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Aleksei Vassilievich Krylov, we want you on our side...
Let's face it, Alex: you were the KGB's top assassin, and they paid you off. Just as we might. A cushy lieutenant-colonelcy in Tokyo; riding pour le sport, a yacht, your pick of Eurasian dolls... Like? We can do better in the U.S.A., Alex — come on over, and bring your secrets with you...
That was FACE's pitch to the would-be defector, and it got results. Witness one hell of a nice courier slashed and dumped in a Tokyo alley.
Maybe agent Pete Brook could make jolly Alex's dream come true. Except what did Krylov really long for in America — wine, women and song... or a dramatic return to the murderer's trade?
You’ll find out in Ellery Queen’s GUESS WHO’S COMING TO KILL YOU — a superlative new thriller by the great suspense novelist...
Halfway House, where a strange man finds final rest on his tortured journey through life... Halfway House, where under the grim shadow of a sensational murder, opposites meet and clash — common peddler and financier, young housewife and cold society woman, struggling lawyer and millionaire debutante...
Halfway House, where Ellery Queen, crime consultant to the world-at-large, returns to his old love of pure and pungent deduction in what is unquestionably his most fascinating narrative of real people and subtle violence to date — a modern Tale of Two Cities by the master mystery-teller.
Dr. Harrison Brown, Healer or Heel?
Competent, respectable practitioner of the time-honored art of medicine. Dr. Harry Brown — failure! Until the day old man Gresham, with his bum ticker, his millions, and his voluptuous young spouse, Karen, became Dr. Brown’s benefactor and major patient. Then it was money, luxury — and Karen.
But what about the corpse someone slipped into Dr. Brown’s tightly locked apartment?
And what can a man say when he finds himself a member of an organized crime ring?
And how do you tell his richest patient that you’re having an affair with his wife?
It was enough to give a man a heart attack.
But which man?
Have yourself a crooked little Christmas with The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries.
Edgar Award-winning editor Otto Penzler collects sixty of his all-time favorite holiday crime stories — many of which are difficult or nearly impossible to find anywhere else. From classic Victorian tales by Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Thomas Hardy, to contemporary stories by Sara Paretsky and Ed McBain, this collection touches on all aspects of the holiday season, and all types of mysteries. They are suspenseful, funny, frightening, and poignant.
Included are puzzles by Mary Higgins Clark, Isaac Asimov, and Ngaio Marsh; uncanny tales in the tradition of A Christmas Carol by Peter Lovesey and Max Allan Collins; O. Henry-like stories by Stanley Ellin and Joseph Shearing, stories by pulp icons John D. MacDonald and Damon Runyon; comic gems from Donald E. Westlake and John Mortimer; and many, many more. Almost any kind of mystery you’re in the mood for — suspense, pure detection, humor, cozy, private eye, or police procedural — can be found in these pages.
FEATURING:
— Unscrupulous Santas
— Crimes of Christmases Past and Present
— Festive felonies
— Deadly puddings
— Misdemeanors under the mistletoe
— Christmas cases for classic characters including Sherlock Holmes, Brother Cadfael, Miss Marple, Hercule Poirot, Ellery Queen, Rumpole of the Bailey, Inspector Morse, Inspector Ghote, A.J. Raffles, and Nero Wolfe.
Who bludgeoned the co-ed and killed the dean?
To find out, McCall had to risk riots. Yippies and the dark mysteries of today’s student unrest...
After seven consecutive best-sellers — Ellery Queen poses an eight problem more bizarre than “The Egyptian Cross Mystery”, more ingenious than “The Siamese Twin Mystery”; more amazing than any crime ever conceived in fiction. We do not hesitate to predict that THE CHINESE ORANGE MYSTERY will be hauled by Mr. Queen’s thousand of ardent fans as the most original of his analytico-deductive novels.
What Inspector Richard Queen wanted to know was the identity of the murdered man. How could he be expected to solve a murder mystery without knowing who was murdered? The body of the slain man was found on the 22nd floor of the Hotel Chancellor in a private room; no one even remotely connected with the investigation had ever seen the man before. His name, where he came from, why he was there — remain a baffling mystery to the end. Yet all who found themselves enmeshed in the web of the tragedy — Donald Kirk, millionaire publisher and collector; his invalid father; his younger sister; the young novelist from China; the adventurers from abroad — found their lives warped and changed by the death of this nameless nobody from nowhere!
But what perplexed Ellery Queen even more was the incredible appearance of the scene of the crime. Everything had been turned backwards! The victim’s clothing had been turned backwards, the rug upside down, the pictures facing the wall — everything movable in the room had been turned backwards. And what was the explanation of those grotesque ramrods stack up the victim’s back?
