The Spider #73: The Spider and the Eyeless Legion
How could a man, enslaved and blinded, still strike terror to the hearts of his captors? How could that man, apparently helpless, remain the only hope of a city laid low by crime? Read here how the Master of Men cast off his shackles and led a populace to redemption and vengeance! The most gripping, dramatic Spider novel ever published!
Ace G-Man #7: Targets for the Flaming Arrow
Klaw, Murdoch, and Kerrigan—AKA the Suicide Squad—are the best the F.B.I. has to offer. Through nearly two dozen adventures, they battled spies, saboteurs, and even super-villains! This collection includes their final four stories:
- MOVE OVER, DEATH!: Kerrigan, Murdoch and Klaw—the fabulous fighting Feds—had finally been given the assignment which no G-man could take—and live! Gladly, with grins on their battle-scarred faces, they walked into the Nazi trap, with blazing guns punctuating their war cry: “Move over, Death!”
- TARGETS FOR THE FLAMING ARROW: They had no clues, nothing but the charred arrow which had snuffed out the life of the American diplomat. But more important, Kerrigan, Murdoch and Klaw had almost no time at all in which to work, for within four days, the Flaming Arrow’s medieval minions were scheduled to destroy America’s vast war effort. Could even the famed Suicide Squad stop this Axis grand coup—before they too became living targets for the Flaming Arrow…?
- BLOOD, SWEAT AND BULLETS: The Ox had America neatly packaged to deliver to Hitler on Christmas morning. And, with only five shopping days left to Christmas, Kerrigan and Murdoch bartered their partner’s life as the price of her freedom. But Steve Klaw found that he had to chase death three thousand miles to seal his bargain—while Kerrigan and Murdoch were helpless save to rush him to his doom!
- THE SUICIDE SQUAD AND THE TWINS OF DEATH!: When Blond Otto The Hangman and his Nazi aides told Murdoch that he would soon join the dead Kerrigan and Klaw, he waited until he did—then added the roar of a dead man’s weapon to the blazing guns of his ghostly pals!
The Complete Cases of Jim Bennett, Volume 1 (The Dime Detective Library)
Cleveland private detective Jim Bennett appeared in over 20 stories in the pages of Dime Detective and other Popular Publications pulps of the late 1940s and early 50s. Noted as one of the few pulp P.I.s to actually be in a relationship, these stories are some of the most refined detective stories of the post-war era, as the influence of the noir movies of the era greatly influenced their plots and styling. The Complete Cases of Jim Bennett, Volume 1 contains the first four stories, along with all of the original pulp illustrations.
The Complete Cases of Doc Pierce, Volume 1 (The Dime Detective Library)
Author Richard Dermody’s stories of traveling conman Doc Pierce appeared frequently during the 1940s in the pages of Dime Detective magazine. Pierce, a scheming grifter, appeared in over twenty stories, and they are a hidden gem in this period of Dime Detective. The Complete Cases of Doc Pierce, Volume 1 contains the first half of the series: “Hello, Sucker!,” “The Doctor’s Bag,” “The Doctor Operates,” “The Doctor’s Ditch,” “The Doctor’s Fee,” “Painless Operation,” “The Doctor’s Treatment,” “The Doctor Deals,” “The Doctor’s Test,” “The Doctor’s Switch,” and “The Doctor’s Plant.”
Ace G-Man #6: The Suicide Squad’s Dawn Patrol
Klaw, Murdoch, and Kerrigan—AKA the Suicide Squad—are the best the F.B.I. has to offer. Through nearly two dozen adventures, they battled spies, saboteurs, and even super-villains! This collection includes their next four stories:
- “The Masked Marksman’s Command Performance”: What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable body? The answer, we’ll bet, would be something like the meeting between Ed Race, the Masked Marksman—and the Suicide Squad!
- “The Suicide Squad’s Dawn Patrol”: The Japs were planning a barbarous air raid on America—that much was known to Kerrigan, Murdoch and Klaw, the F.B.I.’s indomitable Suicide Squad. When, where and How this hellish blitzkrieg was to come, they were grimly determined to find out, even if that meant permitting the lovely, evil Madam Setti to lure them to the reincarnated Japanese Diva-King—who could command men to destroy themselves!
- “The Suicide Squad Meets the Rising Sun”: We are all engaged in the defense of our great nation. But, in one of the most amazing chapters of this war, it became the grim task of Kerrigan, Murdoch and Klaw, three lone champions of democracy, to find and destroy a Japanese Army of nine thousand brutal fanatics—who were hidden here in the United States!
