Little Caesar

Hammett's first novel sends the nameless Continental Op into a mining town run by gangsters, where he turns the rival gangs against each other until the streets run red. This is the book that pushed pulp crime writing into literature.

Dashiell Hammett

Sam Spade takes a case from a client who lies about everything and ends up chasing a jewelled statuette that three sets of criminals will kill to own. The novel that fixed the private eye as an American archetype.

Dashiell Hammett

A stolen diamond pulls the Continental Op into a family convinced it is cursed, a fake religious cult and three separate waves of killings. Hammett at his strangest, and one of the few noir novels built as a triptych.

Dashiell Hammett

A drifter takes a job at a roadside diner and starts an affair with the owner's wife that turns into a plan to kill him. Cain wrote it in the flattest, fastest prose in the genre, and it never lets the reader look away.

James M Cain

An insurance salesman helps a client's wife stage her husband's death for the payout, then watches the scheme close around them both. A short, cold novel about how easily an expert turns his own expertise into a weapon.

James M Cain