Crime Fiction Authors, Murder Mystery Books, Thriller Novel Reviews & True Crime at Tangled Web - Publisher Penguin Classic Crime 08 Oct-Dec
File Updated: 29/06/2011
New Crime & Mystery Fiction Titles From Penguin Classic Crime Oct-Dec 08

New
Burroughs W S & Kerouac J And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks (Penguin Classics) Published November 2008 by Penguin Classic Crime at £20.00 ISBN: 1846141648

In 1944, Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs were charged as accessories to murder. One of their friends, Lucien Carr, had stabbed another, David Kammerrer, whose sexual advances he'd seemingly grown tired of rejecting. Carr, still in bloodstained clothes, had come to each of them and confessed; Kerouac helped him get rid of the weapon - neither told the police. For this failing they were arrested. Months later the two writers - unpublished at the time - collaborated on "And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks", a fictionalized account of the summer of the killing. They wrote alternating chapters - Burroughs writing as sometime bartender and workaday detective Will Dennison, Kerouac as Mike Ryko, an Irish merchant seaman.From this intensely personal material they made a hard-boiled account of a group of friends moving through each other's apartments, killing time drinking, necking, talking and taking drugs, and haphazardly drifting towards a bloody crime - flabby, likeable Ramsey Allen trailing after the beautiful Phillip Tourian, constantly angering him with his endless desire to please.
Unpublished until now, this is a kind of crime novel of humans stewing in their inactivity, and a remarkable insight into the lives and literary development of two great writers.

William S. Burroughs was born in 1914. His first published novel was the largely autobiographical Junky, which remains a classic depiction of drug dependency. He died in 1997.
Jack Kerouac was born in 1922. In 1947, he hitchhiked across America and wrote his most famous novel On the Road. He died in 1969.

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William S Burroughs The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead Pbk published November 2008 by Penguin Classic Crime at £9.99 ISBN: 0141189835

In this funny, nightmarish masterpiece of imaginative excess, grotesque characters engage in acts of violent one-upmanship, boundless riches mangle a corner of Africa into a Bacchanalian utopia, and technology, flesh and violence fuse with and undo each other. A fragmentary, freewheeling novel, it sees wild boys engage in vigorous, ritualistic sex and drug taking, as well as pranksterish guerrilla warfare and open combat with a confused and outmatched army.
"The Wild Boys" shows why Burroughs is a writer unlike any other, able to make captivating the explicit and horrific.

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William S Burroughs Exterminator! (Penguin Modern Classics) Pbk published November 2008 by Penguin Classic Crime at £9.99 ISBN: 0141189843

A man, dispirited by ageing, endeavours to steal a younger man's face; a doctor yearns for a virus that might eliminate his discomfort by turning everyone else into doubles of himself; a Colonel lays out the precepts of the life of DE (Do Easy); conspirators posthumously succeed in blowing up a train full of nerve gas; a mandrill known as the Purple Better One runs for the presidency with brutal results; and the world drifts towards apocalypses of violence, climate and plague. The hallucinatory landscape of William Burroughs' compellingly bizarre, fragmented novel is constantly shifting, something sinister always just beneath the surface.

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Raymond Chandler The Big Sleep (Penguin Classics Bill Amberg) Pbk published November 2008 by Penguin Classic Crime at £50.00 ISBN: 0141189517

This Penguin Classic is the result of a creative collaboration between Bill Amberg and the world's favourite publisher. It is one in a series of six luxury leather-bound titles.
Raymond Chandler created the fast talking, trouble seeking Californian private eye Philip Marlowe for his first great novel "The Big Sleep" in 1939. Marlowe's entanglement with the Sternwood family - and an attendant cast of colourful underworld figures - is the background to a story reflecting all the tarnished glitter of the great American Dream.

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Elizabeth Gaskell Lois the Witch: And Other Stories Pbk published October 2008 by Penguin Classic Crime at £7.99 ISBN: 0141038802

A young English orphan arrives in America to be greeted by an atmosphere of shadowy terror and a wave of Puritan suspicion. She settles with her uncle’s family in Salem, Massachusetts, on the eve of the world’s most notorious witch hunt.
Lois Barclay is a typical ingénue: a well of affection and understanding waiting to be tapped. The New England she experiences, however, is prey to a host of fears – of Indians, of witches, of the Evil One himself. Lois finds all her attempts at friendship misunderstood, her Anglican upbringing a source of mistrust and censure, and her very attractiveness a potential curse. In this moving novella, Gaskell provides a fictionalised account of one of the victims of the Salem witch trials of 1692, using it to highlight the very human dangers of religious bigotry and sexual repression.

