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Без аннотации.
Романы «Чудо десяти дней» и «Две возможности» объединены местом действия — городком Райтсвилл, в котором уже некогда побывал знаменитый писатель и сыщик-любитель Эллери Квин и в котором снова творятся преступления. Обеспокоенные горожане справедливо надеются, что и на этот раз проницательный Эллери сумеет отыскать убийц.
Given its extraordinary span, its international scope, and its variant styles and groundbreaking stylists, A Century of Great Suspense Stories is a singular achievement. A bestselling master of suspense himself Jeffery Deaver had the enviable task of selecting from the thousands of stories written over the past one hundred years those which best represented the classic form, as well as the justly celebrated authors whose ironic twists and stunning payoffs left a lasting, vivid, and unnerving impression. The result is a triumph.
In this ambitious anthology you’ll revel in the sardonic, overtly amoral plotting of Patricia Highsmith. You’ll rediscover the strangely poignant and surprising turns of Stanley Ellin, and the profoundly underrated Margaret Millar, a genius who mixed savage social satire with brooding horror. You’ll be treated to Stephen King at his chilling best. You’ll find yourself on the violent urban streets of Ross Macdonald and Mickey Spillane, and seeped in the ominous regional flavor of Sharyn McCrumb and Tony Hillerman. You’ll marvel at the cunning webs spun by Lawrence Block, Ruth Rendell, Anthony Boucher, and Sara Paretsky, all of whom defy expectations as they reinvent the genre. And you’ll understand the awesome reputations of those authors who set the standard, such as the legendary Harlan Ellison, Fredric Brown, the master of the twist ending, and James M. Cain, uncannily skilled at knowing what went on between men and women behind closed doors. (The darker the room the better.)
Delivering everything from the one-two punch of the detective story to the ingeniously precise trappings of the police procedural, from the disquieting corners of the criminal mind to sheer dread-inducing horror, A Century of Great Suspense Stories is a rich anthology of this popular literary genre, a stunning tribute to the art of storytelling, and to the men and women who have done it best.
Something entirely new in the field — a Wild West mystery in the heart of NYC. Ellery Queen's now-famous and much-imitated analytico-deductive method of solving crimes is brought to the acme of its development. Through logical reasoning and brilliare deduction, Mr. Queen narrows the field from literally thousands of potential suspects to the one and only possible murderer — the ultra-clever plotter who performed the seeming miracle of causing a gun to vanish before the eyes of twenty-thousand spectators!
Tutter King had it made.
Every time he spun a platter on “The King’s Session,” gold came out: TV earnings, returns on his secret holdings in recording companies, the old payola that some bright young men think only their rightful due.
Tutter was a gay young man-around-town. He was also involved in some highly romantic hanky-panky with his pretty blond assistant, Lola Arkwright.
And then the roof started to cave in. Senate Investigating Committees. The angry emergence of the wife who Lola never knew existed. The canceling of his network contract.
Poor Tutter, it looked like he was going to lose everything. Even his life!
An eccentric millionairess is lying in a diabetic coma on a hospital bed in an anteroom of the surgical suite of the Dutch Memorial Hospital, which she founded, awaiting the removal of her gall bladder. When the surgery is about to begin, the patient is found to have been strangled with picture wire. Although the hospital is crowded, it is well guarded, and only a limited number of people had the opportunity to have murdered her, including members of her family and a small number of the medical personnel.
The apparent murderer is a member of the surgical staff who was actually seen in the victim’s vicinity, but his limp makes him easy to impersonate. Ellery Queen examines a pair of hospital shoes, one of which has a broken lace that has been mended with surgical tape. He performs an extended piece of logical deduction based on the shoe, plus such slight clues as the position of a filing cabinet, and creates a list of necessary characteristics of the murderer that narrows the field of suspects down to a single surprising possibility.
For just over fifty years, Ellery Queen has dominated the American detective and mystery story scene. His annual collections of short and not-so-short stories by the cream of writers in the field have appeared for nearly forty of those years.
Including a complete short novel by Erle Stanley Gardner, The Clue of the Screaming Woman, and seventeen novelettes and short stories by masters of mystery Robert Bloch, Hugh Pentecost, Victor Canning, Lloyd Biggie, Jr. and Ellery Queen himself, amongst many others.
At crowded noon, in front of Fifth Avenue's most fashionable department store, while hundreds of sidewalk onlookers watch a demonstration of modernistic furniture in the window, the demonstrator touches a button regulating a concealed wall-bed — the bed swings out of the wall — and from its dark recesses tumbles the distorted, crumpled corpse of a beautiful woman...
Ellery Queen moves vitally and refreshingly through his own story — a slender, cynical young man with a genius for piercing the veil of commonplaces and arriving at foolproof conclusions. Old Inspector Queen, his father, again takes you through the complicated process of a police investigation, although it is Ellery who is responsible for the solution of one of the most stimulating and baffling detective stories ever written. And the denouement is surprising and yet inevitable.