Five classic novels of crime and detection by five great authors--

MURDER TAKES A WIFE by JAMES A. HOWARD (original publication, 1958)
Jeff Allen kills for a living and makes a living worth killing for. Extravagant omen are his preferred targets, his customers their weak, greedy husbands. When he falls in with a set of oil men who are no strangers to cruelty, their wives who are no strangers to vanity, and their families who are no strangers to greed or spinelessness, he begins hatching a plot to take it all. But evil has a way of paying back with interest.

ROOM TO SWING by ED LACY (original publication, 1957)
Pulp legend and civil rights activist Leonard S. Zinberg, better known as Ed Lacy, with this novel gave the United States its first realistic novel featuring an African American detective. Toussaint “Touie” Marcus Moore is running for his life after being found with a murdered client. Hiding out in the dead man's hometown, he struggles to clear his name before the police track him down.

I HAVE GLORIA KIRBY by RICHARD HIMMEL (original publication, 1951)
Johnny Maguire, now a successful attorney, has escaped the dark, slum-world to which he was born, or so he thinks. So has the woman he once loved, Gloria Kirby, now the favorite woman of a wealthy gangster, or so she thinks. But she is about to walk back into his life with a lot of money, a lot of troubles, and a dangerous proposition. Johnny has enough brains not to say 'yes,' but too much heart to say 'get lost.' Johnny Maguire was featured in at least eleven novels, but his creator, Richard Himmel, once a favorite of the genre, has slipped into obscurity. His explosive and passionate style deserves to be rediscovered. Here's your chance.

NO GOOD FROM A CORPSE by LEIGH BRACKETT (original publication, 1944)
Bracket is an author of such diverse talent that it is impossible to know where to begin. As a novelist, she is best known for her work in science fiction, and for the screen was a co-writer for THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK (1979). She has had great success also, however, with crime and westerns, in story magazines, novels, and screenwriting. This Hammett-esque, hard-boiled detective mystery/revenge thriller was her very first novel, and on its strength was hired by Howard Hawks to co-write the screen adaption of THE BIG SLEEP (1946).

DEATH IS MY COMRADE by STEPHEN MARLOWE (original publication 1960)
Stephen Marlowe, who started off as a sci-fi writer under his real name, Milton Lesser. His best known creation was the globe-trotting FBI-agent-turned-private-detective Chester Drum, who in this novel becomes entangled in a murder and kidnapping plot, which eventually send him into the heart of the Soviet Union to free an imprisoned writer with a story to tell the world.