Cool New Covers to Penguin Crime and Espionage Classics
Hats off to the designer of these stunning reprints for a new Penguin Modern Classics Crime and Espionage collection. Cleverly modelled on the green and white design colours of Penguin's crime paperbacks, this is a really interesting selection of the best of their backlist.
All ten are available as a set at our special price of £90 (retail price £100)
Len Deighton
SS-GB
Paperback, £9.99
First published in 1978. Classic thriller: what if England had been conquered and occupied by the Germans in the Second World War?
John le Carre
Call for the Dead
Paperback, £9.99
First published in 1961. Le Carre's masterful debut novel introduces the celebrated spook George Smiley in a murky story of betrayal, intrigue and murder.
David Grubb
The Night of the Hunter
Paperback, £9.99
First published in 1953. Murderous ex-convict Harry Powell misrepresents himself as a prison chaplain upon his release from prison in order to con the widow of his former cellmate into revealing the hiding place of his hoard. An atmospheric Southern Gothic.
Edogawa Rampo
Beast in the Shadows
Paperback, £9.99
Translated from the Japanese by Ian Hughes
First published in 1928. A seminal work of crime fiction from one of Japan's pioneers of the genre, Beast in the Shadows spins a twist-laden tale of disturbing letters, damsels in distress and sinister writers in which nothing is as it seems.
Dorothy B Hughes
In a Lonely Place
Paperback, £9.99
First published in 1947. A classic hard-boiled thriller it was also a film starring Humphrey Bogart.
Eric Ambler
Journey into Fear
Paperback, £9.99
With a new introduction by Norman Stone.
First published in 1940. An unassuming English engineer has traveled to Turkey on business. And somebody wants him dead. This breathless wartime chase finds him desperately fleeing unknown assailants across Europe.
Georges Simenon
Maigret and the Headless Corpse
Paperback, £9.99
First published in 1955. A baffling case. A mysterious inheritance. It starts when a man's arm is fished out of Paris's Canal Saint-Martin. Number 47 in the Maigret series.
Ross Macdonald
The Drowning Pool
Paperback, £9.99
First published in 1950. This is the second novel to feature Private Detective Lew Archer, who is called on to investigate a case of libel and blackmail in oil-rich California.
Chester Hines
Cotton comes to Harlem
Paperback, £9.99
First published in 1965. A rollercoaster of a crime novel, Himes' effervescent caper sees two detectives engage in a fast-paced attempt to retrieve the money stolen from the good people of Harlem by a ruthless conman. It is the best known of the Harlem Detective series.
Josephine Tey
The Franchise Affair
Paperback, £9.99
First published in 1948. By the author of one of our favourite books, The Daughter of Time.
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?
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Claire Keegan
So Late in the Day
Small slim hardback, £8.99
We have just five signed copies of this exquisite new short story by the author of Foster and Small Things Like These. Signed copies are very limited -- we applied for 20 but were only allocated these five. We would like to go to our loyal customers so get in touch as soon as you can if you want a signed copy. We do have lots of unsigned copies. Publication date is tomorrow.
After an uneventful Friday at the Dublin office, Cathal faces into the long weekend and takes the bus home. There, his mind agitates over a woman named Sabine with whom he could have spent his life, had he acted differently.
Anna Funder
Wifedom
Hardback, £20.00
The Sydney-based author of Stasiland has now written this eye-opening account of the neglected life of George Orwell's first wife Eileen O'Shaughnessy. Using newly discovered letters from Eileen to her best friend, Funder recreates the Orwells' marriage, through the Spanish Civil War and WW II in London. As she rolls up the screen concealing Orwell's private life she is led to question what it takes to be a writer - and what it is to be a wife.
Anna bravely battled her way through the Aldeburgh Carnival on Monday last week to sign copies at the shop. Here she is with John just after the floats had passed.