Pick and Mix Deal - Penguin Modern Classics – Crime & Espionage I

A mystery writer turns detective to protect the woman he loves. But is he hunter or hunted?

The chance meeting between a crime novelist and a married woman blossoms into friendship. When she confides to him that she has been receiving threatening and sadistic letters from an ex-lover, who says he is watching her in the shadows, he knows he must help her. But the trail unexpectedly leads to another writer, Oe Shundei, the mysterious and secretive author of works of grotesque violence. Suddenly nothing is as it seems, and nobody is safe.

An apparent suicide. A deepening mystery. A letter from a dead man...

Secret agent George Smiley is in trouble. A Foreign Office civil servant, Samuel Fennan, has killed himself, and Smiley realizes that Intelligence head Maston is going to set him up to take the blame. Beginning his own investigation, Smiley is shocked to receive an urgent letter from the dead man, and slowly uncovers a network of deceit and betrayal. Le Carré's debut novel was also the first of his many books to feature the tenacious, unassuming and singular George Smiley.

A con-man is swindling the poor folk of Harlem out of their life savings - and now all hell's broken loose.

The 'Reverend' Deke O'Malley has just made $87,000 by duping his followers, only for white gunmen to hijack the rally and escape with the cash hidden inside a bale of cotton. Now ace detectives Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson must get the good people of Harlem their money back by any means necessary, in a raucous, breakneck adventure involving double-crosses, exotic dancers, a racist colonel and a whole pile of bodies...

Maude Slocum is in trouble. But luckily trouble is Investigator Lew Archer's business.

A well-dressed, wealthy woman has arrived at Archer's L.A. office, having intercepted a poison pen letter accusing her of adultery. Reluctantly agreeing to help her find the culprit, he dives into the Slocums' moneyed, oil-rich California world. But when Maude's mother-in-law is found dead in the swimming pool, secrets come to the surface too. For the urbane, world-weary Archer, a case of blackmail soon becomes murder.

Abducted, beaten, hidden in an attic, a young woman stages an audacious escape. But is her story everything she claims it to be?

Fifteen-year-old Betty Kane can recall every detail of the room where she says she was held at the country house known as The Franchise - even the crack in its round window. But her alleged kidnappers, a quiet-living mother and daughter, claim they have never seen her before. Somebody has to be lying. But who? As the case sparks a media frenzy, it is up to unassuming village solicitor Robert Blair to find out.

1940. An unassuming English engineer has travelled to Turkey on business. And somebody wants him dead.

It all began when Graham was taken to a nightclub in Istanbul and noticed a man in a crumpled suit, watching him. Then he narrowly missed being killed by gunfire on returning to his hotel room. Now, terrified, he has been helped to escape in secret on a passenger steamer home. But although Graham may try to run, he cannot hide from his pursuers forever, and soon he is caught up in a nightmare beyond his control.

A baffling case. A mysterious inheritance.

It starts when a man's arm is fished out of Paris's Canal Saint-Martin. Then the rest of the body is retrieved - apart from the head. Inspector Maigret is determined to unearth the truth behind this disturbing murder. When he meets the strangely taciturn owner of a shabby local bistro, Madame Calas, who says her husband is away, the pieces start to fall into place. But, as the dogged, laconic detective discovers, nothing in this tangled case is as it seems.

Two young children hold the key to a secret stash of money - and a relentless psychopath is on their trail...

Harry 'Preacher' Powell, his fingers tattooed with LOVE and HATE, is out of prison and doing the Devil's work. He knows his ex-cellmate hid $10,000 somewhere. He knows how to charm his way into unsuspecting lives. And he knows where the man's family lives. As he hunts them down, a terrifying game of cat and mouse begins. One of the great chase novels, The Night of the Hunter is a savage tale of innocence and evil in the Depression-era South.

The Second World War is over. Germany have won the battle. But the fight goes on...

It is November 1941, nine months after the Nazis successfully invaded Britain. Churchill has been executed and the King imprisoned in the Tower of London. At Scotland Yard, renowned Detective Inspector Archer just tries to keep his head down. But when what seems a routine murder in a Mayfair flat leads him to something far deadlier, Archer becomes caught between his brutal superiors and the British resistance, and drawn into a plot that could change the future of the world.

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.