Presents six early classics of American noir fiction: James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice , Edward Anderson's Thieves Like Us , Kenneth Fearing's The Big Clock , William Lindsay Gresham's Nightmare Alley , Cornell Woolrich's I Married a Dead Man , and Horace McCoy's They Shoot Horses, Don't They? . A companion volume collects works of the 1950s. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.