BEAGLE SCENTED MURDER introduces two of the most upright and fearless heels ever to run a detective agency, Otis Beagle and Joe Peel. These two new Gruber characters are not above “making” a little business, especially when times are slow, but they are not in the market for murder. Murder lands in their laps, however, and for a time they are forced to do a little honest work. In the course of avoiding San Quentin they uncover same interesting material about one of their clients and learn a lot about a racket in dime novels. They wind up with a bang, but, much to the grief of the local police, on their feet. Frank Gruber has written a fast, tough, and funny mystery story in the Fletcher and Cragg tradition. We expect to hear more of Messrs. Beagle and Peel

In his spirited Introduction to a topnotch collection of Great American Detective Stories, Anthony Boucher says: “The detective short story belongs to us. It started in America and it started off magnificently. In five stories, Edgar Allan Poe created the form and almost all its possible variants... There are as many kinds of detective short stories as there are of detective novels — and you’ll find most of them here, from the ethical poetry of Melville Davisson Post to the brash foolery of Frank Gruber.” A glance at some of the titles of the stories included confirms Boucher’s modest words and guarantees that you’ll find plenty of good reading here

An unstoppable anthology of crime stories culled from Black Mask magazine the legendary publication that turned a pulp phenomenon into literary mainstream. Black Mask was the apotheosis of noir. It was the magazine where the first hardboiled detective story, which was written by Carroll John Daly appeared. It was the slum in which such American literary titans like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler got their start, and it was the home of stories with titles like “Murder Is Bad Luck,” “Ten Carets of Lead,” and “Drop Dead Twice.” Collected here is best of the best, the hardest of the hardboiled, and the darkest of the dark of America’s finest crime fiction. This masterpiece collection represents a high watermark of America’s underbelly. Crime writing gets no better than this. Featuring • Deadly Diamonds • Dancing Rats • A Prize Fighter Fighting for His Life • A Parrot that Wouldn’t Talk Including • Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon as it was originally published • Lester Dent’s Luck in print for the first time

The BIGGEST, the BOLDEST, the MOST COMPREHENSIVE collection of PULP WRITING ever assembled! Weighing in at over a thousand pages, containing over forty-seven stories and two novels, this book is big baby, bigger and more powerful than a freight train — a bullet couldn’t pass through it. Here are the best stories and every major writer who ever appeared in celebrated Pulps like Black Mask, Dime Detective, Detective Fiction Weekly, and more. These are the classic tales that created the genre and gave birth to hard-hitting detectives who smoke criminals like packs of cigarettes; sultry dames whose looks are as lethal as a dagger to the chest; and gin-soaked hideouts where conversations are just preludes to murder. This is crime fiction at its gritty best. Including: • Three stories by Raymond Chandler, Cornell Woolrich, Erle Stanley Gardner, and Dashiell Hammett. • Complete novels from Carroll John Daly, the man who invented the hard-boiled detective, and Fredrick Nebel, one of the masters of the form. • A never before published Dashiell Hammett story. • Every other major pulp writer of the time, including Paul Cain, Steve Fisher, James M. Cain, Horace McCoy, and many, many more of whom you’ve probably never heard. • Three deadly sections — The Crimefighters, The Villains, and The Dames — with three unstoppable introductions by Harlan Coben, Harlan Ellison, and Laura Lippman. Featuring: • Plenty of reasons for murder, all of them good. • A kid so smart — he’ll die of it. • A soft-hearted loan shark’s legman learning — the hard way — never to buy a strange blonde a hamburger. • The uncanny “Moon Man” and his mad-money victims

It’s a cinch that when there’s, trouble brewing, Johnny Fletcher and Sam Cragg will be mixed up in it. Trouble blew in with the hot wind of Death Valley the night the stranger with a bullet hole in his chest died at their feet on the lonely highway. And trouble followed them to Las Vegas — blonde trouble, cop trouble and murder. Johnny and Sam, no strangers to violence, determined to find out who shot the unknown man. Impoverished, but inexhaustible they arrived in Las Vegas with a purple gambling check, a match pack and a deck of cards as the only clues to his identity. Their curiosity was soon rewarded — with a right to the jaw. THE HONEST DEALER is Frank Gruber’s latest mystery. It is a story of one of America’s most famous gambling towns — the crazy pattern of its nights and days — its glitter and godlessness. Put Johnny Fletcher and Sam Cragg in this setting and you’ve got a volcanic eruption and a swell story

