Orion Crime Masterworks

Orion is widely recognized as Britain's leading publisher of contemporary crime fiction, publishing such acclaimed authors as Ian Rankin, Michael Connelly, Ed McBain, James Lee Burke and a host of others. Now we turn to crime fiction's rich history with Crime Masterworks, a series dedicated to bringing back into print, for a new generation of readers, some of the greatest crime stories ever written, There are stories of all kinds, from classic detective puzzles to the toughest of tough thrillers. Some of the books, such as The Maltese Falcon, are world-famous; others have been forgotten except by crime aficionados; but all are outstanding of their kind. The authors - Hammett, Simenon, Conan Doyle and many others - form an identity parade of the great crime writers. The list has been selected with the help of leading critics and writers from around the word, and will build month by month into a library of essential reading for anyone who enjoys crime fiction.
Malcolm Edwards Managing Director

Orion have had the admirable idea of publishing, in an attractively designed new edition, a collection of crime classics. The first nine titles to appear are a mix of the obvious - 'The Maltese Falcon' and the best of Sherlock Holmes and Edgar Allan Poe - and the rather less obvious - notably, 'The Laughing Policeman' by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, who for all their considerable reputation in the sixties and seventies were never household names. Almost invariably, the book chosen is that which, by common consent, is the author's finest achievement: examples include Anthony Price's 'Other Paths to Glory', Jim Thompson's 'The Getaway' and John D. MacDonald's 'The Deep Blue Goodbye'. Ed McBain is so prolific that picking a suitable title to represent his style must have been especially testing and 'Ice' is possibly the least predictable entry in this series, even though there is no doubting that McBain deserves to be acknowledged as a leading figure in the genre, given his credentials as a founding father of the police procedural novel. This collection, which initially runs to nine books with more promised, provides valuable signposts to writing in the genre which has stood the test of time. The only disappointment is the absence of authoritative introductions to each book. We are told that this library of classics has been selected 'with the help of today's leading crime writers and critics', but the experts are not named and those who are unfamiliar with crime fiction would surely have appreciated more detailed information about each volume. To that extent, this is an opportunity missed.
Martin Edwards
author of the successful Harry Devlin series, he has published many short stories and articles, edited ten crime fiction anthologies and written seven nonfiction books.

No.1
Dashiell Hammett - Maltese Falcon
The Maltese Falcon (1930) set the standard by which the private eye genre is judged. Sam Spade is hired by the fragrant Miss Wonderley to track down her sister, who has eloped with a louse called Floyd Thursby. But Miss Wonderley is in fact the beautiful and treacherous Brigid O'Shaughnessy, and when Spade's partner Miles Archer is shot while on Thursby's trail, Spade finds himself both hunter and hunted: can he track down the jewel-encrusted bird, a treasure worth killing for, before the Fat Man finds him?