Noir Knights: Sam Spade, Phillip Marlowe, Lew Archer, Easy Rawlins, Matt Scudder

Strangers on a Train

By: Patricia Highsmith
Narrated by: Bronson Pinchot
Length: 9 hours 41 minutes

In Patricia Highsmith’s debut novel, we encounter Guy Haines and Charles Anthony Bruno, passengers on the same train. But while Guy is a successful architect in the midst of a divorce, Bruno turns out to be a sadistic psychopath who manipulates Guy into swapping murders with him. As Bruno carries out his twisted plan, Guy is trapped in... Read more

The Maltese Falcon

By: Dashiell Hammett
Narrated by: William Dufris
Length: 7 hours 7 minutes

The Maltese Falcon is the definitive masterpiece of the hard-boiled detective genre. It introduces legendary PI Sam Spade, a loner who follows his own code and the rules of the street as he zeros in on his partner’s killer and the famous jewel-encrusted bird. Humphrey Bogart immortalized the tough-guy detective in the classic 1941 film. Read more

Red Harvest

By: Dashiell Hammett
Narrated by: Richard Ferrone
Length: 6 hours 26 minutes

Detective-story master Dashiell Hammett gives us yet another unforgettable read in Red Harvest.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... Read more

The Thin Man

By: Dashiell Hammett
Narrated by: William Dufris
Length: 5 hours 54 minutes

The Thin Man introduces Nick and Nora Charles, New York’s coolest crime-solving couple.Nick retired from detecting after his wife inherited a tidy sum, but six years later, a pretty blonde spies him at a speakeasy and asks for his help finding her father, an eccentric inventor who was once Nick’s client.Nick can no more resist the case than a... Read more

The Dain Curse

By: Dashiell Hammett
Narrated by: Richard Ferrone
Length: 7 hours 42 minutes

The Continental Op is a short, squat, and utterly unsentimental tank of a private detective. Miss Gabrielle Dain Leggett is young, wealthy, and a devotee of morphine and religious cults. She has an unfortunate effect on the people around her: they have a habit of dying violently. Is Gabrielle the victim of a family curse? Or is the truth about... Read more

Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye

The Barbara Payton Story

By: John O’Dowd
Narrated by: David “Ghosty” Wills
Length: 17 hours

Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye: The Barbara Payton Story is the only family-authorized biography of the late Hollywood actress whose promising film career in the 1950s was quickly overtaken by a disastrous and scandal-ridden personal life that left her career in ashes. Barbara Payton’s story has long been considered one of the saddest and most potent... Read more

The Underground Man

The Lew Archer Series: Book #16

By: Ross Macdonald
Narrated by: Grover Gardner
Length: 7 hours 33 minutes

As a mysterious fire rages through the hills above a privileged town in Southern California, private investigator Lew Archer tracks a missing child who may be the pawn in a marital struggle or the victim of a bizarre kidnapping. What he uncovers amid the ashes is murder—and a trail of motives as combustible as gasoline.The Underground Man is a... Read more

When the Sacred Ginmill Closes

Matthew Scudder: Book #6

By: Lawrence Block
Narrated by: Mark Hammer
Length: 9 hours 6 minutes

When ex-cop Matt Scudder thought back on the summer of '75, two faces emerged from behind the smoky haze of a half dozen boozy saloons that made up his beat-Skip Devoe and Tommy Tillary-two bar flies he wouldn't have given a second thought to in the bright light of day. Yet they and their troubles were the reason that moved him a little farther... Read more

The Concrete Blonde

Harry Bosch Series: Book #3

By: Michael Connelly
Narrated by: Dick Hill
Length: 13 hours 57 minutes

Detective Harry Bosch was sure he'd shot the serial killer responsible for a string of murders in LA . . . but now, a new crime makes him question his convictions.The Dollmaker was the name of the serial killer who had stalked Los Angeles ruthlessly, leaving grisly calling cards on the faces of his female victims. Now with a single faultless... Read more

The Postman Always Rings Twice

By: James Cain
Narrated by: Stanley Tucci
Length: 2 hours 50 minutes

An amoral young tramp. A beautiful, sullen woman with an inconvenient husband. A problem that has only one, grisly solution -- a solution that only creates other problems that no one can ever solve.First published in 1934 and banned in Boston for its explosive mixture of violence and eroticism, The Postman Always Rings Twice is a classic of the... Read more

The Drowning Pool

The Lew Archer Series: Book #2

By: Ross Macdonald
Narrated by: Grover Gardner
Length: 6 hours 40 minutes

When a millionaire matriarch is found floating face down in the family pool, the prime suspects are her good-for-nothing son and his wife, who stand to inherit, as well as a questionable chauffeur and a tycoon of a company trying to get the woman’s property for the oil under it.Private Investigator Lew Archer takes this case in the Los Angeles... Read more

Eight Million Ways to Die

A Matthew Scudder Novel

The Matthew Scudder Series: Book #5

By: Lawrence Block
Narrated by: Lawrence Block
Length: 9 hours 5 minutes

Battling the bottle one day at a time, ex-cop, sometime PI Matthew Scudder finds that next to staying sober, staying alive seems easy. But in the mean streets of New York City it never is. Not for the prostitute who wanted out and got her beautiful self slashed to ribbons. Not for a pimp named Chance who is betting his life that the broken-down... Read more

Double Indemnity

By: James Cain
Narrated by: James Naughton
Length: 3 hours 17 minutes

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 1936, this novel reaffirmed James M. Cain as a virtuoso of the roman noir.Performed by James Naughton Read more

Mildred Pierce

By: James M. Cain
Narrated by: Christine Williams
Length: 10 hours

Mildred Pierce had gorgeous legs, a way with a skillet, and a bone-deep core of toughness. She used those attributes to survive a divorce and poverty and to claw her way out of the lower middle class. But Mildred also had two weaknesses: a yen for shiftless men and an unreasoning devotion to a monstrous daughter. Out of these elements, Cain... Read more

The Galton Case

A Lew Archer Novel

The Lew Archer Series: Book #8

By: Ross Macdonald
Narrated by: Grover Gardner
Length: 6 hours 45 minutes

Almost twenty years have passed since Anthony Galton disappeared, along with a suspiciously streetwise bride and several thousand dollars of his family’s fortune. Now Anthony’s aging and very rich mother wants him back and has hired Lew Archer to find him. What turns up is a headless skeleton, a boy who claims to be Galton’s son, and a con game... Read more