Crime Novels of The 1960s

"The masters of 1960s crime fiction expanded the genre's literary and psychological possibilities with audacious new themes, forms, and subject matter. [Volume 1]: Fredric Brown's The murderers, a darkly comic look at a murderous plot hatched on the hip fringes of Hollywood; Dan J. Marlowe's terrifying The name of the game is death, about a nihilistic career criminal on the run; Charles Williams's Dead calm, a masterful novel of natural peril and human evil on the high seas; Dorothy B. Hughes's The expendable man, an unsettling tale of racism and wrongful accusation in the American Southwest; and Richard Stark's taut The score, in which the master thief Parker plans the looting of an entire city with the cool precision of an expert mechanic; [Volume 2]: The fiend, in which Margaret Millar maps the interlocking anxieties of a seemingly tranquil California suburb through the rippling effects of a child's disappearance; Ed McBain's classic police procedural Doll, a story that mixes murder, drugs, fashion models, and psychotherapy with the everyday professionalism of the 87th Precinct; Run man run, Chester Himes's nightmarish tale of racism and police violence that follows a desperate young man seeking safe haven in New York City while being hunted by the law; and Patricia Highsmith's ultimate meta-thriller, The tremor of forgery, a novel in which a displaced traveler finds his own personality collapsing as he attempts to write a novel about a man coming undone." -- From back covers.