Johnny Fletcher and Sam Cragg have faced many a tough problem in their lives, but never one so dismal as the one they come up against now. Circumstances beyond their control (and for once, beyond their ability to twist, sidestep, or disregard) force the boys either to take jobs in order to cat or to sit out a Chicago winter on a park bench. So, fighting every inch of the way, they become the employees of “the Leather Duke,” Chicago’s biggest operator in the leather business. Most leather workers grind drearily along for years with nothing to break the monotony. Not so Johnny and Sam. Before they’ve been there half a day, Sam finds a corpse where he should have found a barrel of leather counters. Then the uproar begins. Whether they’re fighting in poolrooms in Little Italy, mixing it up at Turnverein dances, or merely adding a fine new lustre to their well-developed art of deadbeating, these two lads are at it every minute. Johnny Fletcher fans will find this full of excitement. So will everybody else

Excursions and alarms! Johnny Fletcher (some might call him a con man) and Sam Gragg (he calls himself the “strongest man in the world”) are on the loose again! The raffish pair are stony broke as usual and they take very temporary jobs as collection agents in New York City to try to fatten up their non-existent income. Almost at once they walk smack into a case of murder — simply because they accept a coin bank, in the shape of a goose, in lieu of full payment for an overdue bill. Very much involved in the affair is the wealthy Carmichael family, as well as assorted blondes, fiancées, and relatives. The key to the whole tangled situation is right in the forefront all the time, but it is Johnny himself who puts the puzzle together — and comes up with the right answer and the murderer. There’s lots of fast talk in this one, speedy action and near mayhem — there always is when these two arc on the job

Did you ever spend your spare time planning a caper which involved robbing a safe deposit box? Neither did Tommy Dancer, but as a lock and key expert he found himself involved in someone else’s plans. Tommy was a young man with deft fingers and not too many morals and THE LOCK AND THE KEY is the story of what happened to him when he listened to a man with more cunning than locksmithing ability. THE LOCK AND THE KEY is a fast and fascinating story with a very unusual background. We particularly recommend it to bank presidents (a warning), bank robbers (how-to-do-it) — and to the thousands of readers who would no more miss a new Gruber than rob a safe deposit box

The Los Angeles police department has often suspected that private detective Otis Beagle is not above making “business” to bring in a profitable client. And they are quite right. But not even Otis and his hired hand, Joe Peel, would have meddled in the affairs of the Iowa Lee Lonely Hearts Club had they realized it would mean murder, blackmail, and the old-fashioned badger game. However, there are compensations in the shape (or shapes) of three lovely ladies — Iowa Lee herself; the perfect secretary, Linda Meadows; and her roommate, Susan, whom everyone is trying to find. Joe pays a call on one of the ladies in posh Hillcrest Towers — and almost at once the first corpse turns up. There’s plenty of action and lots of humor in this fast-moving and ingenious thriller

We now live in enlightened times that reassure us that, far from being a lower form of literature, pulp fiction is the term for what the best storytelling provides — pyrotechnic thrills, shocks galore and excitement by the bucketload! From cops, both straight and crooked, to ruthless bigshots, shady operators, femmes fatales and damsels in distress. Including gangsters, drifters, common crooks, shady attorneys to molls with a heart of gold, enjoy a rollercoaster ride through popular literature’s best pulp writers. The MBO of Pulp Action includes the talents of Charles Willeford, Ed McBain, Bill Pronzini, Ed Gorman, Lawrence Block, John D. Macdonald, William Campbell Gault, Bruno Fischer, Mark Timlin, Joe R. Lansdale and many of the classic Black Mask magazine

