Ed Topliss has a problem.Two and a half years ago, he was approached by a publishing executive of dubious credentials, who said, “If you can write a grammatical letter, you can write a sex novel.” Since then, Topliss (who also writes under the pseudonyms of Dirk Smuff and Dwayne Toppil) has written one sex novel each month for $1,000 per book. According to his formula, that’s 10 chapters of 5,000 words each with one sex scene in each chapter — or 280 various sexual acts in his entire career.But Ed Topliss has reached an impasse. Twenty-five years old, the only son of a cocktail waitress, a graduate of Monequois College, the father of a young girl named Elfreda who was conceived before matrimony, Topliss is haunted by an unflagging desire to be a serious writer. Beset by personal and financial crises, he suddenly discovers he cannot write on schedule. His wife leaves home, his fantasy life starts to merge with his real life, and indeed it seems as if his whole future hangs in jeopardy.In Adios, Scheherazade, Donald E. Westlake, best known for his novels of comic suspense (The Spy in the Ointment, The Hot Rock), turns his attention to a new area. With the same delightful style that won him the Mystery Writers Award for the best novel of 1967, Westlake creates a touching, funny, thoroughly enjoyable portrait of what happens when a small-time writer tries to “make it” in the world of big-time pornography.

Brooklyn Noir is back with a vengeance, this time with the masters of yore: H.P. Lovecraft, Donald Westlake, Lawrence Block, Pete Hamill, Jonathan Lethem, Colson Whitehead, and more!

Tom Garrity and Joe Loomis are cops in New York — commuters to a job in a city where people often feel like animals. As cops, they’re at the center of it. The brutalizers and the brutalized. Unable to take much more of it, they invent a romantic dream for getting the hell out. The cops decide to become robbers.Joe discovers that a blue uniform will get you in anywhere; allow you, for instance, to hold up a liquor store without even being suspected. He and Tom decide to pull one big caper that will net them each a million. Then they’ll wait around a year, and after that pull out for good. They offer their services to the Mafia, because on their own they don’t know what crime to commit for that kind of money. A Mafia boss named Vigano points them in the right direction. After that there is no turning back, and no guarantee that they’ll make it.What happens to Tom and Joe and their families as they make their breakaway move is what COPS AND ROBBERS is all about. Here is a major novel on a major theme by Donald E. Westlake who, in telling a brand new kind of story, makes use of his proven ability to create suspense and entertainment.

No suspense collection is complete without this anthology. Originally published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, the stories in this volume represent many of the biggest names in detective and suspense fiction: Ellery Queen, Harold Q. Masur, Celia Fremlin, Jack Ritchie, Patricia Highsmith and Bill Pronzini are only a few of the prize-winning authors in this amazing volume.

You are in the jungles of Belize.You pick your way carefully along the overgrown trail until you come to the clearing. There, above you, rest the ruins of a Mayan pyramid. Is that a stone whistle at your feet? An idol of a bat-god? Riches surround you and Kirby Galway will be more than happy to smuggle your finds up to the United States in a bale of marijuana. Aren’t you glad you met Kirby?If you are Innocent St. Michael, wily Belizan bureaucrat, you’re not. After all, you sold Kirby the worthless land and know that there are no treasures — not to mention pyramids — on it. If you are Lemuel the curator, you’re not. After all, these artifacts should be protected — by you and in your own way. If you are St. Michael’s assistant Vernon, you’re not. After all, you are involved in a plot to overthrow the government and all the visitors Kirby is bringing in are making your job more difficult.Perhaps you are one of the two homosexual antique dealers with a secret to keep hidden, or maybe you are Valerie — loved, kidnaped, ordered to be executed and otherwise getting in the way. If you are, meeting Kirby didn’t do anything for your disposition, either.Now it is your turn to meet Kirby Galway and begin the most hilarious adventure of your life.

In Uganda in 1977, a particular trainload of coffee, mostly belonging to dictator Idi Amin, is worth six million dollars. As a group of scoundrels and international financiers hijack the train, the double and triple crosses pile up and the comic tension escalates in a brawling brew of buffoons, bumblers, beans and boxcars.* * *This 1981 Westlake gem is back in print. A mile-long freight train steams through the heart of Idi Amin’s mad, tortured, magical, and corrupt Uganda, loaded down with kahawa (Swahili for coffee). What Amin doesn't know, what his most beautiful spy has not been able to wring out of her latest victim, and what the world’s coffee markets may be unable to swallow, is that the train and six million dollars worth of coffee are about to disappear into the hands of a conflicted, colorful, swashbuckling band of mercenaries and moneymakers.“Kahawa is such a splendid huggermugger that if you don't like it, there's something wrong with you…. No reader that I will ever want to meet should dare complain.”— The New York Times

