Milo March Series

Samson Hercules Carter is a little man with a big name who has fallen obsessively in love with a diamond. The Tavernier Blue is only a little smaller than a golf ball and worth a fortune. To insurance investigator Milo March, the hunk of carbon doesn’t seem as attractive as the equivalent in cash, but he can see why the little man might want to put it in his pocket and take a walk. But the problem is, Carter has also shot a man to death in the process. The insurance company sends Milo to track down the murderer and recover the stolen diamond—a task made all the more urgent because he’s got competition. Some of the world’s top jewel thieves would also like to get their hands on the diamond, from sinister professionals to a beautiful seductress. In one of Milo’s wildest adventures ever, the chase takes him from New York to Lisbon and Madrid, where the thief, a mild-mannered accountant, has transformed himself into a new identity as a cultured gentleman, an alternate personality that he has secretly developed for years. Getting the thief back to America for prosecution is challenge enough—but where the hell did the little man hide the diamond? The Man Inside was made into an English film of the same name in 1958, directed by John Gilling and starring Jack Palance and Anita Eckberg.

Insurance investigator Milo March is under pressure to solve a classic whodunit in a small town. Athens, Ohio, is a place full of historic monuments, many of them still walking the streets. But now the excitement of Hollywood has burst on the scene, with a studio shooting a biopic about a rugged pioneer who played a role in the founding of Athens County. Descendants of the story’s hero still live in Athens, and are the owners of valuable antiques, books, and other heirlooms passed down to them from the early 1800s. The studio has arranged to use these gems of Americana as props, insuring them with a million-dollar policy. With such a large sum at stake, the insurance company sends Milo to check on the security measures at the little museum where the items are housed under guard. The job seems like a snap—until a bludgeoned body and a lot of smashed-open cases send everyone into a panic. Among the stolen items is a personal diary written by Hanna’s wife, which appears to be an object of intense interest, or even obsession. Milo can’t imagine why a diary from the early 1800s should be so dangerous as to lead to murder, but he’ll have to find out. Was it a matter of greed, professional ambition, or something bizarre like a delusional fixation on the long-dead pioneer woman who penned the diary? If being unpleasant or eccentric made someone a murderer, then there was full cast of characters to choose from, including a pedantic historian, a shiftless ex-cop, and a couple of snooping old biddies, not to mention a scheming scriptwriter, a genius director, and a man-eating blonde starlet. Murder wasn’t supposed to happen in Athens, Ohio, and the cops want these crimes to be solved fast. The pressure is on Milo to identify the killer before he strikes again—and to recover the heirlooms before anyone cashes in the million-dollar policy.

In this action-packed Cold War spy adventure, Milo March—private detective and former OSS officer during World War II—is recruited by Army intelligence to carry out a dangerous mission behind the Iron Curtain. An important British diplomat has defected to East Germany, carrying with him secrets about British and American codes. He can also help the Communists gain access to a physicist working in the British Sector on a top-secret project that involves tampering with energy fields affecting the human brain―a bizarre process that could disastrously alter the nature of warfare. “Operation Berlin” demands that Milo kidnap the diplomat before the Russians make him talk. Disguised as an American Communist delegate to an international Peace Festival in Berlin, Milo dashes into the Soviet Zone just as the news leaks that an American agent is coming to the event. Surrounded by suspicious comrades, he is congratulated on his mastery of Lenin quotes one moment, while the next he is subjected to arrest and a torturous interrogation. Even when he scores a point, he never knows whether he is fooling them or they are fooling him. While treading this unbearable tightrope of tension, he is distracted by two beautiful women: the sexually aggressive blonde Frieda and the soft-eyed, black-haired Greta, who has some secrets of her own. Either or both of these feminine comrades could be on the verge of betraying him. Although the efficient and fearless Milo always insists on working alone, help comes from an unexpected quarter in the nick of time.

