The guys you lick don’t make you a champ, kid — it’s the guys who lick you... whose red leather roars till that final gong—

A mysterious evil had destroyed all he loved. Now he had nothing to risk but his life.

“You’re back in the bushes, kid, with one of your spikes in a rookie’s grave and one still touching a big league rubber. You can go back either way — but one is called a comeback!”

Only a fool would risk his life to please a mob of crazy peons. But only a coward could refuse the challenge of this greatest bull of all.

When the Walrus experiment goes wrong, McGee becomes one whale of a problem!

Trapped by a desperate hunted man, Susan — at any cost to herself — had to warn the children. Could she find the strength, the calm she’d need to outwit him?

I love my wife, Betty, and the children she gave me. They are my only defense against a memory that otherwise I could not possibly live with.

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.

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 represents a high watermark of America’s underbelly. Crime writing gets no better than this.

Featuring

• Deadly Diamonds

• Dancing Rats

• A Prize Fighter Fighting for His Life

• A Parrot that Wouldn’t Talk

Including

• Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon as it was originally published

• Lester Dent’s Luck in print for the first time

It was Christmas Eve, but this year Paul wanted to leave the house and its memories.

It did not take the American reporter long to sense the mystery aboard the freighter plodding eastern seas.

Gasping, Steve knelt and listened. Horror blossomed in the hot sunlight.

The End of the Night is a journey into a world of fear and violence carried to their logical extreme — murder.

Not the kind of murder that society understands, the murder that comes from passion, or hatred, or love, but the murder that shakes the very foundations of our civilization — the pointless, gratuitous, casual act of killing.

This is the grim and powerful story of the “Wolf Pack” murders: a group of three young men and a beautiful girl, who roam the country, killing without any apparent motive. They are caught; they are tried; they are executed.

But who were they, really? Why did they do it? And who were their victims?

With the skill of the master storyteller that he is, Mr. MacDonald leads us into the little hell where four people, from very different backgrounds, take refuge from the world that they do not understand, that has no meaning for them. Sander Golden, the leader of the group, is a displaced intellectual, intelligent but without real talent. Kirby Stone is a college boy, a young man from a “good” family who has been thrown into the world of adult passions before he is able to cope with them. Hernandez is a simple brute, held in check by his admiration for Golden. And Nan Koslov is the catalyst. the smoldering spark of sexual desire that ignites their brutality.

Theirs is a private, dangerous world, a world of sex, narcotics. jealousy and envy — but it is theirs. Together, linked by their common frustrations, they move back and forth on the endless roads, from cheap motel to cheap motel, in a succession of stolen cars, spreading violence and death.

The End of the Night is a novel of suspense and passion. It is also a remarkable attempt to probe the motives that lie behind this senseless and shocking outburst of violence. Mr. MacDonald examines the past of the young killers, looking for the cause of their revolt. He analyzes the processes of the law, right up to the moment when the State exacts the supreme penalty. And he shows how circumstances provide the victims, as accidentally as the roulette wheel chooses a number.

It is a book the reader will no be able to put down until the very end; and it is one he will not forget quickly.

Their specialty was spotting the soft deal, the shrewd angle, and giving the business to whoever interfered. But what happens when you make a fool of the wrong guy?

It was up to Bus Bannister to climb into a rocket ship presumably headed for the Moon, or else...

They flew from Ceylon to Bombay — and with considerable mystery.

A surprising story about a girl who took a terrific gamble...

Danny Watson should have known that there was something wrong with this fighter, Leslie, considering how he had obtained him...

He was huge, and slow, and very powerful. And the family was never the same again.

Miranda was her name — and she sang a sad song.