Owen Sack turned from the stove as the door of his cabin opened to admit ‘Rip’ Yust, and with the hand that did not hold the coffeepot Owen Sack motioned hospitably toward the table, where food steamed before a ready chair. “Hullo, Rip! Set down and go to it while it’s hot.’Twon’t take me but […]

Margaret Tharp habitually passed from slumber to clear-eyed liveliness without intermediate languor. This morning nothing was unusual in her awakening save the absence of the eight o’clock San Francisco boat’s sad hooting. Across the room the clock’s hands pointed like one long hand to a few minutes past seven. Margaret rolled over beneath the covers, […]

Gold on the door, edged with black, said ALEXANDER RUSH, PRIVATE DETECTIVE. Inside, an ugly man sat tilted back in a chair, his feet on a yellow desk. The office was in no way lovely. Its furnishings were few and old with the shabby age of second-handdom. A shredding square of dun carpet covered the […]

“Teal was killed last night.” The Old Man—the Continental Detective Agency’s San Francisco manager — spoke without looking at me. His voice was as mild as his smile, and gave no indication of the turmoil that was seething in his mind. If I kept quiet, waiting for the Old Man to go on, it wasn’t […]

The house was of red brick, large and square, with a green slate roof whose wide overhang gave the building an appearance of being too squat for its two stories; and it stood on a grassy hill, well away from the country road upon which it turned its back to look down on the Mokelumne […]

When the light that came through the barred square foot of the cell’s one high window had dwindled until he could no longer clearly make out the symbols and initials his predecessors had scratched and pencilled on the opposite wall, the man who had killed Dan Odams got up from the cot and went to […]

I This is Mr. Chrostwaite,” Vance Richmond said. Chrostwaite, wedged between the arms of one of the attorney’s large chairs, grunted what was perhaps meant for an acknowledgment of the introduction. I grunted back at him, and found myself a chair. He was a big balloon of a man — this Chrostwaite — in a […]

A plump maid with bold green eyes and a loose, full-lipped mouth led me up two flights of steps and into an elaborately furnished boudoir, where a woman in black sat at a window. She was a thin woman of a little more than thirty, this murdered man’s widow, and her face was white and […]

A Ford — whitened by desert travel until it was almost indistinguishable from the dust-clouds that swirled around it — came down Izzard’s Main Street. Like the dust, it came swiftly, erratically, zigzagging the breadth of the roadway. A small woman — a girl of twenty in tan flannel — stepped into the street. The […]

Carter Brigham — Carter Webright Brigham in the tables of contents of various popular magazines — woke with a start, passing from unconsciousness into full awareness too suddenly to doubt that his sleep had been disturbed by something external. The moon was not up and his apartment was on the opposite side of the building […]