Robert Leslie Bellem: 45 books

Dan didn’t like this beauty contest, even though he was a judge. He liked it even less when the winning beauty was knifed. Was the dead girl’s murder an act of vengeance—or a legacy of love?

Sheriff Vonner Puts Spurs to Law Enforcement When Death Strikes Hard at a Bloody Cock Pit...

Keeping a cute movie extra on ice in his apartment is bound to get Dan in trouble. And part of it is that a gunman doesn’t forget how to play rough just because he’s turned screen actor.

An ounce of murder prevention is worth a pound of chasing a killer. So Dan tries to help the girl--- only to find that a very fast one is being pulled on him…

Dan Turner works on another mystery in "Daughter of Murder"

The fat gentleman evidently had a very special reason for wanting that glamorous cinema queen to affix her signature to a page in his little book—and Dan Turner saw it turn out to be a book of doom, with complications that would have tried the tempers of the Devil! A Dan Turner Mystery

The cameras are set, the scene has already been rehearsed; Shoot! the director says. . . . What happens is stark tragedynot of the movie, play-acting variety, but like a chapter out of the deeper drama of life itself.

The idea was new—and was tops! Whoever thought of stealing a million dollar production before it was released? And behind it was the ransom angle, and there was blackmail, too. Sometimes a detective likes to get his teeth into a case like that. It’s like matching your wits with a genius.

The clean-living young movie star had emoted his final scene in the audible tintypes. He was now knifed deader than a poached egg, and maybe there’d been more in his life than was suspected by his associates. In any case, Dan Turner, having been in at the kick-off of this murder game, decided he’d throw his weight around until the final whistle

Nixon swung a punch at my chin. I couldn’t parry, and it landed, hard and clean.

Dan Turner wasn’t ordinarily the sort of shamus who messed around with disguises, but here he was now pretending he was a chauffeur and watching an old goat who evidently craved to become a gunsel in connection with his romantic activities—and before this odd escapade caromed into murder, Dan already had earned his fee! . . . 

The cash customers paid plenty to watch her emote on the screen. They looked upon her as brunette angel, but there were a lot of substantial citizens in Hollywood, who knew Linda for a rat!

A camera never lies about a murder it has recorded. But a murderer can lie, and it’s up to Dan to discover who knifed the heroine of the desert pic while she was bathing in her dressing tent.

At first, Dan thought the girl had shot at him and it didn’t make him any the less mad because she had missed. But before he could make her talk, another bullet closed her mouth. That sort of interference in Dan’s business was the last straw! Somebody was going to pay—and plenty.