Showing results by author "Bill Pronzini" in All Categories

It's a lazy mid-August Sunday afternoon. The nameless detective and his old friend Lieutenant Eberhardt are relaxing on the patio, drinking beer and shooting the breeze, when the doorbell rings. As Eberhardt answers the door, the detective hears two sharp echoing reports - gunshots; they could only be gunshots.

The Nameless Detective may not like David Virden, but the case is simple enough: Find his first ex-wife, deliver some papers to her and it's all done. But she refuses the papers, sends a message to Virden to never contact her again, and slams the door. Then Virden threatens to sue Nameless, stops his payments and claims that the woman they located isn't his wife. Then Virden disappears himself and his fiancée hires Nameless to find out why.

Nameless wasn’t supposed to come into the office on Mondays. He wasn’t supposed to answer the phone. On this Monday he did both. The call was from Barney Rivera - once a friend, now despised - at Great Western insurance. Against his better judgement, Nameless agreed to meet him. The investigation was relatively simple: a multimillionaire rare books collector had reported the theft of eight volumes, worth half a million dollars. From a locked library. To which he had the only key...

Nameless had told Mitchell Krochek that he’d do whatever he could to find his missing wife, Janice. She’d run away before - propelled by a gambling fever - and Mitch had always taken her back. This time, when Nameless, his partner Tamara, and the agency’s chief operative Jake Runyon finally found her in a sleazy San Francisco hotel, she demanded a divorce. A few days later, a beaten and bloody Janice stumbled into the agency begging to go home. Then she disappears again and Mitchell is the prime suspect

An empty train yard at midnight...a small cabin bathed in the light of a full moon...a seedy Skid Row hotel in San Francisco....These are the places where fear lives, where the chill in the air has nothing to do with the temperature, and where Death can be someone you've already met. Collected here for the first time are twenty-six terrifying stories by Bill Pronzini, a master of dark suspense and horror. These chilling stories span nearly three decades in his award-winning career, and most have never been published in book form.

For each of the detectives at the agency, a betrayal becomes not only the driving force behind an investigation, but the source of the kind of resolve that cannot be derailed by threats. Tamara’s case began as something personal but explodes as an investigation of her former lover leads to a scam that cheats charities. For Nameless, trying to find out who is manipulating an old woman only exposes the ugly side of family. We’re told that there are seven deadly sins.

Bill, the "Nameless Detective," and his wife Kerry were in the Sierra foothills, just outside of Six Pines, falling in love with a cabin. It was all perfect, until Kerry went missing. They'd seen Balfour at breakfast at the diner and Kerry remembered his name - PR people are like that. Which was unfortunate, because when she ran into him along the trail on that sunny afternoon and called him by name, he panicked. And that's when Bill's nightmare began.

Carpenter and Quincannon, Professional Detective Services is a fixture in San Francisco at the dawn of a new century. While the future is unclear, Sabina and John know one thing for certain: they will protect their clients from flimflammers, thieves, and murderers, and do whatever it takes to run these dregs of society into the arms of the law. Sometimes, that requires a subtle touch. Professor A. Vargas, self-styled medium extraordinaire, and his partner Annabelle, use guile and trickery to swindle bereaved men and women eager to contact the spirits of deceased loved ones.

A con man always has a bag of tricks, ready to fool the unsuspecting, and almost everyone is unsuspecting until they get taken. When that happens, they turn to Carpenter and Quincannon, Professional Detective Services, to recover their money and what’s left of their dignity, and perhaps even to save their lives.

When a pleasant afternoon's bicycling through Golden Gate Park with a friend ends with the revelation of threatening letters, followed by a gunshot in a mansion garden, Sabina Carpenter knows this is a case that demands her immediate and undivided attention. The questions her partner John Quincannon has to unravel are not difficult: Wrixton, a wealthy banker, has met his extortionist's first demand, but the order to pay another $5,000 is too much to face. The banker's real problem is something he doesn't want to reveal.

In response to a string of gold thefts in a Mother Lode mine, Quincannon goes undercover as a newly hired miner to identify and capture the men responsible. Meanwhile, Sabina finds herself not only making plans for her and Quincannon’s wedding, but also investigating both an audacious real estate scam and an abusive young man’s villainous secret.

Today, Bill Pronzini is famed for his private-eye stories about the Nameless Detective and for his Shamus-award winning short stories, and Barry N. Malzberg is one of America's premier science fiction writers, but back in their salad days they collaborated on a number of stories, which have now become legendary. Problems Solved collects all their crime and mystery collaborations, mostly written during the 1970's and early 1980's, and a few recent collaborations (including two new stories written especially for this volume).

Intrigue, crime, and murder create suspense in this edge-of-your-seat collection of cat mystery stories whose plots are all centered on a beloved feline, written by some of the finest, best-selling mystery writers of all time.

More Oddments features 14 more detective stories featuring characters such as Fergus O'Hara and the "Nameless" Detective. The stories included in this collection are: "Fergus O'Hara, Detective", "Chip", "Opportunity", "A Craving for Originality", "One of Those Cases (A "Nameless Detective" Story)", "I Didn't Do It", "Quicker Than the Eye (with Michael Kurland)", "Angel of Mercy", "Connoisseur", "Mrs. Rakubian", "Smuggler's Island", "A Taste of Paradise", "Under the Skin", and "Prose Bowl (with Barry N. Malzberg)".

Drug lords, missing millionaires, corrupt cops… just another day for Carpenter and Quincannon Detective Services. Two missing bodies and two separate investigations take Carpenter and Quincannon from the heights above San Francisco Bay to the depths of Chinatown's opium dens. For John Quincannon, this is a first: searching a Chinatown opium den for his client's husband, missing in the middle of a brewing tong war set to ignite over the stolen corpse of Bing Ah Kee.

Quincannon’s pursuit of two con men who have absconded to Hawaii with a considerable sum of his employer’s assets dovetails nicely with Sabina’s vision of a second honeymoon. But neither is wont to stay out of trouble, and Sabina inadvertently becomes involved in a locked room/dying message murder in Honolulu.

Not all the folks who roamed the Old West were cowhands, rustlers, or cardsharps. And they certainly weren't all heroes. Give-a-Damn Jones, a free-spirited itinerant typographer, hates his nickname almost as much as the rumors spread about him. He's a kind soul who keeps finding himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. That's what happened in Box Elder, a small Montana town. Tensions are running high, and anything -or anyone - could be the fuse to ignite them.

The Nameless Detective has taken many cases over the years...and these two will test his agency's resources. The first involves a woman whose husband is accidentally killed in a remote cabin in the Sierras. The wife isn't buying that he was alone, and she's determined to uncover his secret and get closure...in spite of any potential heartbreak. Nameless' next case is a missing person - a person who was agoraphobic and never left the house.

Matthew Cape has no time to worry about his fears; caught up in events not of his making, but inescapable, he does things he's never dared and goes places he's only dreamed about. He's given up everything he ever had, but nothing at all of what he is, and if there's a price to pay, Cape is the one who will pay it. The Corvette is easy, the skydiving fun, and gambling, well... that has always been a passion, though never at stakes this high.

Things are heating up in Big Coulee. Unorthodox road agent Horse-shy Halloran, who got his name because horses always do him dirt, has been seen in town buying women's clothing. The gold miners' association is about to ship $70,000 of gold dust. The brutal and fearsome Burgoyne brothers are in the neighborhood. And Wells Fargo agent Samuel Quarternight has fallen in love with the banker's daughter, Faye.