On the pier, behind a stack of whisky cases, lay the corpse, a steel box-hook buried in his skull, and aboard Lt. Koski’s police boat was the sexy number who knew the answers — too many of them!

Fire Marshal Ben Pedley was a veteran at double-crossing Death. But this time, with his finger already on the firebug who had hung the butchered torso in Biddonay’s charred refrigerator, Ben didn’t have any more chance than the object that was Suzie’s only prop for her Snowball. Dance in Hell!

How to be famous — in one easy lesson

Gil Vine is a house officer in a N.Y. city hotel which witnesses the murder of a man in the suite of Tildy Millett, gimmick girl on a video show. From Tildy’s love for Dow Lanerd who plays around but not for keeps, to Lanerd’s murder which is to follow, this turns up other angles- and curves, for a final solution in blackmail and an indiscretion which ended in illegitimacy

Plenty of dead ones get dragged out of the dark, roily water that runs through the greatest city in the world. The Harbor Police take only routine notice. But when the cadaver conies in installments — a torso, a leg, an arm — that’s murder... There are lots of murders, sure, but what made Lieutenant Steven Koski do a double-take on this particular butchery was the gadget that came with the torso. In its own frightful little way it was a weapon — the kind of weapon that kills a lot of people kind of quick. And Koski began to move — but fast. The murder marathon took him from a Coast Guard auxiliary vessel (cargo: one stunning blonde) to a waterfront dive. From a union leader’s hangout to an executive’s luxurious office. From a Chinese laundry to a ship being loaded with sudden death... And all the way, a long thin shape, detestable and horrible, paced him. Koski drove himself frantically onward. He had to catch that thing — had to

The way to pin a murder rap on an undercover Racket-King is to panic him into doing his own killing

Everything was pretty quiet on west coast gridirons that Saturday afternoon… and then — BOOM — Dynamite Dan Webb exploded out of a pile-up, streaking for paydirt like a golden sky-rocket… He should have known there’d be plenty of Bowl-breaking reverberations

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

Chief Fire Marshal Ben Pedley sniffed plenty of tell-tale clues among the charred ruins of the Maison Elegant. But he soon learned that some fires are too hot to handle — even after they’re out!

He was the Golden Stallions’ pass-snaring demon who could whiz downfield like a scared coyote and go up in the air like a crazy kangaroo for the payoff pigskin... ’til old man Dollar Sign cramped his sight

All the bets are off when Detective Madden ignores the odds in a racetrack kill — and enters an automatic and his two hard fists!

Here is a fast moving, tough minded mystery for everybody who has ever thrilled to the sound of lire engines screaming down a busy street. The hero is Ben Pedley, Fire Marshal of New York City; the problem, a fire set in a radio star’s dressing room which kills the star’s brother and leads to at least one other killing by fire. Luscious Leila is worth her weight in money and publicity value, and Ben finds himself confronted by radio-and-advertising pressure as well as a singularly brainy murderer. But Ben doesn’t take kindly to pressure and he hates arson with every fibre in his body. So he lashes out against it — with force and good aim — and the story moves rapidly from one high spot to the next, winding up with a climax that has all the excitement of a three-alarm fire next door. Where There’s Smoke is an expertly contrived and smoothly written thriller about fire and people. You’ll like it — and you’ll remember it

В новый сборник из серии «Bestseller» включены три захватывающих детективных романа. «Убийство на стороне» Д. Кина — рассказ о человеке, волею обстоятельств .оказавшемся обвиненным в убийствах, которых он не совершал. «Нет святых в аду» Э. Райта — кровавая история, начавшаяся с расследования загадочной смерти некоего бизнесмена. «Пять тревожных похорон» С. Стерлинга — жестокая хроника работы пожарной службы, столкнувшейся с целой серией страшных поджогов