The Detective O'Malley MEGAPACK®: 21 Police Procedurals

by William MacHarg

This volume collects 21 stories featuring Detective O'Malley from the pages of Collier's. They date from 1930 through the early 1940s. William MacHarg's title character is a lot of fun and sure to appeal to fans of classic puzzle mysteries.Of the series (which numbers about 80 stories), Mike Grost "The brief tales are heavily plot oriented. Some of them have mystery puzzle plots, in others the killer's identity is simply found through police work. O'Malley puts great emphasis on coming up with ingenious ideas to make the killer confess, or make a damaging admission of guilt; the stories contain numerous gimmicks of this type."

Included

The Green PaintThe RingThe SleeptalkerFingerprintsThe Fourth DegreeIn A MirrorThe Wrong HatSoiled DiamondsThe Locked DoorThe High BridgeToo Many EnemiesNo FingerprintsToo Many MilesThree BulletsThe Mind ReaderThrough The Cabin WindowSpilled PerfumeHelp From Uncle SamMrs. Walder's DiamondsCity WiseDeceiving Clothes

If you enjoy this ebook, don't forget to search your favorite ebook store for "Wildside Press Megapack" to see more of the 300+ volumes in this series, covering adventure, historical fiction, mysteries, westerns, ghost stories, science fiction -- and much, much more!

Genres: Mystery

107 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 29, 2017

Reviews

[Carlton Phelps · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection of stories about O'Malley, who can solve murders that no one else can.
The language is old-fashioned and the banter between O'Malley and the storyteller is fun to read.
All the stories are short and fast to read.

[Duncan McCurdie · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fun collection of Detective O’Malley stories which were originally published in Colliers Magazine during the 30s and early 40s. They are very formulaic so good to read a couple here and there but interesting to read a now forgotten Detective lost between golden age mysteries and the new style hardboiled crime stories.

[David Macpherson · Rating 4 out of 5]

These are brisk procedurals where the tough, and sometimes not by the book, detective solves crimes. Each story starts with a dead body and ends with the killer arrested. The cynical detective is fun to be around and the stories flew by.

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

5-minute mysteries. Very thrifty and terse. Great stuff.

[Daniel · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is always interesting to see what kinds of stories were being published in popular magazines like Collier’s Magazine in the early decades of the twentieth century. The stories collected here (originally published in the 1930s and early 1940s) are all short works of formulaic, hard-boiled police procedurals full of banter about dames and guys getting pinched and the like. All of the stories in the collection feature the work of detective O’Malley and all but one are told (in first person) by some pal of his who isn’t a cop but who tags along with O’Malley quite a lot. One story is told in third person and really stands out like an oddball from all of the others. Each mystery usually centers around a murder, with O’Malley bemoaning how he won’t be able to solve the case because no one will talk and there isn’t much evidence and yada yada yada, but he guesses he will have to go take a look at the evidence, anyway. He always come up with some way to solve the case, of course, and then bemoans the fact that he won’t get any credit for his work. Luckily, this is a pretty quick read, as the stories are all so similar. Of course, reading one O’Malley story every month or two in Collier’s magazine is a lot different experience than reading 21 stories back to back in this collection.

[Cliff Poche · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great Collection!

I really enjoyed this collection of detective stories from 1930's. I think they still hold up pretty good today. This was a blind buy for me, it looked pretty interesting so I took a chance and I'm glad I did. I really liked Detective O'Malley and his sidekick. I hope to find another Dectective O'Malley collection soon, I would love to read more of them!