Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.

The 6th and 7th Squads team up to rescue the abducted Yuuki, kidnapped by a humanoid Shuuki...who turns out to be his long-lost sister Aoba. Upon learning about their situation, Yuuki tries to convince his sister to let go of her hostility toward the Demon Defense Force, but their conflicting ideals lead to a fierce battle between the two siblings!

The Literary Mirroring of Aboriginal Australia and the Caribbean challenges the structural opposition of indigeneity and creolisation through a historical and literary analysis of the connections between the 'First and Last of the New Worlds': Australia and the Caribbean. Dashiell Moore explores the continuities between indigenous and creole lifeworlds in the work of renowned Caribbean writers such as Édouard Glissant, Wilson Harris, Sylvia Wynter, and Kamau Brathwaite, and prominent Aboriginal Australian writers including Alexis Wright, Ali Cobby Eckermann, and Lionel Fogarty. Common to these authors is their reimagining of the inter-colonial other as a mirror image. This image, achieved through opacity and projection, visualises in creative ways both the movement to indigenisation in post-independence Caribbean literature and the inter-indigenous encounters of Aboriginal Australian literature. By upending the antipodean relationship of the Caribbean and Australia, this groundbreaking study offers radically new perspectives on the world generated by literary relation.

Sam Spade is hired by the fragrant Miss Wonderley to track down her sister, who has eloped with a louse called Floyd Thursby. But Miss Wonderley is in fact the beautiful and treacherous Brigid O'Shaughnessy, and when Spade's partner Miles Archer is shot while on Thursby's trail, Spade finds himself both hunter and hunted: can he track down the jewel-encrusted bird, a treasure worth killing for, before the Fat Man finds him? THE AUTHOR B.1894, d.1961. After spells as newsboy, freight clerk, labourer, messenger, stevedore and advertising manager, Hammett became an operative of the Pinkerton Detective Agency. His experiences as a private detective laid the foundation for his writing career.

The Deer is a rhythmic, surrealist psychological thriller about a physicist who hits-what appears-to be a deer. As he returns from the scene of the accident to his childhood home, long-forgotten memories flood his consciousness, and he must come to terms with the fact that his past, and reality as he knows it, are not what they appear. Part experimental film, part jazz record, but always lyrical, luminous, and austere, The Deer is a poignant meditation on familial love, loss, and the mystery at the heart of existence.

'An acknowledged literary landmark' [Robert Graves] from 'The dean of the school of hard-boiled fiction' [New York Times] The Continental Op first heard Personville called Poisonville by Hickey Dewey. But since Dewey also called a shirt a shoit, he didn't think anything of it. Until he went there and his client, the only honest man in Poisonville, was murdered. Then the Op decided to stay to punish the guilty. And that meant taking on the entire town...

As the members of the wealthy Yamatsukami family are murdered one by one, Hinako, Chiyo, and Narumi stumble upon a crop of roses growing deep in the mountains. Flowers with the same cloying fragrance as those grown by the Virginal Rose cult... There, Narumi and company also find a collapsed woman...who turns her unusual powers against them! The Yamatsukami arc finally draws to a close!

When the last honest citizen of Poisonville was murdered, the Continental Op stayed on to punish the guilty--even if that meant taking on an entire town. Red Harvest is more than a superb crime novel: it is a classic exploration of corruption and violence in the American grain.

With his diamond-sharp prose and artfully handled intrigue, Dashiell Hammett virtually invented hard-boiled crime fiction. This omnibus edition includes four linked stories - 'The House in Turk Street', 'The Girl with the Silver Eyes', 'The Big Knockover' and '$106,000 Blood Money - featuring the Continental Op, Hammett's anonymous tough-guy detective. In The Dain Curse, the Op takes on a wealthy young woman who appears to be the victim of a deadly family curse. And in The Glass Key - Hammett's own favourite among his works - we encounter his most cynical, morally ambiguous hero and a hard-boiled version of a love triangle. In the works collected here, we can observe the process by which Hammett both stripped crime fiction down to its most subtle and searing essentials and elevated it to high literature.

The last novel from the unsurpassed master of American detective fiction, Dashiell Hammett's The Thin Man is a genre-defining mystery novel, published in Penguin Modern Classics. Ex-detective Nick Charles plans to spend a quiet Christmas holed up in a hotel suite with his glamorous wife Nora, their pet Schnauzer and a case of good Scotch. But then a bullet-riddled corpse and a missing inventor (not to mention the attentions of a beautiful young woman) force him out of retirement and back into business. Trying to make sense of false leads, suspicious alibis and mistaken identities, Nick and Nora are thrown into a world of gangsters, hoodlums and speakeasies, where no-one can be trusted. Dashiell Hammett was credited with inventing the hardboiled crime novel, and this story of murder and mayhem in Manhattan, with its breakneck plot, snappy dialogue - and the hard-drinking, wisecracking couple Nick and Nora - is one of his most thrillingly enjoyable mysteries. Dashiel Samuel Hammett (1894-1961) was born on a farm in southern Maryland, and grew up in Philadelphia and Baltimore. He left school at the age of fourteen, and after various jobs became an operative for Pinkerton's Detective Agency. The First World War intervened, and Hammett soon turned to writing, becoming, during the 1920s, the unquestioned master of detective-story fiction in America. The Maltese Falcon (1930), The Thin Man (1932) and The Glass Key (1931) are among his most famous novels. If you enjoyed The Thin Man, you might like Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep and Other Novels, also available in Penguin Modern Classics. 'The ace performer' Raymond Chandler, author of The Big Sleep 'The exuberance of language, the relish with which seediness is described ... it's a pleasure to imagine Hammett cutting loose with whatever rascally high jinks he could cook up' Margaret Atwood, author of The Blind Assassin

'When I opened my eyes and sat up in bed Nora was shaking me and a man with a gun in his hand was standing in the bedroom doorway.' Ex-detective Nick Charles attracts trouble like a magnet. He thinks his sleuthing days are over, but when Julia Wolf, a former acquaintance, is found dead, her body riddled with bullets, Nick - along with his glamorous wife, Nora - can't resist making a few enquiries. Clyde Miller Wynant, Julia's lover and boss, has disappeared. Everyone is after him, but Nick is not convinced Wynant is the murderer - and when he finds a junked-up hoodlum with a careless attitude to guns in his bedroom, it's only the beginning of his troubles.

As an operative for Pinkerton's Detective Agency Dashiell Hammett knew about sleuthing from the inside, but his career was cut short by the ruin of his health in World War I. These three celebrated novels are therefore the products of a hard real life, not a literary education. Despite - or because of - that, Hammett had an enormous effect on mainstream writers between the wars. Like his readers, they were attracted by the combination of laconic style, sharp convincing dialogue, vivid settings and, above all, the low-life, hard-boiled characters who populate the streets of his stories. Taking detective fiction out of the drawing-room, Hammett 'gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it', as Raymond Chandler said. In so doing, he left his mark on modern fiction.

Nick and Nora Charles are Hammett's most enchanting creations, a rich, glamorous couple who solve homicides in between wisecracks and martinis. At once knowing and unabashedly romantic, The Thin Man is a murder mystery that doubles as a sophisticated comedy of manners.