- “So Sorry, Mr. Hirohito!”: Kerrigan, Murdoch and Klaw, the famed Suicide Squad, had always fought side to side, welcoming any odds. But on that nightmare night in Valparaiso, Johnny Kerrigan stood alone against the Jap horde, while Steve Klaw went to wrest the great ship-building works from the Axis—with a thirteen-year-old girl as his only ally!
Ace G-Man #5: Wanted—In Three Pine Coffins
Klaw, Murdoch, and Kerrigan—AKA the Suicide Squad—are the best the F.B.I. has to offer. Through nearly two dozen adventures, they battled spies, saboteurs, and even super-villains! This collection includes their next three stories:
- “Wanted—In Three Pine Coffins”: The sinister tentacles of Naziism were finally making themselves felt in America, and those who dared fight back were mercilessly murdered! Only the Suicide Squad could stand up before the deadly wave of destruction, but those three cavaliering conquerors of crime were already enmeshed in their own grim battle—dodging the very laws which they fought to uphold!
- “The Suicide Squad’s Private War”: It started with a mock air-raid, which turned, fantastically, into a night of terror for many, when real bombs were dropped. And America’s most precious naval secrets fell into the hands of the Little Gray Old Man and his horde of Black Troopers—who defied even the famed Suicide Squad to come and get them!
- “—For Tomorrow We Die!”: Against the fabulous crime-czar whose thieving legions were undermining the morale of honest Americans, the Chief sent the Suicide Squad—Murdoch, Kerrigan and Klaw. And those three hellions of the F.B.I. found they had a murder carnival on their hands—as well as three fresh nooses already tightening about their necks!
Dog Eat Dog: The Complete Black Mask Cases of Cellini Smith, Volume 2
Cellini Smith returns! Los Angeles private detective Cellini Smith is hired by the pugs who frequent the Hangover Club to find the killer of Morton Miles, ex-champ and manager of the club. The pugs hope Cellini can pin the kill on the Terrible Turk, a giant wrestler who operates a bowling alley in town, and whom all the pugs hate. The Turk, in turn, has hired another private op to protect his own interests.
As all of the likeliest suspects turn up dead, Cellini learns that the players in this mystery have all been partners in a deal to ship scrap iron to Japan. It’ll take all of Cellini’s wits to unravel the plot and find the true murderer.
Ace G-Man #4: The Suicide Squad in Corpse-Town
Klaw, Murdoch, and Kerrigan—AKA the Suicide Squad—are the best the F.B.I. has to offer. Through nearly two dozen adventures, they battled spies, saboteurs, and even super-villains! This collection includes their next three stories:
- “The Suicide Squad in Corpse-Town“: America’s new air arm, the keystone in her vast defense program, tottered on the brink of destruction! …Only three men—Kerrigan, Murdoch and Klaw—could prevent disaster, and that grim trio of Death’s Volunteers was already living on borrowed, bartered time!
- “The Coffin Barricade“: Eight young special agents went out to get the Undertaker, unknown Czar of the Corpse Bazaar. Eight came hack—in caskets and embalmed! So the Chief sent out the Suicide Squad—Murdoch, Kerrigan and Klaw. He figured they’d lived close enough to Death to be able to find the Undertaker—and put him six feet under!
- “The Tunnel Death Built“: Who had the power, the resourcefulness, and the organization to steal thousands of priceless weapons from Uncle Sam, and ship them secretly abroad? The mystery was a job for the inimitable Suicide Squad—Kerrigan, Murdoch and Klaw. But they were already waging a private, unofficial battle against Nicodemus Largo—the most invulnerable crime-king of them all!
Ace G-Man #3: Shells for the Suicide Squad
Klaw, Murdoch, and Kerrigan—AKA the Suicide Squad—are the best the F.B.I. has to offer. Through nearly two dozen adventures, they battled spies, saboteurs, and even super-villains! This collection includes their next three stories:
- “Shells for the Suicide Squad“: Steve Klaw, of the F.B.I.’s Suicide Squad, borrowed a traitor’s name, when he went into battle against three world powers—to save Forge River’s priceless military secret for America!
- “Suicide Squad’s Murder Lottery“: Kerrigan and Klaw of the F.B.I.’s ace trio, came to mourn at the grave of their murdered comrade… and stayed to follow a fighting ghost to war—against the Twentieth Century Nero who held a third of the nation in abject slavery!
- “The Suicide Squad and the Murder Bund“: Murdoch, Kerrigan and Klaw, the F.B.I.’s dauntless Suicide Squad, must daily fight with dogged, unbelievable courage—merely to earn the right to live! Could this fabulous team of crime-fighters lock guns in deadly combat with the Skull and Swastika Corps—and still remain a trio?
