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,...

Now the moon of the Aztecs is at the zenith, and all the world lies still. Full and white, the white of bones, the white of a skull; blistering the center of the sky well...

She was the kind of shopkeeper who finishes the paragraph she is reading before waiting on the customer.

It was a brave city, she decided, eyeing them. Brave in its other sense; not courageous, so much as outstanding, commanding. It was too nice a town to die in. Though it had no honeysuckle...

She had signed her own death-warrant. He kept telling himself over and over that he was not to blame, she had brought it on herself. He had never seen the man. He knew there was...

Human beings shouldn’t have to enter such doors, shouldn’t have to stay behind them. No moon ever entered there, no stars, no anything at all. They were worse than the grave, for in the grave...

The glove comes off, flops loosely over, and there’s suddenly horror beating into his brain, smashing, pounding, battering. He reels a little in his chair, has to hold onto the edge of the table with...

The shears found his throat this time. He fell down on top of them and was silent.Something dark like mucilage glistened where he lay.She had jumped back – not in remorse, but to keep the...

When she comes down to supper I don’t like her any better; in fact, a hell of a lot less. She’s put on a shiny dress, all fishscales, like this was still India or the...

That was enough dialogue for a few pages – he had to get into some fast, red-hot action.There weren’t any more hitches now. The story flowed like a torrent. The margin bell chimed almost staccato,...

I must have roamed dementedly about for a time in the streets. When I at last got back to my own place, Faustine was again there ahead of me, coiled torpid in the bed like...

But it doesn’t happen that way, I keep telling myself knowingly and sadly. Only in our fraternity pledges and masonic inductions, our cowboy movies and magazine stories, not in our real-life lives. For, the seventeenth-century...

Then the long nights, that were also days, in the hospital. And the long blanks, that were also nights. Needles, and angled glass rods to suck water through. Needles, and curious enamel wedges slid under...

An attachment grew up. What is an attachment? It is the most difficult of all the human interrelationships to explain, because it is the vaguest, the most impalpable. It has all the good points of...

And then, with a shock like high-voltage coursing through me, the phone beside me started pealing thinly.I just stood there and stared at it, blood draining from my face. A call to a tollbooth? It...

The sightseers would have been disappointed, as the real thing always makes a poorer show than the fake. (“I’m Dangerous Tonight”)

He handed me something done up in paper. ‘Your mask,’ he said. ‘Don’t put it on until we get past the city-limits.’ It was a frightening-looking thing when I did so. It was not a...

And the blood remembers what the heart has never learned. The approach to kill. (“The Moon Of Montezuma”)

It wasn’t an attack. We’d been together too many times before, made love together too many times before, for it to be that. It was just that fear had suddenly entered, and made us dangerous...

Extreme joy and extreme sorrow are indistinguishable beyond a certain point. (“Jane Brown’s Body”)

Babette looked too good for the place tonight, but then goodness is only relative after all (“Steps Going Up” aka “Guillotine” aka “Men Must Die”)

There is no hard and fast line that can be drawn that says: Up to here there was no love; from here on there is now love. Love is a gradual thing, it may take...

New York. The world’s most dramatic city. Like a permanent short circuit, sputtering and sparking up into the night sky all night long. No place like it for living. And probably no place like it...

It was as simple as that – they met. As simple as only beautiful things can be beautiful, as only life-changing things, turning-point things, can be simple.(“For The Rest Of Her Life”)

He’s prowling back and forth like a lion with distemper now. There’s a shiny streak down one side of his face. “I shouldn’t have let her go ahead – I ought to be hung! Something’s...

Stahl trailed him upstairs, across a mezzanine, and out into the darkness of the sloping balcony. Tom gave the aisle his torch so his guest could see. On the screen below a woman’s head was...