'The new crime and espionage series from Penguin Classics makes for a mouth-watering prospect' Daily Telegraph Los Angeles, the late 1940's. A serial killer stalks the foggy streets at night ... Dix Steele, a former fighter pilot, moved to L.A. after the war, looking for a new life. But the city is gripped by fear of a murderer in its midst. Dix, however, is not scared. And when he bumps into his old friend Brub, now a detective on the trail of the culprit, he is excited to follow the police's progress. A dark and terrible truth is revealed, in a noir novel like no other.

Just as Hughes's earlier books had engaged with the political issues of the 1940s - the legacy of the Depression, and the struggles against fascism and rascism - so 'The Expendable Man', published in 1963 during Kennedy's presidency and set in Arizona, evokes the emerging social, racial and moral tensions of the time.

"It was surprising what old experiences remembered could do to a presumably educated, civilized man." And Hugh Denismore, a young doctor driving his mother's Cadillac from Los Angeles to Phoenix, is eminently educated and civilized. He is privileged, would seem to have the world at his feet, even. Then why does the sight of a few redneck teenagers disconcert him? Why is he reluctant to pick up a disheveled girl hitchhiking along the desert highway? And why is he the first person the police suspect when she is found dead in Arizona a few days later?
Dorothy B. Hughes ranks with Raymond Chandler and Patricia Highsmith as a master of mid-century noir. In books like" In a Lonely Place" and "Ride the Pink Horse" she exposed a seething discontent underneath the veneer of twentieth-century prosperity. With "The Expendable Man," first published in 1963, Hughes upends the conventions of the wrong-man narrative to deliver a story that engages readers even as it implicates them in the greatest of all American crimes.

Who killed Louie Lepetino? Was it Barby, with her silvery sheen of hair, looking like a top model and acting like a woman madly in love? Or the beautiful Toni, who is hiding some strange secrets? Could it be Otto, a handsome refugee, nicknamed Blue Eyes and an object of attraction for Barby? Kit, a cop's son, has come back to New York to track down his best buddy's killer. It had to be murder: Louie wasn't the suicidal type. One person stands in the way of his revenge - The Wobblefoot, his unseen nemesis from two terrible years spent in captivity during the Spanish Civil War. He is watching. One false step will mean curtains for Kit. But Kit is willing to take any risk for a friend - even murder in cold blood.

Espionage, adventure and a hard-boiled heroine not to be trifled with - this classic noir will have you gripped from start to finish Julie Guilles is in trouble. She's fled her home in Occupied France for a seedy neighbourhood in New York and has been laying low - but not low enough. Because now she has the Gestapo, the FBI and her shady Uncle, the Duc de Guille, all on her tail, and her options are running out. Whispers of the Blackbirder reach her - a sinister figure who, for the right price, can promise safe passage across the border to New Mexico. Finding the Blackbirder is her only chance of escape - but what if the Blackbirder doesn't want to be found? 'Dorothy B. Hughes ranks with Raymond Chandler and Patricia Highsmith as a master of mid-century noir' New York Review of Books

'Puts Chandler to shame ... Hughes is the master we keep turning to' Sara Paretsky After the war, cynical veteran Dix Steele has moved to L.A., a city terrified by a strangler preying on young women. Bumping into an old friend, now a detective working on the case, Dix is thrilled by closely following the progress of the police. And meeting his new neighbour, sultry and beautiful actress Laurel Gray, brings even more excitement into his life. But the strangler is still prowling the streets - and Laurel may be in more danger than she realises... In a Lonely Place was adapted for film in 1950, with Humphrey Bogart as Dix Steele.