The Mourning After & The Confession

Armchair Fiction presents extra large editions of classic mystery-crime double novels. The first tale is Frank Kane’s terrific Johnny Liddell thriller, “The Mourning After.” The Strip—Sunset Boulevard—the famed expanse of restaurants and strip joints that make New York’s 52nd Street look like nursery school. Here, right in the heart of L.A., bookies and call girls gather nightly, with little interference from the law. Here, at Maury’s on The Strip, Johnny Liddell sat at a ringside table, watching clothes peel from the featured dancer. In Hollywood they say, “Once you’ve seen one naked body, you’ve seen ‘em all.” Liddell wasn’t nearsighted, but he’d never seen anything like this… But a hurry-up call from L.A. had brought Liddell 3,000 miles out to California to the Beverly Hills estate of TV star Dirk Messner. New York’s shrewdest private eye found the playboy in the middle of a press conference. The reporters were asking a lot of questions, but Messner didn’t feel like talking—and from the looks of the gaping hole in his chest, he wouldn’t ever be talking again. The second tale is a classic, Mary Roberts Rinehart’s “The Confession.” Would a haunted house give up its brutal secret? It had all seemed so innocent. The elderly Emily Benton was well thought of—the last person to be suspected of wrongdoing. She had generously allowed Agnes Blakiston and her faithful servant to live rent-free in the Benton home for the summer. But Agnes had not wanted to stay in the aging structure and soon came to regret it, sensing that something was terribly amiss. At night the phone would mysteriously ring and at times there was evidence of strange, unseen visitors. These cryptic events finally led to the ultimate Was the Benton house haunted? Before long, Agnes Blakiston became oppressed by a sense of terror. Investigating the source of her fear, she gradually learned a deadly secret—a twenty-year-old secret so terrible that Miss Emily would rather die than reveal it.