Classic Noir

L'histoire, racontée à la première personne, est l'autobiographie d'un cheval nommé Prince Noir qui commence sa vie poulain dans une ferme anglaise. Le roman raconte les mésaventures de ce cheval, vendu par ses premiers propriétaires, jusqu'à devenir cheval de fiacre dans les rues de Londres. Tout au long de l'histoire, Prince Noir est confronté à la cruauté ou la sympathie des hommes, et continue à faire le travail qu'on lui demande avec courage.

The 1960s' toughest, brainiest, sexiest, and most compassionate spy, is back in print! Meet McHugh America's#1 Secret Agent a combination of Mickey Spillaine's Mike Hammer and Ian Flemming's James Bond. In this first book in the series, McHugh takes a leave of absence from his spy work to help out his lover's sister who has found a dead Mafioso in her apartment, her boyfriend missing, and half San Francisco's mobsters after her.

"Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street" is a short story by the American writer Herman Melville, first serialized anonymously in two parts in the November and December 1853 issues of Putnam's Magazine, and reprinted with minor textual alterations in his The Piazza Tales in 1856. A Wall Street lawyer hires a new clerk who, after an initial bout of hard work, refuses to make copy and any other task required of him, with the words "I would prefer not to".

In the foggy streets of London, two men - one a respectable doctor and one a depraved killer - become mysteriously entangled. Robert Louis Stevenson’s psychological thriller, which brought the idea of the split personality to the public’s attention, is voiced by former Doctor Who Tom Baker. The tale of Dr Jekyll’s decline into his murderous alter-ego, Mr Hyde, retains its capacity to probe the evil that exists in humankind.

Did a spoiled rich girl die in a plane crash, or is she hiding with her homicidal lover in the Florida Keys? Whose body is that in the wreckage? Who put it there?

The dark strains of madness that permeate many of the works of Edgar Allan Poe make their way through this macabre story. This memorable short story bears a resemblance to Poe's Tell Tale Heart. In both stories guilt leaves a murderer with a singular choice.

"Nulle part ailleurs André n'avait vu des roses, des lis, des camélias aussi merveilleux, ni des tulipes aussi diverses de couleurs, depuis les blanches comme du lait jusqu'aux noires comme du charbon ; jamais il n'eût imaginé une telle opulence florale. Le printemps commençait à peine, et les vrais trésors du jardin étaient encore abrités dans les serres chaudes ; mais les plantes qu'on voyait fleurir le long des allées et dans les plates-bandes suffisaient pour transporter le promeneur dans un royaume de couleurs tendres, surtout aux heures matinales où chaque pétale étincelle de rosée."

Ce sont deux nouvelles de Anton Tchekhov, extraites du recueil Le Moine noir. Ce livre audio est composé du Moine noir, et de L'orateur.

A big-city tough guy comes to a small Minnesota town to settle a deadly fight between the local crime boss and his chief rival - his son.

A Manhattan gumshoe pursues a convict to St. Louis, where he gets mixed up in a cop killing and nearly loses his own life at the hands of a B girl.

Charles Allston Collins (1828-1873) was the younger brother of the novelist Wilkie Collins, and was married to Charles Dickens's daughter Kate. He is well known both as a painter and a novelist. In The Tête Noire, he describes a racy tale of a commercial traveler and his dog who stayed at a most disreputable French coaching inn, whose landlord would appear to be a cunning criminal, and his young daughter just as wicked.