Robert Leslie Bellem: 45 books

Follow Dan Turner, Hollywood’s two-fisted detective, through a murderous tangle of love and intrigue among the film stars.

That washed-up movie-director was going to knock himself off in order to give his no-good bride a double-indemnity payoff—and, Dan Turner, trying to do a couple of good deeds, found himself facing a murder rap with some very hard gunsels making it tough! 

He had a hunch there’d be trouble tonight. Men getting hurt: himself among them, maybe. He advanced on the platform. The hall hummed with an electrical tension he could feel almost physically, like a warning touch. It was something to make you afraid if you were a coward. Or to make you all the...

Nothing can be so mixed up as a couple of scrambled Hollywood marriages—with everybody wanting to kill everybody else. Dan is on hand to prevent things going quite that far . . .

Why should a lovely movie star want to quit her career, hide out from everybody— including the man who loved her? Dan Turner found more than one mystery when death visited the lonely ranch house and offered an astonishing solution.

It’s tough to have your client, a lovely movie star, killed almost before your eyes. . . . In trying to solve the murder mystery, Dan nearly co-starred in it as a corpse! 

This movie ham named McBride acted the death scene very realistically—mostly because some sly sinister stinker had put a real bullet completely through his think-tank. And as foul luck would have it, Dan Turner was on the scene and having it demonstrated that the trigger-finger was quicker than his hawkshaw eye. From then on, Dan was busier than a confused dog in a flea circus . . . .

Donaldson’s crack had been meant as a joke, but the girl who overheard it wasn’t in a joking mood. After that, it didn’t matter what Dan Turner said. To her he was a Russian wife-deserter, and a bad actor.

Missing jewels, a dead canine movie star and assorted underhanded shenanigans might or might not have a tie-in with this murder—but cinemaland’s super-sleuth Dan Turner aimed to find out after it became personal! 

“I think my wife is being blackmailed,” the guy opened up. And Dan agreed to protect the dame while she kept her secret tryst. It wasn’t until after she’d kept her clandestine appointment that he had a real idea of how big a job he’d taken upon himself

They were making a cowboy picture, and of course the Indians’ arrows had all been blunted. Nevertheless it was an arrow with sharpened tip that came out of the welter of battle to kill the lovely star!

In the flash of lightning Dan got a look at his prisoner—a man without a face, a zombie! And listening to his story, Dan suddenly felt that, here in the movie colony, he had at last found a real man!