Somebody had killed his father, then framed him. He knew who that somebody was, but how could he prove it?
An exotic movie actress, the swivel-hipped blonde, Winni Moon, and her scented chimpanzee; a murder which, already precious, became a managing editor’s dream; Pink, who came from Flatbush, Brooklyn; Solly Spaeth who was spawned in New York...
These are only some slight hints of what you will find in THE DEVIL TO PAY and it is fair to say that here again is evidence that for ingenuity, surprise and original setting no mystery writer today can equal Ellery Queen. He never has failed to play fair with his reader. The amazing deductions of his stories are always in accord with the science of the streamlined murder.
If crime is the subject of reader interest no mystery fan can commit a greater crime than to neglect the two-to-three-hour revel which THE DEVIL TO PAY provides.
Police Captain Bartholdi sometimes indulged himself in a harmless fantasy. His thoughts, he would imagine, were irresponsible imps that wriggled out of his head and scampered around with an abandon that was often embarrassing.
A woman had been kidnapped. That woman was dead.
Bartholdi was convinced that a murderer was at that moment having a grim laugh at his expense. He knew who the murderer was. He would have bet his pension and his sacred soul that he knew. But he could not, knowing, prove what he knew. He needed confirmation on one critical point.
From among his antic imps he culled the three that had directed his mind to its present state:
One newspaper too many.
A girl who slept too soundly.
And, most important of all, a ragout with too many onions.
In THE DOOR BETWEEN Ellery Queen again achieves this apparently impossible and produces something entirely new in the mystery field. The weapon he was in the most deadly, most universal and the head known among all the wide variety of weapons ever employed by criminals and murderers. The subject and the theme of THE DOOR BETWEEN give the thousands of Queen readers yet another kind of trill. The skill and brilliance Queen’s writing show in each succeeding Queen novel the steady growth of a master hand.
Ellery Queen has now opened his own detective agency, Ellery Queen, Inc., on Times Square, New York, and his very first case develops into a complex and spell-binding tale of crime, intrigue, and extraordinary deduction. In its telling, the author has returned to the style and method of such earlier great successes as THE DUTCH SHOE MYSTERY, THE SIAMESE TWIN MYSTERY, etc. Here again we meet Inspector Queen, Sergeant Velie and other earlier favorites and again Ellery Queen applies his analytical deductive methods to one of the most puzzling murder plots ever uncovered in the annals of crime.
Six months after paying Ellery a handsome retainer, a retired munitions magnate, worth many millions, dies on his yacht in the Caribbean. Peculiar circumstances! An important man is quickly buried at sea with no medical certificate and no autopsy! Crew quickly dispersed before they can be questioned! Only Ellery’s diamond sharp wits could cut through the web of tangled events and arrive at the dramatic solution.
The Egyptian Cross Mystery has been characterized as “Ellery Queen’s weirdest adventure.”
The shuddery, breathless plot plus Ellery Queen’s brilliantly logical solution mark the peak of Mr. Queen’s new famous “analytico-deductive” method.
Ellery Queen has pitted his brain against many murdered but nowhere in his career has be applied his diamond-keen with to a murder as eerie and as puzzling as the crime which open The Egyptian Cross Mystery.
John who? It all began simply enough, God knows. Mary Hazelwood suddenly decided to go away for the weekend and left a note for her sister Susie, with whom she shared an apartment, that she was off for Los Angeles and that John was driving her to the airport. It was only when she didn’t return that the problem arose.
John, obviously, had been the last person known to have seen Mary. But the difficulty was that Mary knew four different men named John, and each of them denied even having seen her that day.
Which John? Susie hadn’t a clue. And when she turned for help to a young professor named Mervyn Gray, who was half in love with her sister, he found a very disturbing warning in his mailbox. In block letters sprawling across a torn sheet of cheap note paper was this terse message — Confess or tomorrow you die!
A STATEMENT TO THE PUBLIC
Since 1929 we have the exclusive privilege of publishing the detective stories of Ellery Queen in the United States. In our years publishing Queen’s thirteen books we have refrained from the usual and monotonously extravagant publishers’ claims, preferring to let the books speak for themselves.
They have spoken so eloquently — each has been an instant best-seller here and abroad — that Queen is now recognized by the world’s press and public as one of the greatest writers of detective stories.
Now, with our publication of Ellery Queen’s fourteenth book and latest novel, THE FOUR OF HEARTS, we feel compelled to break our silence. We honestly believe that THE FOUR OF HEARTS is not only Ellery Queen’s finest novel to date, but is destined to be ranked as a classic by those familiar with this type of fiction.