Ace G-Man #2: Coffins for the Suicide Squad
Klaw, Murdoch, and Kerrigan—AKA the Suicide Squad—are the best the F.B.I. has to offer. Through nearly two dozen adventures, they battled spies, saboteurs, and even super-villains! This collection includes their next three stories:
- “The Suicide Squad Pays Off”:The Black Sheep of the F.B.I. turn a terror-ridden town upside down in a finish-fight with a gang that had decreed death for all G-men!
- “Coffins for the Suicide Squad”: Boldly, New York’s crime czar flung his challenge before the F.B.I., daring the full might of America’s prize crime-fighting machine to a finish war! And Washington answered with the Suicide Squad—three grinning, fighting Volunteers of Death—to tame a murder empire!
- “The Suicide Squad—Dead or Alive!”: Storm Troop gangsters took over the Hill City government. Blue-uniformed killers picked up the blood-purge hunt for Kerrigan, Murdoch, and Klaw—the three F.B.I. aces who had to capture a city just to rescue a red-headed girl!
Ace G-Man #1: The Suicide Squad Reports for Death
Klaw, Murdoch, and Kerrigan—AKA the Suicide Squad—are the best the F.B.I. has to offer. Through nearly two dozen adventures, they battled spies, saboteurs, and even super-villains! This collection includes their first three stories:
- “Mr. Zero and the F.B.I. Suicide Squad”: One for all, and all for one—even in death—was the fighting creed of the three wildest, gun-swinging law aces of the F.B.I.!
- “The Suicide Squad Reports for Death”: In all the Service they were the Law’s toughest, shield-bearing crime fighters—and their job was to come through or die!
- “The Suicide Squad’s Last Mile”: The F.B.I.’s ace manhunt trio fight their way to hell and back—to end the rule of a crime-czar who had decreed death for all G-men and paid highest cash prices for second-hand corpses!
The Complete Cases of Bookie Barnes (The Dime Detective Library)
A truck driver employed by Murdock Motor Freight, Bookie Barnes is a tough working class hero. Though not a detective per se, he is a rough customer described as “tall, heavy-chested, with a build you see only in physical culture ads, and, though barely twenty-six, he’d been on the trucks for three years.” He is emblematic of the type of crime fighters found in pulp fiction in that he represents the typical readership of pulp fiction: an average working-class audience.
Written by one of the greats of the detective pulps, Robert Reeves—who was tragically killed in World War II—this book collects all of his Bookie Barnes stories: “Murder in High Gear,” “Over a Barrel,” and “Murder Without Death,” as well as his lone, non-series character story, “Dance Macabre.”
The Complete Cases of Cash Wale, Volume 1 (The Dime Detective Library)
Written by Peter Paige, one of Black Mask editor Fanny Ellsworth’s finds after succeeding Joseph Shaw’s tenure in that same role, Paige introduced the tough-as-nails detective Cash Wale and partner Sailor Duffy: a series worthy of the esteemed lineage of Black Mask magazine. Quickly plucked by Black Mask’s rival, Dime Detective, the cases of Cash Wale were a mainstay of that magazine for the next decade. Never before in book form, this edition collects his first five cases: “Voodoo Frame,” “The Corpse Promoter,” “Lotta Had a Husband,” “Wanted: Dead and Alive!,” and “The Bullet From Nowhere.” And it includes an all-new introduction by popular fiction authority John Wooley.
The Complete Cases of Inspector Allhoff, Volume 3 (The Dime Detective Library)
Brilliant, decisive, and hard-charging, Deputy Inspector Allhoff was the NYPD’s ace detective until bullets from a mobster’s machine gun robbed him of his legs, his career, and—in the opinion of an associate—his sanity. Yet Allhoff was too good a man to be put out to pasture, so New York’s police commissioner found a way to keep him employed and refer to him such cases as the department couldn’t or wouldn’t handle. Confined to a wheelchair and operating from a seedy tenement flat, Allhoff is assisted by two cops: Battersly, the rookie patrolman whose brief moment of cowardice cost the inspector his legs, and Simmons, the bitter career cop who detests Allhoff but sticks with the embittered cripple to protect his own pension. Created by D.L. Champion, Inspector Allhoff denied most conventions of detective-pulp fiction. He could never be confused for one of Raymond Chandler’s knights errant, trudging down those mean streets. Allhoff was no Rover Boy in trench coat and fedora. He was, in fact, a sadist and a psychopath.
With 30 entries published between 1938 and 1946, the Allhoff series was among the most popular and long-lived to appear in Dime Detective, the prestigious crime pulp second only to the legendary Black Mask in its impact on the genre. Volume 3 collects the next seven stories: “You’re the Crime in My Coffee,” “Thanks for the Ration Card!,” “The Profitable Corpse,” “The Diplomatic Corpse,” “Aaron Had a Rod,” “The Day Nobody Died,” and “Go Home and Die!”
