Showing results by publisher "Wordwooze Publishing" in Historical

Here is a time when the old west became new - the 1930s-50s - as Louis L'Amour witnessed it first-hand in Southern California before and after World War II. Many people think the age of gunmen, scheming land barons, murderous bad guys, and the determined men who stood up against them, went out with the end of the Old West around the 1890s. But, in L’Amour’s own time in the New West, there were far more bad men toting guns and making grabs for far more wealth and valuable land than in the fabled days of the Old West.

In one of the first crime novels ever set behind the scenes of big-time television, Clarence Budington Kelland has plotted a thrilling adventure of danger and death which climaxes in a series of fast-moving surprises. Peter Mortain, one of the youngest directors in this very young medium, was beleaguered enough, directing the first episode of the most expensive variety show ever produced. He had a cast whose first appearance on television made them skittish, a thousand technical details to handle, and a star…who was also his boss!

Archibald Cloyd was an ubergeek and as pedantic as it is possible to be. Hollywood hired him at thousands of dollars a week as the technical director on a movie about Napoleon. Wilson Page, Archibald's secretary, figured he didn't deserve anything better than being nursemaid to a strutting egomaniac.

Wisecracking Jane Teach had pirate blood, a take-charge attitude, and a penchant for sticking her nose in the wrong places. Sober-minded Bill Popple was from one of Long Island's first families, a conservative-minded young man who walked the straight and narrow. When they met it was loathing at first sight, definitely not a match made in heaven. But with six people trying to kill them over a dead bootlegger's lost fortune and a pirate's treasure secretly buried 300 years ago, they both needed each other.

What happens when a Korean War vet recovering from serious injuries wins a ghost town in a contest, meets a hard-riding, gun-toting cowgirl, and is threatened by three dangerous people all within a few days? Answer: cock-eyed characters, pixilated dialogue, zany romance, and heart-stopping suspense. Thus begins one of Clarence Budington Kelland's finest and rarest novels, previously only published as a seven-part serial in the legendary and best-selling magazine of its era, The Saturday Evening Post.

Mike Lanson was the ace crime reporter for the Gazette, so it was natural that he heard about the kookie wino who had reported eavesdropping on two men plotting a murder. So, it was also natural that he got on the case after one of the two plotters was found dead. Mike, like all reporters, was looking for an answer. But when he filled in the five W's on the next victim, he came up with this: Who: Mike Lanson. What: His own murder. When: As soon as that fire reached the explosives. Where: In a deserted storehouse. Why: Because he knew too much.

Only a few months earlier, the young woman now known as Jane Smith had lived a life of luxury and privilege as the ruler of a small Balkan kingdom. She lived a life of glittering balls, the finest furnishings, the most handsome men, the most exquisite of foods. Her only friends were four bearded old men who served as her cabinet, and worshiped the ground she walked on. Then the Germans had marched in, and she and her four councilors barely escaped with their lives.

When Maggie McTigg's brother Michael went off to fight in World War II, he left his taxicab company in her hands. As the only member of the family with a lick of business sense, he asked her to keep it running while he was gone. Maggie took it as a sacred trust, her own contribution to the war efforts, and resolved that it would still be operating when the conflict was over and he finally returned home—no matter what it took and what she had to do. Just how far will a woman go to keep her soldier brother's heritage alive for him until a war is over?

The Cardiff Giant Affair is set in 1869 Syracuse and features a happy mélange of medicine shows, con games, "brawling canawlers", high society, and murder, with two highly spirited women and incidental glimpses of P. T. Barnum. All this is interwoven with the splendid true story of the Cardiff Giant hoax.

A dazzling blend of alternative history and detective noir, with just a dash of fairy tale. A missing child in a small Transylvanian town could spell trouble for Hungary’s new revolutionary government. Another case for Ferenc Marlowe, pioneer private detective. Soon Marlowe is on an undercover mission to the Carpathian Mountains, where he must contend with the local nobility, Jesuit intrigue, and woods that are full of wolves...or something worse.

McHugh's back, drunk, and locked deep in a Mexican jail while the clock ticks down to doomsday! Someone is planning an international incident that would set off a revolution in one of the US's closest South of the border allies, plus provoke a shooting war between the US and Mexico - and it's up to McHugh, the two-fisted secret agent who always travels with a briefcase containing a fifth of Scotch and a .45, to stop it.

He can out shoot, out think, out fight, and out love any other secret agent on the planet - get out of the way James Bond before your tux gets rumpled! McHugh lands a Caribbean island assignment: Stir up a revolution, topple the world's most brutal dictator, smash the secret police whose methods start with torture and get a lot worse from there, help the revolutionaries, and stop the revolution before it goes too far in the other direction. It's just another days' work for McHugh.

McHugh, the world's toughest spy, is on an assignment that spells triple trouble! Trouble #1 begins at the bar he owns to cover his espionage activities, called The Door. And it’s the door to death for the stranger he finds dying just outside with a shiv in his guts. McHugh doesn't like corpses on his doorstep, so he starts to back-track on the stranger, which leads him to a round, ripe, terrified girl, wearing narrow chino pants. There is puzzlement in her eyes, then recognition, then panic. Then the whole house falls in on McHugh!

The 1960s' toughest, brainiest, sexiest, and most compassionate spy, is back in print! Meet McHugh America's#1 Secret Agent a combination of Mickey Spillaine's Mike Hammer and Ian Flemming's James Bond. In this first book in the series, McHugh takes a leave of absence from his spy work to help out his lover's sister who has found a dead Mafioso in her apartment, her boyfriend missing, and half San Francisco's mobsters after her.

The year was 1943. He was a pilot in the U.S. Army Air Corps, on loan to the British, flying a reconnaissance mission over occupied France. Shot down, he had to make his way back to England with what could prove to be a very important reel of film taped to his chest. Wounded, he was grounded and sent back to the States to the Air Cadet Base in San Antonio, Texas to teach. Plagued by nightmares stemming from his wartime experiences, he was easy pickings for a woman like her