Milo March, a tough private eye from Denver, is sent to Aragon City (which could be Hollywood) to help the City Betterment Committee wipe out the gangsters and hoodlums controlling brothels, bookies, gamblers, shady nightclubs, and the dope traffic. He just has to uncover “Mr. X,” the mystery man who’s been raking in a tidy little income by providing protection to the Syndicate. But can Milo accomplish that without stumbling over something even more dangerous—like who pays Mr. X, and why? Milo is well equipped for the job. He has plenty of gall, good looks, an unlimited expense account, a fishtail Cadillac, and ample experience with lawbreakers—and beautiful, willing women, of whom there are several, but only one who is the girl next door. As March starts his snooping, he is surprised to discover a sexy, naked blonde in his hotel room. And there are other, more painful things complicating his life—things like beatings and fistfights and gun battles, and a blow he never saw coming.   “Sentence by sentence, this is a strongly readable book.” —New York Herald Tribune Book Review “The established pattern of California coast crime—political graft, dope, and prostitution—with a fall guy introduced to clean it up. Milo March, hired by the Civic Betterment Committee, fouls up with the brains and muscle men when he spies on his assignment before he is due, latches onto cultured hoods and tough racket boys—and pays off from syndicate roughing up to cards down.” —Kirkus Reviews “It was obvious that sooner or later there’d be a capable challenger of Mickey Spillane in the concoction of the muscular and seductive mixture that makes Spillane’s best-selling books. A challenger has appeared in M.E. Chaber.” ―Los Angeles Examiner

It’s been two years since Milo March sneaked into East Germany to capture a valuable Western deserter. Now, as a major in the Army Reserves, he is recalled to tackle a much weirder case. No one knows why Hermann Gruss, head of the counterespionage police in West Germany, disappeared behind the Iron Curtain. Did he defect voluntarily, or was he taken by force? Either way, Milo has to get him back before he reveals secrets that the U.S. shared with him. Some say Gruss suffers from a dread disease and is being treated in East Berlin with the latest wonder drug by his friend Dr. Oderbruch. Milo suspects that Oderbruch, a former Nazi, is experimenting on Gruss, bouncing him in and out of insanity like a yo-yo by dosing him with LSD, then healing his “schizophrenia” with an antidote. Withholding the antidote is a handy way to squeeze information out of Gruss, and the drug experiments are part of a larger, fiendish project involving mind control of the military. In his effort to gain access to Oderbruch and find Gruss, Milo ends up in the arms of the lustful Frau Beate, who plies him with Soviet champagne and vodka. Milo is reasonably safe if hangovers are the only menace. But when his disguise as a Russian secret-police agent is blown, he is packed off to a mental hospital. There he joins Gruss as the doctor’s latest guinea pig. Milo survived a marathon interrogation by the Communists during his last mission. But this is different—the hallucinogenic effects of LSD threaten to splinter his mind into pieces. How will he escape the closely guarded hospital, bringing both Gruss and the evil Oderbruch back with him to the West? Milo’s quick-witted action and sheer nerve, not to mention his irreverence toward authority figures on both sides, make for the wildest trip of all—an insane car chase back to the Free World.

Three businessmen go to New Orleans to skin-dive off an island where their map indicated there was ancient pirate treasure. They are accompanied by a haughty Creole guide and an African-American diviner whose chatter about spirits and spells is worthy of an Oscar. When two of the treasure seekers go off by themselves and never come back, the third man wants to cash in on the life insurance policies the three men took out, each one payable to the other two survivors. Never eager to pay up too hastily, the insurance company sends Milo March to New Orleans to find out what really happened to the two missing men. It is claimed they were accidentally sucked down into quicksand and buried in it forever―a horrible fate. But what if that’s not what happened? Had the survivor killed the two men and disposed of their bodies, either to collect the insurance or get possession of the treasure they found? Had the three men entered into a conspiracy in which two would disappear and the third would collect for all of them? Or could they have stumbled onto some illegal operation on the island, leading to their kidnapping or murder? Milo is tailed by criminals and G-men, threatened by a nasty little gangster, and wooed by a cultivated Syndicate boss who swears that he abhors violence, and he almost drowns when his tank runs out of oxygen during a skin-diving expedition. An accident? Milo is so busy that he almost gets behind on his drinking, though not on his dates with a gorgeous blonde who takes him sightseeing, and more. It will require a lot of action, smarts, and patience before Milo March discovers that the key to the mystery is hiding in plain sight. 

