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Armchair Fiction presents extra large editions of classic mystery-crime double novels. “The House of Murders” by longtime mystery pulp magazine veteran D. L. Champion is the first story in this double novel. The Thorpe family was one of the most respectable and wealthy families in all of New York. But behind a seven-foot fence (and the pack of killer hounds that encircled it) lay the ancient house in which they lived—a house where vicious waves crashed against the rocks at the base of the sea cliff upon which it was perched. A house that held a most terrible secret—a secret that held the promise of a horrific, grisly death. The one man who could solve the mystery was The Phantom Detective. The Phantom was the top detective in the business. Most of the world knew him as a masked, mysterious character who hunted down the shadowy servants of Death. Killers knew him to be a relentless specter of justice, who would use any means to catch them. Reporter Frank Haven was one of the lucky few who knew the Phantom’s true identity, and Haven presented him with yet another case…the murder of James Thorpe, head of the Thorpe Family. No one could discern how Thorpe had come to his untimely end, thus causing great perplexity about the killer’s identity—but finding people who didn’t want to be found was the Phantom’s specialty. This double novel’s second tale is a fast-moving thriller by Lawrence G. Blochmann. His novel, “Pursuit,” is about Timothy Shawn, the head of the great Shawn Detective Agency, who dangled the biggest piece of change before the sleepy eyes of Edward T. Mitchell that the former All American halfback had ever seen. It was a five-grand fee, payable on the delivery of little Betty Dorin—several million dollars’ worth of blond, blue-eyed precocious femininity—to her mother in New York City. But the trouble was that little Betty was now in San Francisco, and those three thousand miles between were sort of…complicated. First, there was Mitchell’s confederate and make-believe wife for the trip, beautiful Sylvia Furness, who right from the start was as suspicious of him as he was of her. Second, there was another agency employed by powerful interests to keep little Betty in San Francisco—at all costs. Third, police all over the country were alerted by a ten-thousand-dollar reward to capture dead or alive a couple of kidnappers—meaning Mitchell and Sylvia! It all spelled trouble and only time would tell if Mitchell and Sylvia could deliver Betty to her mother, literally in one piece.
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