We ask you to compare it mercilessly, point for point — in plot, in characterization, in atmosphere, in style, in ingenuity, in excitement and bafflement and as a source of sheer reading pleasure — with any detective story you have ever read.
We ask you to judge for yourself whether our claim is even slightly overmagnified. We feel confident that your judgement will substantiate our opinion.
Uncle Slater O’Shea was loaded.
Uncle Slater was supporting the lot of them — five freeloaders.
And in spite of liberal daily applications of whisky, Uncle Slater had his health.
He intended to keep it, so he had made a new will. So long as he continued to enjoy life, he would continue to maintain them. But the minute he died, his estate would be cut up among them, plus seventeen additional assorted O’Sheas. Cut up into twenty-two pieces, the freeloaders wouldn’t get enough from Uncle Slater O’Shea’s estate to live in the manner to which they had become accustomed.
Several weeks later, benevolently trailing a fragrant haze of good Irish whisky behind him, Uncle Slater went upstairs for a nip and a nap. He never came down. Which of them had been foolish enough to do the old boy in?
Armed men invade the Queen apartment. At their head is Abel Bendigo, brother of one of the world’s most powerful men, King Bendigo of Bodigen Arms, industrial monster whose tentacles embrace the planet. Someone is threatening to kill King Bendigo, and Ellery must undertake to save that hated life! Virtual prisoners, the Queens are rocketed a sealed plane to the headquarters of the Bendigo empire — a mysterious island believed to be “somewhere in the Atlantic.”
On Bendigo Island — in a frightening atmosphere of concentration camp, industrial slavery, and brute militarism — Ellery comes to grips with a baffling murderer who calmly announces not only the exact date of the assassination, but the exact hour and minute as well! He finds himself matching wits with the fascinating American-born King, handsome, cynical, an absolute monarch; with King’s disturbing wife Karla, from a European royal family; Abel, King’s Prime Minister, of acute intelligence; and Judah, the saturnine little third brother with an inexhaustible thirst for $50-a-bottle cognac.
Ellery solves a difficult locked-room puzzle with classic brilliance and at the same time grapples with the life-and-death problem of the democratic world today — how to deal with the violent threat of totalitarian power.
The green wig belonged to a redheaded Vegas show girl. The sequined gown had highlighted the bouncy silhouette of a blonde off-Broadway actress.
The long evening gloves were the property of a bosomy smalltown nurse. These were more than an inventory of ladies’ wear. For they were found on the scene of a brutal crime during a hideaway weekend, near the body of an internationally known jet-setter notorious for his pursuit of beautiful women. What did they mean?
The question plagues Ellery and Inspector Queen — and it will plague you — throughout the Queens’ newest murder case, most of which takes place in Queen fans’ favorite New England town, Wrightsville. But it is far from the only missing piece of the puzzle. There is the victim’s dying message. There is the mysterious woman to whom the trail is long and difficult. Above all there is the question: Who was THE LAST WOMAN IN HIS LIFE?
Follow Ellery as he works his way through a typically labyrinthine Queen maze, from one surprise to another, with the most stunning surprise of all waiting for you at the end.
At first it seemed as though only The Madman Theory could explain the brutal shotgun slaying which lay in wait for the friendly group of back-packing hikers.
But Inspector Omar Collins, lean, gloomy-eyed, black-haired, was a painstaking man.
The more he pursued it, the less he believed in The Madman Theory.
“A Problem in Adultery” might aptly be the subtitle of Ellery’s latest case.
Who is pretty Mrs. Lawrence’s lover? And how can the young, rich Broadway producer be saved from the folly of her infidelity and the fury of her husband Dirk, the unsuccessful author who cannot control his morbid attacks of jealousy? These are Ellery’s major problems.
Beginning with a night rendezvous in the park and a punch in the jaw from Irate Husband, Ellery finds himself hot on the trail of an unknown Casanova... suspected lover, home-wrecker, and likely target for a .45. And making the trail all over the jungle of New York City — from Chinatown and The Bowery to the upper reaches of Bronx Park — are the tantalizing Scarlet Letters, an alphabetical puzzle that keeps Ellery — and the reader — cudgeling his wits to the very end.
Ellery has a special surprise for you in a case as sensational as the front page of tomorrow’s tabloid — the first appearance in a Queen novel of Nikki Porter as Ellery’s Girl Friday, that fiery, faithful, and long-suffering secretary of the Queen radio and short-story adventures. But THE SCARLET LETTERS is full of surprises, not the least of them the astounding pay-off of as exciting and clever a mystery as Ellery has ever gone a-hunting.