When Milo March heads for an island in the sun to recover the stolen copy of a heavily insured manuscript, it’s like a one-way ticket to hell: his destination is a brutal Caribbean dictatorship called the “Monican Republic.” The manuscript, a scandalous exposé of the government, is in the hands of the dictator himself, who seized it before it could be published. The author is a Monican professor who has been kidnapped on American soil and forced back to his homeland to face the wrath of the dictator. And two other men—one a U.S. citizen—have died under suspicious circumstances in connection with the kidnapping.  Milo’s assignment is just to get the valuable manuscript back for the insurance company. But he also wants to investigate whether the deaths of two men were murders engineered by the regime. He also wonders what had happened to the large sum that the professor withdrew from a charitable fund for Monican refugees the same day he vanished. It would be great to deliver the regime’s chief assassin into the hands of the New York police. Not to mention that Milo has to figure out how to smuggle the manuscript out of the presidential palace. Oh, and what happened to the professor?  There was no problem getting into the Monican Republic; it’s getting out with all of this that might cause some trouble for Milo. And then there’s the small difficulty of two Latina beauties who may have been set up to trap him… From the moment Milo lands in Torcido’s island, he is marked for murder. The finger man is an international playboy, and the executioner is a sinister mystery man called El Nariz—“The Nose.” The bait is a dark-haired Latin beauty with her own brand of Caribbean allure. It could be a lovely way to die… if only the sadistic Monican police chief doesn’t finish Milo off before he can fully enjoy the perks of the job.

Several cases involving industrial espionage, secret formulas, a missing inventor, and two suspicious suicides are presented to investigator Milo March as a very expensive matter of insurance fraud, but the executives at Intercontinental Insurance hint there is more to the case. Milo is sent to meet with a three-star general attached to the CIA, yet he receives only minimal details and is then told there will be no communication with other agents assigned to the case—no cooperation or contact at all. Thus begins another tough adventure, leading Milo from New York City to Stockholm and Paris as he pursues a ruthless criminal with many identities in many countries. The man appears to be a well-respected businessman, yet Milo can find only the vaguest description and no photos. There is no question in his mind that this man is an international thief of industrial patents and the murderer of at least four men. He is undoubtedly responsible for kidnapping the inventor of an electronic device that will make a missile do everything except play tennis. But how he smuggled the inventor out of his hotel is a puzzle worthy of a classic locked-room detective story. To throw Milo off his trail, the shadowy villain sends thugs pointing guns, knives, and speeding cars at him. One of them will not live to regret his impudence. Amid the nerve-wracking tension, a dazzling Swedish blonde who enjoys dining in the nude is ready to soothe Milo’s ruffled feathers, providing some much-needed booze and sympathy.

Milo March, Madison Avenue insurance detective, is sent to Rome to investigate the double-indemnity claim on the policy of a young woman who may have been murdered. Anna Maria went walking on a beach, allegedly to bathe in the healing seawater. A few hours later she was found lying nude on the sand, with no apparent signs of violence to the body. An accidental drowning, says the medical report, and the family puts in a claim for the large benefit. The insurance company, understandably, would like to confirm that the death was indeed an accident. Although the case is quickly closed by the police, the whispers of Rome will not be silenced. They insist that the girl was murdered, that she’d been consorting with VIPs at a wild drug party, that she was pregnant and the guilty man did not want any trouble. It is rumored that politicians made the police hush up the truth, lest a scandal topple the Christian-Democrat government, allowing the Communists to take over. Milo is warned to leave the case alone. If he persists, he may find himself arrested, he may get orders from his own American Embassy, or he may even be killed by someone… or some thing. All of this may happen if he says out loud that a girl of no importance died because someone wanted her dead. But the question—and the shocking surprise—is who actually killed her? A Lonely Walk was inspired by the true story of Wilma Montesi, whose death in 1953 led to a scandal that rocked Italy with revelations of corruption in high places. The real-life case remains unsolved death to this day. Not so Milo’s investigation of the girl who took a lonely walk—until Death came to keep her company.

