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We are delighted to present our second collection of Talmage Powell mystery short stories! Talmage Powell (1920–2000) was one of the all-time great mystery writers of the pulp magazines (and later the digest mystery magazines). He claimed to have written more than 500 short stories, and we have no reason to doubt him — we are working on a bibliography of his work and have documented 373 magazine stories so far... and who knows how many are out there under pseudonyms or buried in obscure magazines? He wrote his first novel, The Smasher, in 1959. He went on to pen 11 more novels under his own name, 4 as “Ellery Queen,” and 2 novelizations of the hit TV series Mission: Impossible. Clearly, though short stories were his first love.

Roses are red, violets are blue, but murder comes in every hue...

Swamps, particularly such vast and mostly uncharted swamps as the Florida Everglades, provide a natural habitat for all sorts of large and small creatures. Isn’t it likely, then, that one such creature might be a cousin, or at least a distant relative, of the Sasquatch and the Yeti of northern climes? Indeed, there have been many accounts of similar-looking beings in the bayous of Louisiana and in the Everglades itself. There is even an old Seminole Indian legend of the Stuestaw Enawchee, “gigantic beings from some nether world that had inhabited the Rivers of Grass from the time of creation,” who had come out of the swamps to war on the first Seminoles a thousand generations before the appearance of the white man. When, as part of a routine military “Survival Exercise,” three tough U.S. Marines are first set down in a remote section of the ’Glades, they do not believe in, or fear, the Stuestaw Enawchee or any swamp creature. But what happens to them in that primitive and alien environment is enough to make a believer of any man — and in the case of one, Master Sergeant James C. Kelly, to add a whole new dimension to the exercise of survival. For even as creatures go, the one which he encounters is extraordinary...

I swung the wet, flat money belt, enjoying the slap of it against my leg. I had gone through a lot to get that belt. I had consorted with midgets and freaks. I had been lied to, framed, been offered the bribery of a beautiful but depraved normal-sized woman’s body. I had also been beaten senseless twice, another time left for dead, locked in the trunk of an abandoned car. And now I was home, free. “It’s a long story,” I said. I thought about it for a moment. “It began with a beautiful little doll who stands three feet tall. Unhappily she had an ache inside her almost as big as she imagined the rest of us to be.”

Murder by the Sword Three people were dead, their heads bashed in, their bodies hacked with a samurai sword. All three victims were Japanese. The murder weapon was traced to Nick Martin, a veteran of Iwo Jima. Nick had spent fifteen pain-ridden years in and out of Army hospitals. He tried to drown his memories of the horror, but whisky only put him right back in the middle of that fierce battle. Nick drank a fifth the night of the killing. That’s the kind of case the police call “open and shut.” But Ed Rivers, a private detective, was a friend of Nick Martin’s. And no one was shutting the door of a death cell on Nick-not while Rivers could still go after the real, fiendishly clever murderer.

Talmage Powell (1920–2000) was one of the all-time great mystery writers of the pulps (and later the digest mystery magazines). He claimed to have written more than 500 short stories (and I have no reason to doubt him — I am working on a bibliography of his work, and so far I can document 373 magazine stories... and who knows how many are out there under pseudonyms or buried in obscure magazines!)

Abner Murder was due to freeze to death in August! That’s what that weird crystal-gazer foretold — who’d already accurately predicted three equally impossible dooms. So before the stars could put the freeze on the little detective, Abner had to jump to scorch the trigger-fingers of Fate’s criminal hustlers.

Talmage Powell (1920–2000) was one of the all-time great mystery writers of the pulp magazines (and later the digest mystery magazines). He claimed to have written more than 500 short stories, and we have no reason to doubt him — we are working on a bibliography of his work and have documented 373 magazine stories so far... and who knows how many are out there under pseudonyms or buried in obscure magazines? He wrote his first novel, The Smasher, in 1959. He went on to pen 11 more novels under his own name, 4 as “Ellery Queen,” and 2 novelizations of the hit TV series Mission: Impossible. Clearly, though short stories were his first love.

«Поверьте, мое отвращение к скандалам — плод утонченного воспитания многих поколений моих предков. Я готов скорее умереть, чем оказаться замешанным в скандальную историю».