Stanley Ellin

For Murray Kirk, running a private investigation agency is a business; he isn't interested in justice or crusades, just profit and loss. And, because Murray knows something about police corruption, when he's asked to act for a young officer accused of bribery, he isn't keen. He can't see the profit - until he meets the man's fiancée. Then his motives become uncomfortably confused, and he finds himself descending into a murky world of bookmakers, gangsters and crooked politicians, where setting up an honest cop is all in a day's work ...

The Eighth Circle

Original Title: Mystery Stories

Quiet Horror

Star Light, Star Bright

In the wake of a tragic accident, a young college student haunted by guilt moves to New York City to shake the past and discover his destiny. After three years at Temple University, Dan Egan was still trying to find out who he was. Frustratingly unmoored, he moved from engineering to fine arts and finally to humanities, plowed under each time. He was the one in the back row, sleeping behind dark glasses—the “ivy beleaguered” dilettante soon to be adrift in the very real world of working men. Now, following his expulsion after a tragic dorm fire, Dan has finally been defined. He’s the guy who failed to save his roommate—all-American football hero, Time magazine’s golden cover boy, and Dan’s best friend since childhood. Maybe Dan will take the midnight train to Philadelphia and weather the worst of the family storm. Maybe not. Wherever Dan’s headed, he’ll be carrying his buddy’s ghost. Then he meets the Barbara Jean Avery, the dumb, sweet still-virginal child bride of a dangerous old crust named Michael. She reads movie magazines, flounces around Coney Island, and has Technicolor dreams that will never come true. Dan’s got a thing for her; maybe she can make his dreams come true. Without even trying, without even realizing, Barbara Jean and Michael are going to change Dan’s life. A novel that flirts with the mysteries of being human—from the comic to the sexual to the tragic—The Winter After This Summer is a singular work in the canon of a three-time Edgar Award–winning author, a late coming-of-age story written with a fierce and respectful regard for man’s fate.

The Winter After This Summer

Very Old Money

Ben Smith, a market researcher from New York City, has arrived on Santo Stefano, an island two hundred miles off the coast of Peru. At the behest of his company's seafood division, he's gauging the potential profitability of the island's abundance of rock lobsters. Encouraging a little tin-pot country to draw foreign investment should be a breeze – a beautiful one, too, berthed, as he is, in such an exotic locale. But Ben's interests are soon divided between the seductive Infanta Elissa, daughter of the island's powerful guano king, and another American tourist who has come in search of a reportedly lost and invaluable Panama portrait painted by French post-Impressionist artist Paul Gauguin. And something sinister is taking over Santo Stefano. The locals call it festa brava, a ritualistic hanging ceremony, dating back centuries, in which competitors test their courage against the gallows. Whether you survive or not, it's said to be the ultimate experience. As an undercurrent of violence and unease rises closer to the surface, Ben wonders what else awaits him on the island, how it will change him, and how far he'll be expected to go on a journey of adventure, self-exploration, and absolute fear. From a Mystery Writers of America Grand Master, The Panama Portrait is "a [spellbinding], sophisticated, barbaric, and hypnotic" thriller (Kirkus Reviews).

The Panama Portrait

Michael and Amy Lloyd, live-in servants to the straightlaced Durie family, are slowly, and for seemingly innocent reasons, becoming involved in a series of events leading to tragedy, scandal, and ghastly death because of Margaret Durie, the elderly doyenn

Joseph Losey

John Barrymore jr.

Howard Chamberlain

Dorothy Comingore

Preston Foster

Joan Lorring

Die Nacht der Wahrheit

In a quaint old restaurant, a chef relies on a devilish secret ingredient In Sbirro’s restaurant, there is no electric lighting, no music, and no menu. The only sound is the contented sighs of the regulars, who come every night in hopes that Sbirro will treat them to his signature dish, the famed lamb Amirstan, which comes from a beast so rare, only Sbirro knows how to obtain it. Tonight, two diners at this spectacular relic of a forgotten age will find that lamb Amirstan costs more than they are willing to pay. “The Specialty of the House” was the first story published by Stanley Ellin, who would go on to become one of the great short fiction authors of the twentieth century. From crime to horror to grim tragedy, every story in this collection is as delectable as a cut of meat prepared by Sbirro himself.

The Specialty of the House

Specchio delle mie brame

Hired as a tutor for a madwoman’s son, an American expatriate scraps to stay alive A washed-up heavyweight with dreams of becoming a writer, Reno Davis is down to his last franc when he lands a job as a bouncer at a sprawling Paris discotheque. His first night, he saves a slumming beauty from a pair of café toughs, and she rewards him with a well-paid job tutoring her darling son. But what she really wants is a bodyguard to keep her precious baby safe from terrors real and imagined. Reno’s new boss is a mental case, paranoid and delusional, whose lovers have a bad habit of dying violent deaths. But in this case, her paranoia may be justified. Protecting the boy draws Reno into an international conspiracy that stretches from Paris to Rome to the killing fields of northern Algeria. When the bullets start to fly, this ex-fighter begins to fear that he may be punching above his weight.