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William Hope Hodgson The House on the Borderland Pbk published October 2008 by Penguin Classic Crime at £7.99 ISBN: 0141038748

From the beasts of the pit to the endless terror of the void. A manuscript is found: filled with small, precise writing and smelling of pit-water, it tells the story of an old recluse and his strange home - and its even stranger, jade-green double, seen by the recluse on an otherworldly plain where gigantic gods and monsters roam. Soon his more earthly home is no less terrible than this bizarre vision, as swine-like creatures boil from a cavern beneath the ground and besiege it. But a still greater horror will face the recluse - more inexorable, merciless and awful than any creature that can be fought or killed.

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M R James The Haunted Dolls' House: And Other Stories Pbk published October 2008 by Penguin Classic Crime at £7.99 ISBN: 0141038772

Evil comes with many different faces. A macabre human drama is re-enacted in a Gothic dolls' house one night; a whistle awakens a force of unspeakable malevolence; an ancient curse is passed from person to person; a grisly crime is avenged from beyond the grave; the tomb of a Swedish count will not rest quietly. M R James' chilling ghost stories reveal a world where the familiar becomes diabolical, the smallest object can lead to unimaginable horror, and evil brushes against everyday life in the most unexpected and sinister of ways.

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Vernon Lee The Virgin of the Seven Daggers: Excursions into Fantasy Pbk published October 2008 by Penguin Classic Crime at £7.99 ISBN: 0141038780

He lusts and kills in equal measure. The brutal Don Juan - an unrepentant sinner - makes a pact with the Virgin of the Seven Daggers. He promises to forever proclaim her supreme beauty and asks that in return she save him from damnation. Emboldened by the deal and driven by insatiable greed, he embarks on a necromantic journey to an enchanted palace beneath the Alhambra. In an orgy of beasts, demons and slumbering infantas, Don Juan is called upon to uphold his side of the bargain and in doing so lose everything his lustful heart desires.

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H.P. Lovecraft The Dunwich Horror: And Other Stories Pbk published October 2008 by Penguin Classic Crime at £7.99 ISBN: 0141038764

Deadly forces are about to be awakened ...In the degenerate, unliked backwater of Dunwich, Wilbur Whately, a most unusual child, is born. Of unnatural parentage, he grows at an uncanny pace to an unsettling height, but the boy's arrival simply precedes that of a true horror: one of the Old Ones, that forces the people of the town to hole up by night, fearful for their lives, by day able only to trace the wreckage wrought by the gigantic, unseen monster. In this and other tales of the macabre, H. P. Lovecraft weaves unearthly fantasies of creatures beyond conception - existing between the spaces of the dimensions we know.

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Richard Marsh The Beetle: A Mystery Pbk published October 2008 by Penguin Classic Crime at £7.99 ISBN: 0141038799

The Beetle (1897) tells the story of a fantastical creature, "born of neither god nor man," with supernatural and hypnotic powers, who stalks British politician Paul Lessingham through fin de siècle London in search of vengeance for the defilement of a sacred tomb in Egypt. In imitation of various popular fiction genres of the late nineteenth century, Marsh unfolds a tale of terror, late imperial fears, and the "return of the repressed," through which the crisis of late imperial Englishness is revealed.
This Broadview edition includes a critical introduction and a rich selection of historical documents that situate the novel within the contexts of fin de siècle London, England’s interest and involvement in Egypt, the emergence of the New Woman, and contemporary theories of mesmerism and animal magnetism.

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Edgar Allen Poe The Masque of the Red Death: And Other Stories Pbk published October 2008 by Penguin Classic Crime at £7.99 ISBN: 0141038829

The Masque of the Red Death: Three Tales of Horror by Edgar Allan Poe, 1809 - 1849 Legendary Master of the Macabre Performed by David Cade With music composed by Roberto Barzini
However you try to escape it, horror is always there Outside the abbey's armoured walls, the common poor are ravaged by a grisly pestilence known as the 'Red Death', while within, safe and untroubled, the happy Prince Prospero hosts lavish entertainments. But, in their immodest comfort, the Prince and his guests are not as safe as they hope from the horrors of the outside world ...In "The Masque of the Red Death" and other tales of gothic horror, Edgar Allan Poe writes as no one else ever has of creeping, mounting terrors - of torments of ingenious, malevolent tormentors and of a mind's own sickening madness.

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