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Mel D. Ames

Valentine For a Dead Lady, an introduction to Mel D. Ames’s classic intrepid and daring Detective Cathy Carruthers. In the male dominated world of hard-boiled detectives, Ames’s genre changing Lieutenant Carruthers pioneered a new exciting direction with these fast-paced tales of vice and villainy. Originally published in Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Ames’s stories evoke the golden era of short crime stories that filled pulp magazines. This anthology compiles the first five stories of Detective Caruthers, with introductory story “A Matter of Observation” and four other expertly crafted tales of murder and deception. Years before Elmore Leonard introduced his smart and savvy female detective Karen Sisco, Mel D. Ames’s razor sharp Cathy Carruthers expertly and cleverly out manoeuvres duplicitous crooks and cynical partners to solve complex and nuanced homicides. When originally published thirty years ago, these stories were praised for their originality and quality, as the editor of Mike Shayne stated that Ames’s serialized female detective stories “blend character, story and plot into an entertaining read” while Canada’s national newspaper the Globe & Mail declared Ames to be a “superior talent.”

Mark Hebscher

Heraclon

Dime Crime

Valentine for a Dead Lady, Dime Crime. Vol. 1

William Bankier

"Songs in the Key of Death," an anthology of music-infused crime stories by acclaimed author William Bankier. For over thirty years, starting in the 1960s, Bankier's love affair with music mixed with his hard-boiled crime stories to produce some of the most exhilarating and dramatic crime fiction of his generation. Many of Bankier's best works originally graced the pages of classic pulp magazines like "Alfred Hitchcock" and "Ellery Queen Magazine," where Ellery Queen himself declared, "No one in the genre writes about music better than William Bankier." In Bankier's stories, among the notes of jazz and classical music, murder comes silently in the dead of night, asking the reader to turn the page and enter a bar where the patrons demonstrate Bankier's finely tuned ear for the lyrical, almost musical way, people speak--where fear is a killer.

Songs in the Key of Death, Dime Crime. Vol. 2

Peter Sellers

This One’s Trouble offers a collection of some of the best hard-hitting crime stories from acclaimed writer Peter Sellers. Hailed as "one of the key figures in the Canadian mystery renaissance" in the pages of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Peter Sellers' entertaining and offbeat crime fiction stories have appeared in every major mystery magazine including Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine and Hardboiled. In This One’s Trouble, readers will discover characters that live in a world of shattered dreams and failed plans, where the banality of evil is found in everyday life. "A typical Sellers story there is usually one bad decision made, and on that hangs the plot—as well as the perpetrator."—Don Hutchison, acclaimed author of Great Pulp Heroes. Included here are some of his best work, including stories "Avenging Miriam" which won the 2001 Ellery Queen Readers Award and the title story which was nominated for the Arthur Ellis Award in 1992.

This One's Trouble, Dime Crime. Vol. 3