Following her husband's death in an accident, beautiful young widow Joan Medford is forced to take a job serving drinks in a cocktail lounge to make ends meet. At the job she encounters two men who take an interest in her, a handsome young schemer and a wealthy but unwell older man who rewards her for her attentions with a $50,000 tip and an unconventional offer of marriage...

All three books are written with an enduring view of the dark corners of the American psyche. Cain hammered high art out of the crude matter of betrayal, bloodshed, and perversity.

'One of the great crime novels of all time' Tony Parsons, Express 'Nobody has ever quite pulled it off the way Cain does, not Hemingway, and not even Raymond Chandler' Tom Wolfe 'It is no accident that movies based on three [of Cain's novels] helped to define the genre known as film noir' NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS 'The most starkly elemental thing that has been written for years' EVENING STANDARD The torrid story of Frank Chambers, the amoral drifter, Cora, the sullen and brooding wife, and Nick Papadakis, the amiable but inconvenient husband, has become a classic of its kind, and established Cain as a major novelist with a spare and vital prose style and a bleak vision of America.

'Cain was not just a great hard-boiled novelist but a great novelist, period ... To read MILDRED PIERCE now is to experience a double vision, in which we confront both how much and how little things have changed' LA TIMES 'Vivid, gritty, real...this is crime writing at its very best' MY WEEKLY Mildred Pierce is the story of a determined and ambitious woman who, after her feckless husband abandons her, by hard work and sacrifice builds a successful business to ensure the future of her pampered and selfish daughter. But she isn't prepared for the intrigues and devastating betrayals of those closest to her. This is James M. Cain's most substantial novel and a classic of the Depression years.

Tautly narrated and excruciatingly suspenseful, Double Indemnity gives us an X-ray view of guilt, of duplicity, and of the kind of obsessive, loveless love that devastates everything it touches. First published in 1935, this novel reaffirmed James M. Cain as a virtuoso of the roman noir.

Additional Authors Include Gerald V. Stamm, Paul C. Greene, And Dan D. Howe.

In these never-before-published interviews, the author of Double Indemnity, The Postman Always Rings Twice, and Mildred Pierce discusses his first notions to be a writer, his newspaper days, his Hollywood years, and Marilyn Monroe with brutal honesty and in a tone and vernacular that only a master like Cain could command. Also in this critical, tell-it-like-it-is study, Cain reveals his thoughts on Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Arthur Miller, Hammett, Chandler, and, in his eighty-fifth year, what he planned for his future. Packed and Loaded is James M. Cain "unplugged," at his finest. The manuscript is seasoned with original epigraphs about this major American writer from masters like Elmore Leonard, Sue Grafton, Robert B. Parker, Dennis Lehane, Peter Lovesey, Phil Lovesey, Edward D. Hoch, Katherine Hall Page, Robin Moore, William G. Tapply, and the grand master of mystery himself, Rex Stout.

John McAleer graduated from Harvard University with a Ph.D. in English Literature and was the author of over a dozen books, including an Edgar Award-winning biography of Rex Stout. He was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Emerson. He wrote critically-acclaimed studies of Thoreau and Dreiser, as well as a definitive novel on the Korean War, Unit Pride.

'Cain has established a formidable reputation of furious pace, harsh and masterful realism, tough, raw speech right out of the mouths of the people' SATURDAY REVIEW Serenade is the story of the eternal triangle - with a difference. John Howard Sharp is an American opera singer down on his luck, having just bombed in Rigoletto in Mexico City when he first encounters the beautiful Mexican-Indian prostitute called Juana. Miraculously, she offers him the chance to rebuild his career in Hollywood and New York but then Winston Hawes, the young, rich and well-connected conductor who had first launched Sharp, comes back into his life with terrible consequences.

DOUBLE INDEMNITY is the classic tale of an evil woman motivated by greed who corrupts a weak man motivated by lust. Walter Huff is an insurance investigator like any other until the day he meets the beautiful and dangerous Phyllis Nirdlinger and falls under her spell. Together they plot to kill her husband and split the insurance. It'll be the perfect murder ... THE AUTHOR James M. Cain was born in Annapolis, Maryland, in 1892. Having served in the US Army in World War 1, he became a journalist in Baltimore and New York in the 1920's. He later worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood. Cain died in 1977

Seventeen hardboiled crime stories from the "poet of the tabloid murder" and author of Double Indemnity (Edmund Wilson). They call him Lucky-but he has never had a lucky day in his life. A nineteen-year-old hobo just starting to ride the rails, he is hiding in the coal car when the railroad detective comes through. They get into a scuffle, and Lucky's hand finds a railroad spike. Before he knows it, he has smashed the investigator's head and shoved him out of the car. If he hurries, if he's lucky, he will get back to Los Angeles in time to establish an alibi, burn his clothes, and avoid the electric chair. But as Lucky will discover, the deadliest threat is lurking within his own mind. "Dead Man" is just one of the outstanding stories included in this volume. The author of some of the most hard-boiled prose ever written, James M. Cain understood fear in all its forms-and knew better than anyone the terror of a killer on the run.