cover art by Tom Lovell
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Carroll John Daly, “Monogram in Lead” (Race Williams)
T.T. Flynn, “A Date at the Morgue”
John K. Butler, “The Walking Dead” (Rex Lonergan)
Robert Sidney Bowen, “The Man Who Was Two” (Kip Lacey)
John Lawrence, “Broadway Malady” (Marquis of Broadway)
a letter from JKB appeared on pgs. 123-124
Daly, Carroll John. BETTER CORPSES: A RACE WILLIAMS STORY. London: Robert Hale Limited, [1940]. Octavo, pp. [1-6] 7-286 [287-288: blank], publisher’s black cloth stamped in red and silver. First edition. “When better corpses are made, Race Williams will make them” (p. 186). The last Race Williams book, a fix-up novel incorporating the three-part Morse story arc that first appeared in DIME DETECTIVE in 1935 and 1936 featuring Daly’s violent tough-guy detective, Race Williams, who “never bumped off a guy what didn’t need it” and the Flame (The Girl with the Criminal Mind), “a woman of good — a woman of evil. Take your choice.” Carroll John Daly (1889-1958), one of the fathers of the modern hard-boiled private eye and an important BLACK MASK writer, “is not known for literary niceties — his style can best be described as crude but effective … Characterization is minimal and action is everything” (Crider and Pronzini). Race Williams was Daly’s most successful creation, appearing in about 70 stories and eight novels. Lee Server (Encyclopedia of Pulp Fiction Writers, 2014) has called Race Williams “the single most popular private eye in the history of the pulps.” Cloth worn and scuffed, slight spine lean, half title leaf and final blank tanned, a sound, good copy in a pictorial 8/3 dust jacket with touch of wear at edges, mainly lower spine end, and mild tanning to spine panel and along rear flap fold. Stunning jacket. From the library of a well-known mystery writer with his library stamp on the front paste-down. Rare. There is no equivalent U.S. edition.
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Peter Paige, “Cash Wale’s Carnival Kill” (Cash Wale)
Theodore Sturgeon, “Die, Maestro, Die!”
Carroll John Daly, “Half a Corpse” (Race Williams)
Larry J. Marcus, “Dead Man Blues”
R.M.F. Joses, “Bad to the Last Drop”
Robert Carlton, “Sealed with a Kiss” (Mike Brent)
John D. MacDonald, “You’ll Never Escape”
later UK edition, includes five pieces from US May 1949 edition
Peter Paige, “Cash Wale’s Carnival Kill”
Theodore Sturgeon, “Die Maestro, Die!”
Larry J. Marcus, “Dead Man Blues”
R.M.F. Joses, “Bad to the Last Drop”
Ted Palmer, “The June Thrill Docket”
stories by Daly, Carlton and MacDonald omitted
cover art by Norman Saunders
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Carroll John Daly, “Race Williams Cooks a Goose”
John D. MacDonald, “Target for Tonight”
William P. McGivern, “Hunt Her in Hell”
Raymond Drennan, Jr., “He Woke Up Dying”
Preston Grady, “Killing’s Too Easy”
Charles Larson, “My Crime – Your Punishment”
cover art by John Howitt
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Carroll John Daly, “Make Your Own Corpse!” (Vee Brown)
Maxwell Hawkins, “Death from Down Under” (Jones & Jones)
Frederick C. Davis, “The Silver Doom” (Oke Oakley)
cover art by John Decker
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~ Raymond J. Brown, “Phantom Bullets”, part 2 of 5, only work in BM
~ Ray Cummings and Gabrielle [2nd wife], “Haunted”, only story by this pair in BM
~ Carroll John Daly, “It’s All in the Game”, ‘1st-person narrator, preying on “leading lights of the underworld” e.g., Ed, The Killer’, 3rd of 71 appearances in BM
~ Drayton Dunster, “The Fruit of the Tomb”, ‘A Cemetery Tale’, 5th of 9 stories in BM
~ H.M. Hamilton, “Vanishing Gold”, 2nd of 2 stories in BM
~ Charles Somerville, “The Vengeance of the Dead”, 6th of 47 articles in the ‘Manhunter’ series, 6th of 49 total articles in BM
~ Joe Taylor, “The Meanest Thief”, ‘brief-brief’, 7th piece of 13 tales in BM
~ Joe Taylor and G[eorge] W. Sutton, Jr., “Burnt Hands”, part 2 of 2 (subtitled, “A Splinter of Steel”), ‘GWS was then editor of BM’, 2nd of 2 appearances by this team in BM
~ Juliette Van, “At the Dragon’s Dip”, ‘Billed as “A Complete Double-Length Detective Mystery Novelette”’, author’s sole appearance in BM
~ Harold Ward, “The Turning of the Worm”, last of 29 stories under this name in BM [last of 46 stories in BM under three different names – Ward Sterling and H.W. Starr]
~ J.A. Young, “The Meanest Thief”, ‘brief-brief’, author’s sole appearance in BM
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Carroll John Daly, “Gangman ’s Gallows” (Race Williams)
Raymond Chandler, “Trouble is My Business ” (John Dalmas)
Edward Ronns, “Three Doors to Doom”
O.B. Myers, “Fire and Ice”
Hugh B. Cave, “Deal from the Bottom”
D.L. Champion, “Laughter in Hell”
cover art by Norman Saunders
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Bert Sims, “Beautiful, Blue and Deadly”
Larry Holden, “Murder and the Mermaid” (Gil Gilchrist)
Mel Colton, “Something to Shoot About” (PI Steve Stone)
Dane Gregory, “Self-Out!” [reprinted from 1942, originally titled “Remember the Blood and Tears”]
Carroll John Daly, “Death Rehearsal” (Willie Bloto)
Dick Goggin, “Danny, Get Your Gun!”
Fletcher Flora, “Ghoul to Go!”
Julius Long, “Mr. Mouthpiece” (Barry Bodine)
SMB Noir 