Milo March, back in uniform again, does his bit for the CIA in a quest for a paper stolen from the highest government files—a job that the government can trust only to him. Milo, relying only on his wits and seemingly unlimited American dollars, travels from Paris to East Berlin and then to Moscow. He drugs a Russian delegate at a trade congress in East Berlin and trusses him up like a chicken in order to assume his identity and attend a reception party where he comes face to face with Premier Khrushchev himself. He lures a beautiful brunette who is an important Russian spy into a date by posing as a shy comrade who just happens to have a collection of her favorite American jazz records. As if that weren’t enough chutzpah, he then steals the private limo of a high Russian official and, after changing identities again, leads the secret police on an insanely dangerous goose chase. Fortified by vodka-fueled courage and the thrill of risk-taking, Milo stirs up enough trouble to make even the Kremlin see red, not to mention his own government. And before the conclusion of this tense and exciting adventure, he even endangers the entire mission to protect an enemy out of loyalty to that special breed of humans who are secret agents.

An exquisite necklace of Chinese jade is stolen from wealthy New York couple, and the insurance company wants investigator Milo March to get it back so they won’t have to pay out the claim. But the case soon expands from simple theft to international intrigue as Milo’s only clue leads him to Hong Kong in search of a well-organized gang and its criminal mastermind.

Insurance companies don’t like it when someone puts a match to a house they’ve insured to the hilt, and in the process burns to death a couple who carry double-indemnity policies. Investigator Milo March sets out to discover who torched the Santa Monica beach house with its owners inside, and who paid them. Did the philandering husband hire a notorious gangster to do the dirty work, and trick a Skid Row bum to stand in for himself as the victim? Three other suspects are an elegant blonde, a steamy redhead, and a shapely young Japanese woman, any of whom Milo might bed or bust—or both—in the course of this fast-paced, action-packed whodunit.

A man disappeared seven years ago, and his large life insurance policies are ready to come due unless he is found alive. He’s a union boss and gangster who was in the midst of testifying to Congress when he mysteriously vanished. Hoping to save the insurance company a million dollars, Milo March crisscrosses the country to find out if he’s still alive, with a pair of professional killers on his tail, determined to stop the investigation.

It was a well-planned heist. An armored truck had picked up money from banks to be delivered to the Federal Reserve. The car climbed the winding road of Storm King Mountain in New York State. At the summit were the men from the state highway truck, placing a detour sign in the road. Parked at the side of the road was a police car, its warning light blinking. Minutes later, the two guards from the armored car had been lured from their truck by the phony troopers and shot dead. The money that had been safely locked up in its armor-plated vault was loaded into two ordinary cars and driven away. It is Milo March’s job to get the money back for the insurance company—one and a half million dollars in cash, securities, and bonds. The trail leads Milo to three more murders; the men who pulled the robbery had been killed too. As he follows the clues, he discovers that three others—two tough men and a striking blonde—had run away to Miami. They purchased a fishing boat, and the seller was found shot to death. The boat did not return. Where did they go? There was only one place to go if you had a lot of money and were wanted by the American police. Brazil had no extradition treaty with the U.S. and had long been a haven for American crooks who were loaded with loot. Is it unreasonable of Milo to think he can talk all three of them into voluntarily returning to the United States? While frequenting the beaches, bars, and nightclubs of the Marvelous City, and romancing a beautiful Latina jazz singer, Milo is steadily working on his problem: how to get the criminals back to the United States before they kill each other—with the money, securities, and bonds intact, untouched by the hands of a persistent Brazilian police lieutenant with a nose for money.

