Four complete novels

These four novels remain fantastically readable and enjoyable some eighty years after they were written. Suspension of disbelief is required now and then, when plots became a little too thick or characters speak a little out of character, but on the whole there is nothing outrageously improbable in them. This is no mean achievement.

It’s not hard to see why James Cain helped to define terms like “noir” and “hardboiled” with Postman and Indemnity, his first two novels. If The Maltese Falcon (1929) and The Big Sleep (1941) are anything to go by, he is right up there with Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. No sleuths and mighty feats of deduction here, but there is something better: carefully planned crimes and the rare opportunity to enter the heads of some, to put it mildly, seedy characters.