A Novel of Suspense

House of Cards

'A macabre little tale about an unusual restaurant in Manhattan and its lonely patrons, it displayed both a debt to Edgar Allan Poe and an acute understanding of human nature that is the key to the success of his work' GUARDIAN Stanley Ellin's first short story, 'The Speciality of the House', about a New York restaurant with a special gourmet menu, was published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine in 1948 and caused an immediate sensation, winning him a special Ellery Queen Award. 'The House Party' and 'The Blessington Method' subsequently both won Edgar Awards. Stanley Ellin, who was made a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America in 1980, is acknowledged as one of the great masters of the 20th-century short story, and this volume brings together the best of his work in the genre. 'A macabre little tale about an unusual restaurant in Manhattan and its lonely patrons, it displayed both a debt to Edgar Allan Poe and an acute understanding of human nature that is the key to the success of his work' GUARDIAN

The Speciality of the House

Mirror, Mirror on the Wall

There was a time when Davis Cup winner Chris Monte had it all. Now, down and out in Dade County, restringing racquets at a South Beach tennis shop and hiring himself out for an occasional lesson, he's dead broke. Then, along comes Elizabeth Jones, a mousy student with an irresistible proposition: fifty thousand dollars in exchange for marrying her. As sole beneficiary of the Valentine estate, Elizabeth is set to inherit a fortune. There's only one stipulation: She must be married. She'll collect, they'll divorce, and Chris will get paid off. Simple. But there are a few details Elizabeth left out, including the other claimants who are ruthlessly scheming to get their shares;her former boss, a goon with shady connections;her institutionalized mother, the target of whispers and gossip;the syndicate representative behind the execution of the will;and the pressing question of the actual identity of the deceased. Before long, Chris is in over his head. And wondering what his real part is in this twisted game of family secrets, Chris has good reason to fear that in agreeing to marry Elizabeth, he's set in motion the carefully drawn plans for his own murder. From a Mystery Writers of America Grand Master, The Valentine Estate is a gripping thriller and was named an Edgar Award finalist for Best Novel.

The Valentine Estate

In a desolate part of Brooklyn, a retired history professor plots mass murder The withered old man speaks into a tape recorder. This is not a confession, he explains, but a presentation. He is Charles Witter Kirwan, a former academic who has lived his whole life in the same house and watched his childhood neighborhood turn from white to black. Now, stricken with terminal cancer, Kirwan has decided to fight back against his neighbors. His may be the ravings of a lunatic racist, but the dynamite in his basement is real. He is going to blow up the apartment building next door—and take some sixty African Americans with it. Private investigator John Milano is on the trail of a stolen painting when he catches wind of Kirwan’s mad plan. He has forty-eight hours to stop the bombing, and to keep those innocents from following this twisted, hateful man into death.

The Dark Fantastic

Edgar Award winner: Investigating a crooked cop, a private detective gets too close to the case. The investigators of the Conmy-Kirk detective agency don’t work in trench coats, drink on the job, or carry pistols. They are researchers who comb newspapers and government records in search of the tiny details that could make or break their clients’ fortunes. It is painstaking and unromantic, but as co-owner Murray Kirk is about to learn, those details can mean the difference between life and death. The district attorney is cracking down on corruption in the NYPD, and the search is spreading like wildfire, forcing hundreds of policemen to resign in disgrace. When Conmy-Kirk is hired to clear the name of one of the accused, Kirk finds himself falling for his client’s daughter, a moral infraction that draws him deeper into the city’s underworld than he ever wanted to slip. This work isn’t like it is in the movies—if Murray Kirk catches a bullet, he’ll stay dead.

A grisly murder reveals the hateful secrets that lie beneath a small town’s surface The locals call her the Ballou. An illustrator for a high-fashion magazine, she has been the talk of the upstate town of Sutton ever since she first appeared, paying cash for one of the finest houses on Nicholas Street. Daring, gaudy, and grand, she inspires envy in the women and lust in the men. And in one member of this quiet town, she is about to inspire murder. The trouble starts when her rakish New York lover moves in full time, scandalizing the prudish Ayers family next door. When the Ayers’ maid pays a social call to the Ballou, she finds her lying dead at the foot of a staircase—gray, cold, and fabulous no more. Suspicion falls on the Ayerses, whose starched exterior hides a wealth of ugly secrets. From this interlocking narrative told from the perspectives of the citizens of Sutton comes a reminder that no town is too small for murder.

Stanley Ellin

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