Milo March is on a new case for Intercontinental Insurance, and it’s a real puzzler this time. Actually, Milo was just settling into a hedonistic vacation in Los Angeles when Intercontinental called him from New York and convinced him, with the promise of a large bonus, to try to solve a series of jewel robberies in Beverly Hills. Since Intercontinental carries the bulk of the policies on the jewels, they are desperate for Milo to get the loot back—and to see the thieves put away, as a cautionary lesson to other would-be lawbreakers. The police have identified their prime suspect: Johnny Rinaldi, a gangster with a cross-country criminal record. But just as Milo takes on the case, the cops are busy arresting Johnny’s beautiful girlfriend, Lita, for the murder—she’s been found standing over his body with a revolver in her hand. Yet Milo won’t believe Lita did it. He had just been on a date with her the same night! He also doesn’t believe Renaldi is the chief culprit. The thefts must have been committed by a gang of seven or eight people, and Johnny didn’t seem smart enough to be the mastermind. In each case a home was broken into at the exact time the owners had taken their gems out of a bank vault. Somebody was tipping off the thieves. Milo has a good idea of who is involved—for example, the hoods who keep warning him to stay off the case, constantly tailing him, and threatening him with fists and guns. But one problem is how to pin it on them, and the other is: where the hell is the large amount of stolen jewelry, especially the three hundred loose diamonds hidden in a place only known to the dead man? The question is a little like the old gag about looking for a lost dog: “Where would you go if you were a dog?” Milo tries to guess where Renaldi might have hidden the jewelry. There had to be a lot of it, so he couldn’t just dump it in a dresser drawer. And why hadn’t any of it turned up on the market? Surely he wasn’t saving the diamonds to trickle through his fingers, or to run barefoot through a collection of costly baubles. The answer is just on the tip of Milo’s mind, and he’s got to access his intuition or else several millions swill have to be paid out—and Lita could go to the gas chamber.

Once again, private eye Milo March, a Major in the Army reserves, is recalled by the CIA for a special mission. At a time when relations between the U.S. and Soviet Russia are somewhat relaxed, the Russians have asked a Syndicate-owned American company to send an expert to teach them how to build coin vending machines and plan where to install them. The CIA easily makes a deal with the Syndicate, and Milo is assigned to go undercover in the guise of this expert. Since both the Syndicate and the Soviets know who Milo March is, his identity must be kept secret. The CIA provides Milo with I.D. papers and a history covering his entire life as a gangster named Peter Miloff. After a crash course in vending machines, he is off to Moscow. Never mind that the Russians have his fingerprints on file. He will spend much of his time opening doors with his palm and closing them with his elbow. Milo’s mission is twofold. First there’s an American agent who disappeared into a Russian prison somewhere, and Milo has to figure out where he is. The other assignment is to finish that agent’s job: find out whether a master Soviet spy who was believed killed during the war is actually still alive and running a special espionage bureau.  And so our hero arrives in Moscow armed with several 007 gadgets and a gun, without which he would feel naked. He has also been offered the assistance of four double agents, two Russian nationals and two Yugoslavs. Just as Milo is deciding that he cannot expect much from these little helpers—apart from the company of the two who are lovely young women—a warning comes from Washington that one of the four agents is a traitor. But which one? The Russians are good at playing the cat-and-mouse game, and now Milo had become the mouse….

