a high-tech contraption most Viennese try to avoid where possible. The methodology of Stebbel and Dörfner is, of necessity, much closer to Sherlock Holmes’ than it is to the work of modern CSI teams with all the tools of modern crime-fighting at their disposal. So will these crack Viennese detectives be able to take down this killer before he adds more innocent victims to his gruesome list? With pressure being steadily applied on them by politicians, an unforgiving press corps and their superiors in the police department, Stebbel and Dörfner must finally call upon the skills of two real-life figures who were actually living and working in Vienna at that time: Sigmund Freud, the most famous psychiatrist in the world; and another, even more unlikely hero, a young artist toiling in obscurity who will later achieve even greater fame than Freud – albeit in a field other than art.

Peasants, religious heretics, witches, pirates, runaway slaves, prostitutes and pornographers, frequenters of taverns and fraternal society lodge rooms, revolutionaries, blues and jazz musicians, beats, and contemporary youth gangs--those who defied authority, choosing to live outside the defining cultural dominions of early insurgent and, later, dominant capitalism are what Bryan D. Palmer calls people of the night. These lives of opposition, or otherness, were seen by the powerful as deviant, rejecting authority, and consequently threatening to the established order. Constructing a rich historical tapestry of example and experience spanning eight centuries, Palmer details lives of exclusion and challenge, as the "night travels" of the transgressors clash repeatedly with the powerful conventions of their times. Nights of liberation and exhilarating desire--sexual and social--are at the heart of this study. But so too are the dangers of darkness, as marginality is coerced into corners of pressured confinement, or the night is used as a cover for brutalizing terror, as was the case in Nazi Germany or the lynching of African Americans. Making extensive use of the interdisciplinary literature of marginality found in scholarly work in history, sociology, cultural studies, literature, anthropology, and politics, Palmer takes an unflinching look at the rise and transformation of capitalism as it was lived by the dispossessed and those stamped with the mark of otherness.