One of only three Sam Spade short stories, this one involves a blackmailing poet, a seductive chanteuse, her rough-hewn stage-door-johnny, and, of course, murder. Recorded before a live audience in New York.

An eccentric boarding-house denizen winds up dead; his presumed killer, a fellow boarder, has vanished. The baffling case unfolds through the testimony of witnesses, who are themselves suspects.

A starlet’s plot to blackmail a film-studio executive results in her murder. Only the “trouble chaser” can clear her volatile lover and solve the crime.

In this comic vignette, a carnival barker’s valuable watch gets stolen during an illegal poker game. The local sheriff seems in no hurry to apprehend the thief, until a reward is offered.

A society matron’s life is threatened after she engineers the theft of her own priceless jewelry to pay off a gambling debt. Only a debonair connoisseur of crime can save her and recover her gems—for a price.

Tough gumshoes, rotten yeggs, and dangerous damesIn the 1930s and '40s, Black Mask was the single most important magazine for the modern mystery field. In its pages writers such as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Earl Stanley Gardner reshaped the established view of mystery fiction, creating the "hard-boiled" private eye. Now comes this series in which the toughest of tough detectives are resurrected from its pages in sonic dramatization from the award-winning Holl...

Tough gumshoes, rotten yeggs, and dangerous damesIn the 1930s and ’40s, Black Mask was the single most important magazine for the modern mystery field. In its pages writers such as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Earl Stanley Gardner reshaped the established view of mystery fiction, creating the “hard-boiled” private eye. Now comes this series in which the toughest of tough detectives are resurrected from its pages in sonic dramatization from the award-winning Holl...

Mississippi heat—A Manhattan gumshoe pursues a convict to St. Louis, where he gets mixed up in a cop killing and nearly loses his own life at the hands of a “B” girl.