On October 2. 1936. the SS Orient Princess, a vessel of some 8,000 tons, put into Valparaiso carrying a cargo of timber and crude rubber from the Dutch East Indies. Immediately upon arrival, her captain, one Willem van Groot, was met by two members of the local police and Professor Thomas Wilmerson of Miskatonic University, the latter having flown to Chile in response to an urgent radio message sent by van Groot four days before the Orient Princess reached port.<P> Captain van Groot took...
Small-time crook Johnny Merak is determined to get Maxie Temple, a former crime boss who'd framed him for a three-year stretch in San Quentin, and is now returning home from Mexican exile. But the 1950s Los Angeles Underworld wants Temple and Merak dead, and decides that by killing Temple, they can remove both men with one shot. But Merak isn't having any of the deal–he wants to clear his name and escape his Syndicate ties. When beautiful Dawn Grahame shows up, he finally has a reason...
After Dexter inherits the old family mansion in Tormouth, on the death of his uncle, he visits the main library. Here he peruses the old records pertaining to Tormouth, and finds several references to the Dexter family. The documents trace their history back for almost four centuries. He locates numerous listings of births and marriages in the family, but not one instance of a death! Dexter begins to wonder if he's done the right thing in taking up residence in the house. What happened to...
The midnight moon rode high in the sky above the storm clouds sweeping in from the west, and the house seemed to transmute the moonlight into something terrible and evil. The broken chimneys stretched up like hands to the heavens, the eyeless sockets of the windows staring intently along the twisting drive. There were eldritch shadows in the house. On the floor of the library at the rear of the house, the strange cabalistic designs glowed with an eerie, devilish light. There was a flickering...
She was the kind of woman a man always noticed, mostly because of her eyes: deep and dark, they'd held a warmth that could easily kindle a fire in one's soul. Now they were staring sightlessly up from the sidewalk. It was a killing without a motive, just the first of a string of murders that led Johnny Merak, private investigator, from the teeming underworlds of Chicago and Los Angeles to the edge of the New Mexican desert, trailing a killer who left no clues. But Merak knew the Mafia,...
The murder of Carlos Galecci, a kingpin of organized crime, was not unexpected. Only three days earlier, fearing for his life, he'd hired Los Angeles private eye Johnny Merak to discover who was threatening him. Then he's found seated in his private vault with a knife in his back–a vault whose combination only he knows, a vault no one else has entered in the interim. Summoned to the scene, Merak is hired by Gloria, Galecci’s statuesque blonde wife, to discover her husband's...
