Well, this is the hardest part to believe; look, you can suspend me if you want to, but it’s the God’s honest truth. This man Tompkins came all the way down to where I was...

It’s hard to say goodbye for good at any time or any place. It’s harder still to say it through a meshed wire. It crisscrossed his face into little diagonals, gave me only little broken-up...

It must be dawn, and the last breath went out of this body on the table – how long before? Irretrievably gone from this world, as dead as though she had lived a thousand years...

…all a guy can do is die once. The big difference is whether he dies clean – or dirty… (“I’m Dangerous Tonight”)

A scattering of pinpoint lights shows up in the blackness ahead. A town or village straddling the highway. The indicator on the speedometer begins to lose ground. The man glances in his mirror at the...

Lew had never seen a dead man before. He just stood there, and looked and looked. Then he went a step closer, and looked some more. ‘So that’s what it’s like!’ he murmured inaudibly. Finally...

You haven’t any right to expect your friends to be larger than yourself, larger than life. Just take them as they are, cut down to average size, and be glad you have them. To drink...

You’d be surprised how difficult it is to ask alms of a stranger when you’ve never done it before, what a psychological barrier separates the honest man from the panhandler. (“Dusk To Dawn”)

She was ready to be a fugitive with him for the rest of her life – ‘Whither thou goest, I will go; thy people shall be my people’ – and when a Parisienne is ready...

The portieres were drawn across the French windows now, veiling the stars outside – that were there nevertheless. (“Speak To Me Of Death”)

He should have caught up with me inside of fifteen minutes at the outside, if he’d been able to get on the next train after mine. But then there was that station agent to be...

I didn’t look over my shoulder; there wasn’t a sound behind me on the pavement, but I knew he was coming slowly after me. The crawl of the skin up and down my back told...

She had said: ‘You could not hate anyone that much -‘ She was mistaken. What did she know? She felt so good right now, this must be hate, what else could it be?(“Mind Over Murder”)

A raging, glowering full moon had come up, was peering down over the side of the sky well above the patio.That was the last thing she saw as she leaned for a moment, inert with...

One of them hasn’t got a uniform on or plainclothes either like the rest. He has on the white coat that is my nightmare and my horror. And in the crotch of one arm he...

Business after all is a form of warfare; you bring all your available weapons to bear. If you don’t you’re a fool. (“Jane Brown’s Body”)

I wasn’t that good you know. What I was was a guy who could write a little, publishing in magazines surrounded by people who couldn’t write at all. So I looked pretty good. But I...

She turned and walked down the musty, dimly-lighted corridor, along a strip of carpeting that still clung together only out of sheer stubbornness of skeletal weave. Doors, dark, oblivious, inscrutable, sidling by; enough to give...

It was dark now, and broodingly sluggish. Like something supine waiting to spring, with just the tip of its tail twitching. Leaves stood still on the trees. An evil green star glinted in the black...

What careful planning, what painstaking attention to detail, goes into extinguishing a man’s life! Far more than the hit-or-miss, haphazard circumstances of igniting it.(“New York Blues”)

We don’t marry women, he thought; we marry angels, and in this moment or two of the marriage act, the scales fall from our eyes and we see them as they really are, perhaps never...

It isn’t dying I’m afraid of, it isn’t that at all; I know what it is to die, I’ve died already. It is the endless obliteration, the knowledge that there will never be anything else....

Now the evening’s at its noon, its meridian. The outgoing tide has simmered down, and there’s a lull-like the calm in the eye of a hurricane – before the reverse tide starts to set in.The...

Men’s loyalty to their women dies hard – and almost always too late. (“I’m Dangerous Tonight”)

Home? What is home? Home is where a house is that you come back to when the rainy season is about to begin, to wait until the next dry season comes around. Home is where...

Gosh, it’s easy!’ he marveled, open-mouthed. ‘I never knew before how easy it is to kill anyone! Twenty years to grow ’em, and all it takes is one little push!’He was suddenly drunk with some...

The ride had begun.The theatre and club spectaculars seemed to stick up into the sky at all sorts of crazy angles, probably because most of them were planted diagonally on rooftops. Follow Thru, Whoopee, Show...

The girl’s face was the color of talcum. Her uncle’s was a death mask, a bone structure overlaid by parchment. Shane’s was granite, with a glistening line of sweat just below his hair line. He’d...

How simple death without weapons was. How safe for the killer.(“Mind Over Murder”)

I took a few dragging steps toward the locker-room door. ‘You’re doing something to me that I wouldn’t do to a dog,’ I mumbled. ‘What you’re doing to me is worse than if you were...

There was a pause, while I fought against this other, lesser kind of death that was creeping over me – this death called strangeness, this snapping of all the customary little threads of cause and...

Three o’clock in the morning.The highway is empty, under a malignant moon. The oil drippings make the roadway gleam like a blue-satin ribbon. The night is still but for a humming noise coming up somewhere...

A slight concussion of the brain simplifies matters so beautifully.(“Three O’Clock”)

Gates got up, but not fast or jerkily, with the same slowness that had always characterized him. He wiped the sweat off his palms by running them lightly down his sides. As though he were...

A second red-orange spearhead leaps straight at O’Shaughnessy. The whole world seems to stand still. Then the gun behind it crashes, and there’s a cataclysm of pain all over him, and a shock goes through...

Keep her downstairs a minute!’ I breathed desperately. I don’t know why; you don’t want your agonies of soul witnessed by a woman. (“Nightmare”)

The thing, whatever it was – and no one was ever sure afterwards whether it was a dream or a fit or what – happened at that peculiar hour before dawn when human vitality is...

Murder is such an elastic term, isn’t it?(“Mind Over Murder”)

She opened a small silver compact and looked at her face in its mirror. I am still guiltless, she thought, I have not done it yet. But I will look the same when I have...

When I came out into the outside room again, I saw her shoe still lying there, where it had come off in the course of our brief wrestle. It looked so pathetic there by itself...

It had grown darker now; it was full night already, with the swiftness of the mountainous latitudes. The square of sky over the patio was soft and dark as indigo velour, with magnificent stars like...

I think fear neutralizes alcohol, weakens its anesthetic power. It’s good for small fears; your boss, your wife, your bills, your dentist; all right then to take a drink. But for big ones it doesn’t...

You see, this would be a death by the imagination. And though the imagination feeds on phantoms, it needs a premise in reality to begin with. Then it can go on from there under its...

I saw her sign the register, but her name isn’t on it any more. The bellboy says he never saw her. Now they’ve got me so I’m scared and shaky, like a little kid is...

The honky-tonk bartender, who doubled as bouncer, waiter, and cashier, was in no mood to compromise. Mercy was not in him. He came out around the open end of the long counter, waddled threatening across...

The car drives through, stops while the man closes and fastens the prickly gate behind it. The bell shuts off; the stillness is deafening by contrast. The car goes on until the outline of a...

On hands and knees the figure comes pacing along beside the wall that flanks the patio, lithe, sinuous, knife in mouth perpendicular to its course. In moonlight and out of it, as each successive archway...

She’s a slinky sort of person, no angles at all; and magnetic – you can’t take your eyes off her. She’s dressed like a Westerner, but her eyes have a slant to them. They are...

The preliminaries were out of the way, the creative process was about to begin. The creative process, that mystic life force, that splurge out of which has come the Venus de Milo, the Mona Lisa,...

She was beautiful, only hers was the dark beauty of night, just as Sherry’s was the bright beauty of daytime. Her hair was raven-black, ending in a sort of widow’s peak low on her forehead,...