Talmage Powell: 29 books

The dirtiest killer of the year was the man private investigator Ed Rivers had to save from the chair. Wally Tulman, Florida socialite, had been convicted of molesting and murdering a young girl. Tulman’s lovely wife begged Rivers to take his case - to prove him innocent. Rivers...

My name is Ed Rivers. I live in Tampa, Florida, where I work as a private cop. I’m six feet tall, weigh in at about one ninety, and am forty years old. When I look in the mirror I see a heavy, bearish face, dark-tanned and creased, the thick lids giving the brown eyes a lazy look....

Give her five minutes more, I thought . . . More than an hour had passed since Jean Putnam’s voice had promised on the phone that she would be there. As I started back to my office I gave a final look down the corridor, and suddenly she was there, framed in the stairwell. She was dressed...

A young woman, the last passenger on a late night bus, gets to talking with a kindly bus driver about two murders that recently occurred.

This one was for keeps. It started the night private eye Ed Rivers went to the rescue of a damsel in distress and almost ended up at the bottom of Tampa Bay. Ed knew who was lurking behind him. His name was Russ Leppert. Russ liked to kill people. Not for any real reason - just because...

Three people were dead, their heads bashed in, their bodies hacked with a samurai sword. All three victims were Japanese. The murder weapon was traced to Nick Martin, a veteran of Iwo Jima. Nick had spent fifteen pain-ridden years in and out of Army hospitals. He tried to drown his memories of the...

When enough money is involved, there is more than one way to bend a will to one's desires....

Fred started the motor but didn’t put the car in gear right away. “It won’t happen here, Marcia. I believe in Leacock. And Leacock understands. He knows I can’t take on the job and do it halfway.” A crime novella originally published in the May, 1960 issue of Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine.

When Chat, a boy living in the Bayou,, goes out "Gator Baiting" with his stepfather, he is reluctant, but his abusive "Pa" steamrolls over him.

An invalid old man overhears his family plotting to murder him, and begins to envision them as rats. What he really needs is a cat to protect him!

A classic crime story originally published in the July, 1949 issue of Black Mask.

Nick Ramey, a gangster money handler, finds himself at the wrong end of a bellhop's gun...

They planned to kidnap a little boy, hold him for ransom, and collect a big payoff. Nothing would happen to the kid -- Garvin promised. What could possible go wrong with their big score? A classic crime novella ripped from the pages of the Sept. 1960 issue of Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine!

She was young, beautiful -- and dead. And now they had to find her killer.