Frank Gruber’s amateur and usually unwilling sleuths — Johnny Fletcher, book salesman extraordinary, and Sam Cragg, his side kick — have a knack of getting into trouble. This is the third time and the trouble is even more desperate than in the hair raising days of THE FRENCH KEY and THE LAUGHING FOX. Thrown into jail for vagrancy in a little Minnesota town, Johnny and Sam wake up to find that one of their cell mates has been murdered in the night. That was bad enough, but the murdered boy was Tom Quisenberry, heir to the Quisenberry clock fortune. In the confusion, Johnny and Sam wasted no time breaking jail because they knew they would be charged with the murder. They did the only thing they could do; they started out to solve the murder to clear themselves. Working their way east, they went to the fantastic Quisenberry estate outside New York City, home of the remarkable Quisenberry family and of the Quisenberry collection of thousands of valuable clocks. They followed the erratic wanderings of the Talking Clock, the incredibly valuable item stolen from the collection. Johnny hoped that the answer to all their troubles would be found in what the Talking Clock said

Here are those two old favorites, Johnny Fletcher and Sam Cragg, in their usual strategic position, up to their necks in the soup. The boys are back at that beloved caravanseric, the Forty-fifth Street Hotel, and appear likely to stay there for some time since Mr. Peabody, the manager, is lurking in the corridor with the French key. Then things take a turn for the better — not for the lovely across the airshaft who skims master phonograph record into their window before being throttled — but for Johnny and Sam themselves. They get Sam’s pants out of hock (luckily) and they’re off. Now you see them and now you don’t. But when the eye is quick enough to follow their activities, you’ll find them kiting checks, pawing wrist watches, getting beat up, busting in where they’re not wanted, and driving Mr. Peabody — among many, many others — crazy. We don’t know how they — and Mr. Gruber — do it, but they are actually, if incredibly, faster, furiouser, and funnier titan ever

Два предприимчивых и храбрых друга живут случайными заработками. То в их руки попадает лучший экземпляр коллекции часов («Говорящие часы»), то на чужой жетон они выигрывают кучу денег («Честная игра»), а то вдруг становятся владельцами прав на песню и заодно свидетелями убийства ее автора («Бей ниже пояса, бей наповал»). А это делает их существование интересным, но порой небезопасным

Два предприимчивых и храбрых друга живут случайными заработками. То в их руки попадает лучший экземпляр коллекции часов («Говорящие часы»), то на чужой жетон они выигрывают кучу денег («Честная игра»), а то вдруг становятся владельцами прав на песню и заодно свидетелями убийства ее автора («Бей ниже пояса, бей наповал»). А это делает их существование интересным, но порой небезопасным

Два предприимчивых и храбрых друга живут случайными заработками. То в их руки попадает лучший экземпляр коллекции часов (Говорящие часы), то на чужой жетон они выигрывают кучу денег (Честная игра), а то вдруг становятся владельцами прав на песню и заодно свидетелями убийства ее автора (Бей ниже пояса, бей наповал). А это делает их существование интересным, но порой небезопасным. Содержание: Говорящие часы (пер. А. Коршунов) Честная игра (пер. М. Лахути) Бей ниже пояса, бей наповал (пер. А. Мельников)

Коллекция детективных рассказов, опубликованных в газете «Совершенно СЕКРЕТНО» в 2013 году

Продажные судьи, насквозь прогнившая полицейская система, свирепые и беспринципные мерзавцы, избравшие порок своим ремеслом… Только герой, обладающий высшими достоинствами, может одолеть злодеев такого масштаба! Смертельный поединок со злом продолжается…

Раскрыть преступление — задача непростая, а если в нем замешана женщина, то распутать его чрезвычайно трудно. Таким оказалась любовная история американского писателя и графини Гелены Райзингер («Монахи-молчальники»)

Раскрыть преступление — задача непростая, а если в нем замешана женщина, то распутать его чрезвычайно трудно. Таким оказалось дело об убийстве девушки любвеобильного Уилбура Джолифа («Рынок для убийства»)

Раскрыть преступление — задача непростая, а если в нем замешана женщина, то распутать его чрезвычайно трудно. Таким оказалась история наследницы чудака-миллионера («Серебряный мул»)

Два предприимчивых и храбрых друга живут случайными заработками. То в их руки попадает лучший экземпляр коллекции часов («Говорящие часы»), то на чужой жетон они выигрывают кучу денег («Честная игра»), а то вдруг становятся владельцами прав на песню и заодно свидетелями убийства ее автора («Бей ниже пояса, бей наповал»). А это делает их существование интересным, но порой небезопасным