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...

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.

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....

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....

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...

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...

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...

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...