Showing results by narrator "Maynard Villers" in All Categories

Shell Scott is hired to help State Senator Paul Hershey gather information against Joe Blake, one of the biggest crooks Los Angeles has ever produced. Joe Blake is the kingpin behind the opposition party to Paul Hershey’s re-election. Blake is backing the candidate against Hershey, a Blake pawn, and using smear and innuendo in an increasingly vicious campaign. Hershey’s only defense against this onslaught is to get the information that will put Blake behind bars. That’s where Shell Scott comes in.

Shell Scott's mental contemplation was rudely interrupted when his office door was suddenly opened and an unpleasant little man walked in with a .45 caliber automatic pointed right at Shell's midsection. Unknown to Shell Scott, some guy named Sader wanted Shell eliminated permanently. Why, is the question

'The scarlet bikini which had covered a minimum of the eye-popping curves on the dead woman, lay at her feet, and my eyes focussed on her as glassily as did the dead man’s next to her. He was dead, all right. He had been shot, poisoned, stabbed, and strangled. Either somebody really had it in for him or four people had killed him. Or else it was the cleverest suicide I’d ever heard of. Me? I’m Shell Scott, private detective and I’m wondering why anybody in his right mind would commit such a complicated murder....'

Haunted by the blood and bitterness of the Civil War, Houston Ballou escaped from Tennessee on the proud stallion High Fire, followed by his brother, Ruff; his sister, Dixie; and the last four mares from the Ballou farm, one of them heavy with foal. Threatened with extreme danger from either army, they head west to start a new life. Adding to their peril are deserters that stalk the roads. These men would kill for a few coins, more so for valuable horseflesh.

Which horse is fastest, Wildfire or Sage King? No one in the Colorado River Valley knew, until a raging range fire trapped both horses and riders into a race against death.

J. Harrison Bing after receiving no word from his daughter in nearly a year, went to her home in L.A. only to find she had sold the home and left without a trace. He hired a Los Angeles P. I. named William Carter to track her down and after calling from Vegas, he also disappeared. Now it is Shell Scott's turn. Assuming a simple case of finding a missing person, Shell finds out the hard way that he has bitten into an elephant.

A rash of hit and run deaths in Los Angeles has the press in an uproar. The police have no clue as to the primary cause and the deceased are all men who appear to have been brutalized prior to the time of the accident. But there are other aspects to the case and Shell Scott has been hired by a not so upstanding night club owner to investigate.

In the wake of disaster, the surviving members of the Ballou family sought a new beginning on the Texas Frontier. A minister and his family become their traveling companions. Tragedy strikes when the minister and his young daughter are attacked by rattlesnakes and severely bitten. Their lives depend on the only medical attention available, that of a Comanche medicine man. And it is up to Ruff to persuade the reluctant Comanches to give them aid.

They say that even the strongest man secretly wants to feel wanted. He even hopes to have some woman take care of him. Well, my cup was running over. Me? I’m Shell Scott, the human target for every gun in the State of California. And that’s no private eyewash...I was made to feel wanted all right...by the city, county and state police. And there was a woman with a nasty little .32 in her tiny hand, well she was just dying to take care of me, permanently. Everywhere I turned, somebody was trying to help me plan what to do with the rest of my life....

“The strait jacket’s canvas held my arms tight. My six-two was horizontal on a stretcher and the two bruisers carried it and my 205 pounds easily down the long corridor. I was confused as modern art, and being in this stupid asylum didn’t help. I was dumped onto a bed, yelling like a fiend. A needle, a stinging sensation in my neck and it was lights out for me. I awoke with a light beaming upon my face. A blade moved upward through the beam of light. And suddenly I was wide awake, thinking: This idiot is about to stab me! Me? I’m Shell Scott private eye and I’m in a lot of trouble...”

The Horseman, is the story of the Ballou family's brave struggle to fulfill a dream. The Ballous were the finest horsemen in the South, a courageous Tennessee family famous for the training and breeding of glorious thoroughbreds. When the Civil War devastated their home and their lives, they headed west into the heart of Indian territory. As horsemen, they triumphed. As a family, they endured. But as pioneers in a new land, they faced unimaginable hardship, danger, and ruthless enemies....

