A collection of suspense stories, puzzle stories, whodunits and tricky whydunits involving police detectives, private eyes, talented and sometimes lucky amateurs, armchair detectives, and ethnic detectives

Crackling, burning death waited for me in that quiet Georgia countryside... But I had to go back for three reasons: To get Lucy, to get the money — and to kill my brother Charlie!

Harrowing tales of mayhem, murder versus moonshine acting as counter irritants and prescribed by spine-tingling specialists chosen for you this month by the MASTER OF SUSPENSE

In that ill-assorted collection of relatives there was one who would do murder — for a fortune

When a man finds a girl running his business, it’s bad... But when he finds his partner murdered — it’s terrible!

It was a romantic setting — the right place, maybe the right girl — but instead of cocktails, it turned out to be

Paula Sloan had plenty of reason for killing her patient, and when he suddenly died things looked pretty bad for her!

To save Laura’s life — and maybe his own — Brad was forced to reveal a past that might cancel out his future

I’m a private eye in Tampa. My card reads: It all started during Gasparilla Week, when our city re-enacts the good old days when that lusty pirate, José Caspar, sailed up Tampa Bay and took over the city. Well, Caspar was only a memory now, and the atmosphere of the city was not unlike Mardi Gras. Gaiety ruled. Wine flowed. And people danced in the streets. That was fine with me, though beer is really my tipple. Until I discovered that somewhere in that mass of pleasure-mad humanity a diabolic killer was on the prowl. He’d already killed once. Could I discover his identity amongst all those mummers before another corpse turned up in the morgue?

Frank’s shackles were never so heavy as they were after he’d shucked them

The corpse in the morgue wasn’t Bill Aiken’s wife... but where was she? The soft little blonde knew the answer which led to double murder... and blackmail!

Three frightened people waited in that darkened room. Three, and a grim unwanted guest — Murder!

Amnestic Dash Smith couldn’t marry the lovely widow until he got rid of his double-crossing wife — and himself

Where there’s a will, there’s a way — and the grim, cold household, soggy with riches, waiting for the old man to die

With an iron-clad defense, Ralph Smith still had to remain silent when his last mile came. For a murder he’d never committed had trapped him hopelessly in the steel jaws of homicide justice

Steve had never even met the girl, yet her torrid love-making was leading him to the brink of disaster!

A walk on the wild side! In this series of collections of gritty Noir and Hardboiled stories, you’ll find some of the best writers of the craft writing in their prime

Here, for the first time in one volume, are the best stories of the year from Mike Shayne's Mystery Magazine — featuring the incomparable Mike Shayne himself. Whether you prefer your crimes brutal, clever, daring or disastrous... whether you relish a case with infinite complications or of deceptive simplicity, you will enjoy this superior collection by and for connoisseurs of crime

Joey had read all the psychological thrillers — but he never dreamed he’d get personally involved

Hen-pecked, shrinking Sylvester Sneed was not a heroic character... what could he do with his houseful of desperate criminals?

“Expenses: A couple of lives — and a gray worsted suit.”

There’s a price no man should pay ex-con Quinn learned — even to rub out a... deathhouse dolly

She was blind — but eventually there were many things she could see clearly — for instance, who had murdered her son!

He had murdered the old man in his mind — and now the living corpse demanded retribution

She was beautiful in life — and even in death! Detective Sergeant Mason wanted, above all, to work on the case because he was sure it was murder. And he vividly remembered when they had been in love

I swung the wet, flat money belt, enjoying the slap of it against my leg. I had gone through a lot to get that belt. I had consorted with midgets and freaks. I had been lied to, framed, been offered the bribery of a beautiful but depraved normal-sized woman’s body. I had also been beaten senseless twice, another time left for dead, locked in the trunk of an abandoned car. And now I was home, free. “It’s a long story,” I said. I thought about it for a moment. “It began with a beautiful little doll who stands three feet tall. Unhappily she had an ache inside her almost as big as she imagined the rest of us to be.”

Unfortunate that Phineas Slack should die of sunstroke on the night of his reconciliation with his black-sheep nephew... and strange that the sun shone so strongly that night!

Swamps, particularly such vast and mostly uncharted swamps as the Florida Everglades, provide a natural habitat for all sorts of large and small creatures. Isn’t it likely, then, that one such creature might be a cousin, or at least a distant relative, of the Sasquatch and the Yeti of northern climes? Indeed, there have been many accounts of similar-looking beings in the bayous of Louisiana and in the Everglades itself. There is even an old Seminole Indian legend of the Stuestaw Enawchee, “gigantic beings from some nether world that had inhabited the Rivers of Grass from the time of creation,” who had come out of the swamps to war on the first Seminoles a thousand generations before the appearance of the white man. When, as part of a routine military “Survival Exercise,” three tough U.S. Marines are first set down in a remote section of the ’Glades, they do not believe in, or fear, the Stuestaw Enawchee or any swamp creature. But what happens to them in that primitive and alien environment is enough to make a believer of any man — and in the case of one, Master Sergeant James C. Kelly, to add a whole new dimension to the exercise of survival. For even as creatures go, the one which he encounters is extraordinary