The Complete Cases of Corpus Delicti Mort, Volume 1 (The Dime Detective Library)
Defense attorney Clarence Darrow Mort, an unkempt habitué of seedy bars, was known familiarly, if not affectionately, as “Corpus Delicti” Mort. A mainstay of the page of mid-1940s issues of Dime Detective magazine, Mort was yet another of the quirky characters which editor Ken White avidly placed in his hard-boiled pulp magazine. This collection contains the first half of the C.D. Mort stores, all by Julius Long: “C.D. for Corpus Delicti,” “No Minimum for Murder,” “Loaded for Murder,” “Corpus Delicti de Luxe,” “Mostly for Murder,” and “Murder Under Foot.”
The Complete Cases of Steve Midnight, Volume 2 (The Dime Detective Library)
Down and out former playboy Steven Middleton Knight’s fortune was destroyed by the Depression. Now a cabbie for the Red Owl Cab Company, he never fails to take on another mystery with each new fare. Created by John K. Butler, this fast-paced, Los Angeles-based hard-boiled series was published between 1940 and 1942 in the pages of Dime Detective, the prestigious crime pulp second only to the legendary Black Mask in its impact on the genre.
Volume 2 collects the final five stories: “The Killer was a Gentleman,” “Dead Man’s Alibi,” “The Hearse from Red Owl,” “Death and Taxis,” and “The Corpse That Couldn’t Keep Cool.”
The Dime Detective Library: Series 6 (Six Book Set)
This specially-priced set includes all six books in Series 6 of The Dime Detective Library:
- The Complete Cases of the Acme Indemnity Op, Volume 1 by Jan Dana writing as John Lawrence, introduction by John Wooley
- The Complete Cases of Mike Blair by Hank Searls
- The Complete Cases of Bill Brent, Volume 2 by Frederick C. Davis
- The Complete Cases of Val Easton by T.T. Flynn
- The Complete Cases of John Smith, Volume 1 by Wyatt Blassingame
- The Complete Cases of Uncle Tubby by Ray Cummings
Considered the greatest of all detective pulps to only Black Mask, Dime Detective was the home to dozens of classic, quirky series characters, all with an offbeat twist. Get all of Series 6 at a discount!
Dead and Done For: The Complete Black Mask Cases of Cellini Smith
Long considered one of the best of the Black Mask authors, author Robert Reeves’s longest-running detective character actually first appeared in the 1939 novel, Dead and Done For. Cellini Smith, accountant for a New York City pinball gangster, must clear his boss’s name after being accused of murder. Featuring an introduction by Black Mask editor Kenneth S. White, and a cover illustration by the great Rafael de Soto.
Murder Costs Money: The Complete Black Mask Cases of Rex Sackler
Author D.L. Champion’s knack for penning quirky series characters reached a new height with his stories of skinflint shamus Rex Sackler, one of Black Mask’s longest-running and most beloved series. Already a reader favorite for his Inspector Allhoff stories in Black Mask’s companion title, Dime Detective, Champion chronicled the offbeat cases of Rex Sackler, the greedy gumshoe who “could squeeze a nickel till the buffalo cried uncle.”
The Rex Sackler series allowed Champion to display his talent for sardonic wit and humor in more than two dozen frequently hilarious novelettes published in Black Mask during the 1940s. This volume collects the first eight stories. With an all-new introduction by Ed Hulse.
Let the Dead Alone: The Complete Black Mask Cases of Luther McGavock
The Luther McGavock stories are not your garden variety hardboiled detective yarns. These Black Mask stories are so rich in place and detail that they almost seem a travelogue of small-town life in the Deep South.
Having bounced around to just about every major agency in the country, Luther McGavock finally settled in the Atherton Browne Agency in Memphis, and his cases take him to small towns in the Tennessee hill-country. As an outsider, McGavock is our tour guide to this odd world of the Deep South.
Written by one of the most polished writers to see print in Black Mask, author Merle Constiner’s writing is vivid, his characters complex, and his mysteries deep. This edition collects the first four stories in the series. Includes an all-new introduction by Evan Lewis.
The Spider: Slaughter, Incorporated (Facsimile Edition)
Originally slated to appear in The Spider Magazine in the 1940s, “Slaughter, Incorporated” was ultimately shelved when that magazine was cancelled. Never before published directly from author Donald G. Cormack’s original manuscript, this edition has been faithfully reconstructed as an exact copy of the never-published February 1944 issue of The Spider Magazine, complete with vintage interior illustrations.
In addition, The Spider: Slaughter, Incorporated (Facsimile Edition) marks the first publication of the never-before-published lost Red Finger story, “Red Finger and the Murder Trio,” penned by Arthur Leo Zagat. Also including a story by longtime Spider author, Norvell Page.