'The House Party' and 'The Blessington Method' subsequently both won Edgar Awards. Stanley Ellin, who was made a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America in 1980, is acknowledged as one of the great masters of the 20th-century short story, and this volume brings together the best of his work in the genre.

    Works prior to this tended to fall into bias categories either for or against. Max Brown’s book was the work of an open-minded outsider who’d put time and effort into studying the events of the Gang’s lives on the ground, in the caves, the ranges and the rough dwellings – wherever the incidents occurred.

    It was a special day. That night he took his father's gun and set out to kill a man named Al Judge.A powerful novel of suspense and violence, DREADFUL SUMIT was successfully filmed by Joseph Losey as THE BIG NIGHT.

    Al Colby, an American expatriate working as a private investigator in Mexico City, is contacted by an old acquaintance in Los Angeles who hands him a cold case involving a missing person. Robert Parker’s mysterious disappearance is tying up a family fortune and is enraging his abandoned wife who can’t tap the family coffers without proof of death. The case sounded routine enough, right up his alley, but the trail for the missing Mr. Parker leads Colby down a rabbit hole winding through a number of South American countries, each one a dead end. Running out of funds and clean shirts, Colby is ready to throw in the towel, but the stakes are too high and his client fuels the search with additional cash. The deeper Colby digs the more entangled he becomes in a decades old mystery of misplaced loyalties, family secrets and riches in nitrate ore. In between tequila shots and beautiful women, Al Colby has a case that drags him in deeper with each step.  But can he piece it all together before the quicksand swallows him whole?