"There was a fire in her eyes that was scorching me - me, who couldn't tell whether a dame wanted to kiss me or kill me! No matter how you look at it, 36-22-35 are magic numbers. They have a real message for me. I'm Shell Scott, the private eye, and I'm very good at figures. You might say I follow them very carefully. I've been following this one for several days and learned her name is Sherry. I hated to think she was mixed in murder. But somebody was planning to send me to my friendly neighborhood mortician and I had to find out who - or die trying."

"'I'm trying to get back in shape,'" she said. Man, if her shape got any better she'd be banned for just walking down the street. I'm Shell Scott, private eye, and my job was to guard her day - yeah, and night. I didn't have a chance to discuss these points with her because I saw the man walking toward us. There was only one of him but he seemed to outnumber me. He was so big I was surprised his feet didn't leave holes behind him in the concrete. "Shell Scott," he rumbled. "Shake." I hardly dared....

The Union nearly killed him in the Civil War. Then the bluecoats and carpetbaggers stole his Texas plantation and turned what was left of his family against him. His Texas home-town became an armed camp, full of corrupt, greedy Yankees anxious to wipe out any veteran that showed up in tattered Confederate gray. Any other man would have just drifted on, but not Confederate Captain Clete Slater.

Creed was willing to risk his life by going home to the girl and the land he loved. Texada and Texas. Both represented his future and as long as he could breathe he would determine his own destiny. But the road home lay through Victoria County, a place that many considered to be lawless and wild even before the War. He knew he was inviting trouble, but he was in a hurry. Riding into the town of Victoria, Creed finds himself caught in a standoff between the angry townsfolk and the company of Union soldiers sent to occupy the town.

The Civil War was hell for Captain Clete Slater, a forgotten hero of the Confederacy, and the Texas Reconstruction's even worse. His Texas home-town is overrun with carpetbaggers and bluecoats. He's hunted by the law for a crime he didn't commit. He rides south to Mexico with a new name, Slate Creed, to hide his real identity. Riding across the Rio Grande, Creed expects to find frontier justice for the real culprits. Instead he finds another country torn apart by its own civil war.

This is the sequel to the Wolf Hunters as Rod, Wabi and Mukoki return for more adventures. In their possession is the secret of a great fortune. Romance, adventure and discovery awaits them as they start on that most thrilling of all trails, the trail of gold. The big silent North, mysterious in its age-old desolation, was just ahead of them. They were about to bury themselves in its secrets, to wrest from it the yellow treasure it guarded. They tingled excitedly at thoughts of encounters in that unknown world inhabited only by the things in the wild.

The Civil War left Clete Slater with three things: a price on his head for a crime he didn't commit, his new assumed name of Slate Creed, and a savage thirst for vengeance. To follow the trail of his brother's killers, he left his family, the girl he intended to marry, and his ravaged Texas hometown behind. The Union Army wants Creed, dead or alive. But even far from Texas in the wide-open gambling dens of New Orleans, the bluecoats are just a hoofbeat behind. With luck, Creed might escape the bloodthirsty bluecoats.

Marty Keller, ex-Texas Ranger turned bounty hunter, is on the vengeance trail to find the three men who murdered his family. After being wounded, he is cared for by the widow of a murdered sheriff and she convinces him to search for the sheriff's killer as well. She asks a friend of the sheriff, an Indian, to help. The two are slowed by many battles along the way but eventually track the killers across the Southwest into Mexico. Side-tracked again, Marty gets involved in defending a large ranchero from Mexican bandits.

Astronauts Jim Parker and Michael Murphy, aboard the space shuttle Charger II, were wrapping up a routine mission. Just prior to re-entry, they encountered a mysterious cloud bank in space and were never heard from again. Two years later, a metal box was unearthed at a construction site in St. Louis. In it was a previously unknown, yet apparently authentic, journal of the historic Lewis and Clark expedition: written by astronaut Jim Parker. Did Parker and Murphy alter history, or save it?