Parker, el personaje más emblemático creado por Donald E. Westlake (Brooklyn, Nueva York, 1933), es un ladrón profesional y, eventualmente, un asesino. Un hombre frío y calculador, reservado hasta la exasperación y dueño de una inteligencia más que destacable. Dos años atrás, Parker se vio obligado a abandonar en la pequeña y apacible ciudad de Tyler, en el estado de Mississippi, los setenta y tres mil dólares de botín de un robo a un coche blindado. Ahora ha llegado el momento de recuperar lo que es suyo, y para ello se va a ver involucrado en una guerra entre las mafias que controlan la ciudad. Parker, acompañado por Grofield, su cómplice, tendrá que demostrar su profesionalidad y agudizar el ingenio para lograr su objetivo, tarea nada fácil dado el poder de sus adversarios…Escrita en 1974, La luna de los asesinos es, sin lugar a dudas, una de las mejores novelas de este gran escritor norteamericano que revolucionó el género policíaco al ofrecer una nueva concepción que se aleja de los lugares comunes y los viejos clichés que siempre lo habían acompañado. El estilo ágil y directo, sin florituras ni descripciones innecesarias, acompañado de un elegante sentido del humor, acentúa la tensión de la novela, que no deja de crecer desde la primera página, hasta resolverse en un final brutal e inolvidable que revela la precisión narrativa de uno de los principales escritores norteamericanos de novela policíaca del siglo XX.

Following the commercial success of the original Manhattan Noir, mystery titan Lawrence Block explores the historic literary roots of this dark island.Featuring stories by: Edith Wharton, Stephen Crane, O. Henry, Langston Hughes, Irwin Shaw, Jerome Weidman, Damon Runyon, Evan Hunter, Jerrold Mundis, Edgar Allan Poe, Horace Gregory, Geoffrey Bartholomew, Cornell Woolrich, Barry N. Malzberg, Clark Howard, Jerome Charyn, Donald E. Westlake, Joyce Carol Oates, Lawrence Block, and Susan Isaacs.

The madman clung to the side of the hill, hidden by darkness and trees. Staring over his left shoulder he could see the lights in pairs crossing the bottom of the night, round whites when coming aslant, red dots when going. Only the circling red light atop the state police car did not move on, across the valley floor and out of sight. The ambulance had gone now, and the traffic jam had been broken up, but the state police car did not move on.Down below him, past the trees, he could see the headlights going by. He was waiting for the state police car with the circling red light to go on, to go away with the rest of the lights, and then he could move. But the state police car didn’t go away.And now more red lights came, borne on the stream of headlights. The madman reared up, almost losing his balance and rolling down the hill, and stared in hatred at the revolving red lights. Three more of them, all stopping by the first. Dimly amid the lights he could see men moving, and then a different kind of light appeared. A small nailhole of light in the darkness. Flashlights. Men with flashlights crossed the road down there and started up the hill, spreading out, opening like a fan. He lost sight of them all in the trees, and saw there a flicker of light, and there. And there.They were coming after him.The madman put his head down on the ground, his burning forehead against the cool dampness of the turf. Despair washed over him. Just after dinner he’d broken out, and before midnight he was to be caught again. They would make him scream for this, the shock every day, death and rebirth every day, going down and away to spasmodic shrieks and coming back to twitches and deafness and the cold blue eyes of Doctor Chax. (There was no Doctor Chax; all the doctors were Doctor Chax: all the doctors had the cold blue eyes and the warm brown voices, and told him while they tortured him that the torture was for his own good; he had made up the name, Doctor Chax. It was all of them.)He would not go back to Doctor Chax. He would not.He got away. He had the surface plausibility of the completely mad and a glittering intelligence. Also, he had no compunction about destroying anybody who stood in his way.PITY HIM AFTERWARDS is a terrifying tour de force of suspense.

Jack Pine was born to be a Hollywood star. He has no morals, no scruples; he will not hesitate to do anything or love anyone if it might advance his career, get him the best roles, or project him ever more firmly into the spotlight.And success does come, beyond the imagination of Jack’s agents and co-stars — even beyond the hopes of his boyhood friend Buddy Pal, a man who carries with the dark secrets of Jack’s past.Buddy stands apart, aloof: he alone truly benefits from Jack’s careening ambition and his artful, charming conniving. Others who depend on Jack may fall by the wayside, but how can the affable star be blamed?In fact, Jack Pine can be excused anything — until he carries out the final sin, for which there can be no pardon.

