Ambrotox and Limping Dick by Oliver Fleming

Oliver Fleming was a pseudonym used by the British authors Ronald MacDonald (1860-1933) and his son Philip MacDonald (1900-1980). Works published under this name include Ambrotox and Limping Dick (1920) and The Spandau Quid (1923). Philip MacDonald also wrote as Anthony Lawless, Martin Porlock, W. J. Stuart and Warren Stuart. His detective novels, particularly those featuring his series detective Anthony Gethryn, are primarily whodunnits with the occasional locked room mystery. His novel X. V. Rex (1933), aka The Mystery of the Dead Police, is an early example of what has become known as a serial killer novel. In later years Philip MacDonald wrote television scripts for Alfred Hitchcock Presents (Malice Domestic, 1957) and Perry Mason (The Case of the Terrified Typist, 1958).

Hidden Foes by Nicholas Carter

Hidden Foes by Nicholas Carter

It beginsL

"

Nobody had heard the report of a pistol.

There had been no disturbance; in fact, no audible altercation, no startling cry for help, or even a groan of sudden, terrible distress.

The man lay there as motionless, nevertheless, as if felled by a thunderbolt. His life had been snuffed out like the flame of a candle by the fury of a whirlwind. Death had come upon him like a bolt from the blue. By slow degrees his face underwent a change—but it was not the change that ordinarily follows sudden death, that peaceful calm that marks the end of earthly toil and trouble.

Instead, the smoothly shaven skin seemed to shrink and wither slightly over the dead nerves and lifeless muscles, and a singular slaty hue that was hardly perceptible settled around his lips and nostrils, partly dispelling the first deathly pallor. It was as if the blast from a furnace, or the searing touch of a fiery hand, had withered and parched it."