When the menu is murder, some eat crow — some eat buzzard

Welcome to The Seventh Ghost Story MEGAPACK®! Once more we have a wide-ranging assortment of supernatural fiction, with setting across the world — Europe, the Americas, Asia — and across the centuries. You will note that we have a larger than normal number of "Anonymous" stories. No, the authors weren't embarrassed by their contributions. Victorian-era literary magazines and newspapers often ran fiction without crediting the author, or with only vague terms like "A Lady," initials, or humorous pseudonyms (as with the story by "Q.E.D." in this volume). Authors later collected their stories in books, and that's when readers discovered who had actually written what. If a story never got reprinted, its author remained a mystery. Modern scholars are still researching these anonymous stories, but many authors will never be properly identified

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

Abner Murder was due to freeze to death in August! That’s what that weird crystal-gazer foretold — who’d already accurately predicted three equally impossible dooms. So before the stars could put the freeze on the little detective, Abner had to jump to scorch the trigger-fingers of Fate’s criminal hustlers

Murder by the Sword Three people were dead, their heads bashed in, their bodies hacked with a samurai sword. All three victims were Japanese. The murder weapon was traced to Nick Martin, a veteran of Iwo Jima. Nick had spent fifteen pain-ridden years in and out of Army hospitals. He tried to drown his memories of the horror, but whisky only put him right back in the middle of that fierce battle. Nick drank a fifth the night of the killing. That’s the kind of case the police call “open and shut.” But Ed Rivers, a private detective, was a friend of Nick Martin’s. And no one was shutting the door of a death cell on Nick-not while Rivers could still go after the real, fiendishly clever murderer

She started as a fictitious character, but the body they found was real enough and so was the murder charge!

Roses are red, violets are blue, but murder comes in every hue

We are delighted to present our second collection of Talmage Powell mystery short stories! Talmage Powell (1920–2000) was one of the all-time great mystery writers of the pulp magazines (and later the digest mystery magazines). He claimed to have written more than 500 short stories, and we have no reason to doubt him — we are working on a bibliography of his work and have documented 373 magazine stories so far... and who knows how many are out there under pseudonyms or buried in obscure magazines? He wrote his first novel, The Smasher, in 1959. He went on to pen 11 more novels under his own name, 4 as “Ellery Queen,” and 2 novelizations of the hit TV series Mission: Impossible. Clearly, though short stories were his first love

She was a woman alone, fighting for her life. But she had a weapon working for her stronger even than a murder rap. And used it!

The only clues Barney could follow on this desperate manhunt, were the smell of murder, and the silent message in a dying man’s eyes

Sam Tucker used his magic to save a friend — and woo a Sioux maiden

Talmage Powell (1920–2000) was one of the all-time great mystery writers of the pulp magazines (and later the digest mystery magazines). He claimed to have written more than 500 short stories, and we have no reason to doubt him — we are working on a bibliography of his work and have documented 373 magazine stories so far... and who knows how many are out there under pseudonyms or buried in obscure magazines? He wrote his first novel, The Smasher, in 1959. He went on to pen 11 more novels under his own name, 4 as “Ellery Queen,” and 2 novelizations of the hit TV series Mission: Impossible. Clearly, though short stories were his first love

Bill Latham, student at Crownover University, has a job in the morgue, cleaning the floor. One night he finds a body in drawer B-3, an unidentified body that should not be there. That’s all I’m going to reveal. Spooky, yes?

Talmage Powell (1920–2000) was one of the all-time great mystery writers of the pulps (and later the digest mystery magazines). He claimed to have written more than 500 short stories (and I have no reason to doubt him — I am working on a bibliography of his work, and so far I can document 373 magazine stories... and who knows how many are out there under pseudonyms or buried in obscure magazines!)

She was buxom, beautiful — and bad. She was my prey. Tonight I would prove it to her — and her husband

Эллери Квин — это коллективный псевдоним двоюродных братьев американцев Дэнииела Нэтана (Daniel Nathan 1905–1982) и Манфорда Лепофски (Manford Lepofsky 1905–1971). С разрешения авторов под псевдонимом Ellery Queen, было опубликовано несколько книг, написанных другими авторами. Книгу «Женщина с тёмным прошлым» (Murder with a Past) написал Talmage Powell

«ИСКАТЕЛЬ» — советский и российский литературный альманах. Издаётся с 1961 года. Публикует фантастические, приключенческие, детективные, военно-патриотические произведения, научно-популярные очерки и статьи. В 1961–1996 годах — литературное приложение к журналу «Вокруг света», с 1996 года — независимое издание. В 1961–1996 годах выходил шесть раз в год, в 1997–2002 годах — ежемесячно; с 2003 года выходит непериодически

Ежемесячный литературный журнал. Издаётся с 1961 года

Коллекция детективных рассказов, опубликованных в газете «Совершенно СЕКРЕТНО» с декабря 1997 года по декабрь 2012 года включительно