Due to a foiled burglary in a high-tech lab doing research for cigarette manufacturers, Freddie Noon, the thief, is now invisible. This condition has clear-cut advantages for a man in Freddie's profession, but now everybody wants a glimpse of Freddie. But Freddie doesn't dare show his face, his shadow, anything. Because Freddie Noon has gotten a taste of invisibility--and he can't quit now.From Publishers WeeklyYet another variation on the invisible-man notion doesn't sound like a promising prospect, but if any author can wring some fresh fun out of it, Westlake's the one. He doesn't fail. Freddie Noon is a sharp, likable burglar whose mistake is to break into the offices of two doctors doing so-called research for the Tobacco Institute. Catching him, they make him a human guinea pig for one of their formulas, and -- meet disappearing Freddie. Naturally, his life as a burglar gets much easier, but his girlfriend, Peg, isn't too comfortable with an invisible lover. In no time, Freddie is on the run: the Institute wants him for its nefarious purposes, the doctors want to study him further and a corrupt cop has his own reasons for pursuit. How Freddie and Peg run rings around the opposition, in New York and at an upstate hideaway, is the stuff of glorious Westlake comedy, in which Freddie's invisibility is merely one element in a caper full of hilarious characters, crackpot conversations and narrative sleight-of-hand.

Cab driver Chet Conway was hoping for a good tip from his latest fare, the sort he could spend. But what he got was a tip on a horse race. Which might have turned out okay, except that when he went to collect his winnings Chet found his bookie lying dead on the living room floor.Chet knows he had nothing to do with it — but just try explaining that to the cops, to the two rival criminal gangs who each think Chet’s working for the other, and to the dead man’s beautiful sister, who has flown in from Las Vegas to avenge her brother’s murder...

Misadventures of a young cab driver who, when trying to collect some race track winnings, becomes embroiled in the mystery surrounding the murder of his bookie.

Nabbed midheist, Dortmunder has to do some fast thinking.

For 25 years, Burke Devore has provided for his family and played by the rules. Until now. Downsized from his job, Devore is slipping away: from his wife, his family, and from all civilized norms of behavior. He wants his life back, and will do anything to get it. In this relentlessly fascinating novel, the masterful Westlake takes readers on a journey of obsession and outrage inside a quiet man’s desperate world.

After just three years, THE BEST AMERICAN MYSTERY STORIES series is already a great success, earning raves from such diverse sources as Joyce Carol Oates, ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY, and ELLERY QUEEN’S MYSTERY MAGAZINE. Little wonder, given the power of the Best American brand, the talent of the series editor, Otto Penzler, and the high profile of the guest editors. Now, with the legendary mystery writer Donald E. Westlake as guest editor, the 2000 edition is sure to boost the series’ popularity even more. From Tfty exceptional stories chosen by Penzler, Westlake has selected the twenty best, including stories by Tom Franklin, Jeffery Deaver, Shel Silverstein, and Dennis Lehane, for a collection that will delight mystery buffs and casual readers alike.

Otto Penzler rounds up the most cunning, ruthless, criminals in mystery fiction.The best mysteries — whether detective, historical, police procedural, cozy, or comedy-have one thing in common: a memorable culprit. For all the heroes in earnest pursuit, there are malefactors on the loose, determined to outfox their efforts and sow trouble in their wake. These are the rogues and villains who haunt our imaginations, but they often have more in common with their heroic counterparts than we might expect (and, as we shall see, some even moonlight as detectives or do-gooders themselves). The seventy-two handpicked stories in this collection introduce us to the miscreants who have schemed and slashed their way through the mystery canon over the past hundred and fifty years, captivating and confounding readers in the process.MEET DELINQUENT PSYCHES OF ALL STRIPES, INCLUDINGgentleman thieves, calculating crooks, fearsome body snatchers, masters of disguise, morally-challenged lawyers, deceitful doctors, heinous hit men. charismatic con men, amoral adventurers, supernatural suspects, deviant detectives, vile villainesses, and cold-blooded killersIN UNFORGETTABLE TALES BYRobert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, Washington Irving, Jack London, L. T. Meade, 0. Henry, Sinclair Lewis, Edgar Wallace, Leslie Charteris, Erle Stanley Gardner, Edward 0. Hoch, David Morrell, Loren D. Estleman, and countless others.

Engel had worked his way up to being Nick Rovito’s right-hand man, near the top of the Syndicate. And this was a delicate job — retrieving a very important jacket, loaded with heroin, from a fresh grave. But Engel found only an empty coffin...

This Halcyon Classics ebook collection contains fifty science fiction short stories and novellas by more than forty different authors. Most of the stories in this collection were published during the heyday of popular science fiction magazines from the 1930s to the 1960s.Included within this work are stories by H. Beam Piper, Murray Leinster, Poul Anderson, Mack Reynolds, Randall Garrett, Robert Sheckley, Stanley Weinbaum, Alan Nourse, Harl Vincent, and many others.This collection is DRM free and includes an active table of contents for easy navigation.