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!

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

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...

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.

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.

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!

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...

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...