Milo March is sipping a martini at the pool of the Far Eastern Hotel, a lovely British blonde on his left and a Chinese beauty on his right, both in bikinis. What more could a man require? But then he is rudely interrupted by a call from Intercontinental Insurance in New York. They have a serious case that only he, their best investigator, can tackle. As usual, many millions of dollars are at stake. A large, well-organized ring is transporting stolen goods from the U.S. to Red China via Hong Kong. Milo doesn’t doubt that organized crime is responsible, and he is determined to put and end to the whole operation—not only the stealing, but the dealing with an enemy country.  Milo persists with plodding but dangerous work, then suddenly, when he gets warm around the edges, he springs into  action. Assuming a secret identity as a tough loner named “John Milo,” he hangs out at a couple of bars frequented by con men. The V.O. and martinis keep flowing as he waits to make a connection to the smuggling ring.  Through an unpleasant police informer described as a “sick bulldog,” Milo makes a deal with a couple of men peddling stolen liquor, as this may lead him to the Syndicate men responsible for the smuggling. It does, but it also lands him in jail, charged with conspiracy to receive stolen property, possession of stolen property, and three counts of burglary—another day in the life of John Milo. Out on bail, Milo continues his quest and manages to land a job as a bagman for a Mafia don. Before closing the case, Milo will spar with some tough customers. A weasel-faced punk will stick a gun in Milo’s back, and someone will get badly injured. Milo will get lucky in Vegas and even luckier with the sensational woman known as the Dragon Lady of Hong Kong. And at the end, Milo will get a promised $20,000 bonus whether he solves the case or not. The latter outcome is highly unlikely…

People always say it sounded like a firecracker at first. But it was a rifle shot that rang out from the fourth story of an apartment building in Cleveland, killing a handsome young Congressman as he delivered a speech. The suspect is Eugene Crown, an escaped convict who rented the apartment, but no one knows where he is now. After four weeks of intensive nationwide search, the police and the FBI have still not captured him. Then Intercontinental Insurance gets the bright idea to hire its best investigator, Milo March, to capture the killer―as a public service, of course. They are determined to prove that a large corporation can have a soul, and they’re going to do it even if it kills Milo. But it won’t. Milo will crisscross the country and the globe in search of the truth: Cleveland, Columbus, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Reno, Lisbon, New York City, Hong Kong, Cape Town, Paris... even a little old mining town in Arizona. All the while he is dogged by a sneering white-haired gangster determined to get to Crown before Milo does―to shut him up. Milo doesn’t believe that Eugene Crown is the real culprit. He was a born loser by all accounts, and now, suddenly, he’s a master criminal? Clearly Crown is no more than a pawn in a well-organized game of death. But why the Congressman? Because he was for civil rights? anti-Communist? anti-union? pro-Israel? There had to be an international conspiracy behind the deed, a group of men with a lot of money and one simple idea in common: Stir things up. Put the blame on the Left, the Right, the blacks, the whites, whoever—but scare everybody so that the men can get the things they want....

Milo March heads for the historic mining boomtowns of Nevada, but he’s planning to dig at people, not rocks. The case involves three men who bought an old gold mine outside Reno. Though it had been abandoned for a century, the mine has miraculously started producing again. Armed with a glowing assay report, the owners persuaded the insurance company to issue a large policy against the mine’s running out of gold before they have taken two million dollars in gold from it. You guessed it—a few months later the owners claim the mine has run dry, and they want their payout. The insurance company screams at once for its top investigator, Milo March. Milo first has to solve a riddle: How do you get gold out of a mine that has no gold in it? The easy explanation is the old con job known as salting, but that only involves a sprinkling of gold around a mine to deceive buyers. This mine had a helluva lot more gold than that. So the answer to the riddle must be that you bring gold into the mine, then take it out again. Now this raises another question: Where did they get a ton of gold bricks to put into the mine? One of the owners of the mine belongs to a crime family that Milo has tangled with before. The Syndicate must be using the mine as a front for something else. Milo can’t imagine its being a front for anything except gold. That sounds silly. But the case is anything but silly, turning deadly as Milo gradually unravels its complexities. Though it’s a case for the FBI, Milo wraps it up in his own way, determined to set things right for an innocent victim whose friendship has come to mean a lot to him.

It is the time of the infamous Los Angeles riots of 1965—several days of arson and looting in protest of police mistreatment of black residents of the Watts neighborhood in the southeast of the city. During this tense time, Milo March is summoned to L.A. to investigate because one of the properties that has burnt down is heavily insured, as are two of the three people who were killed Harry Masters, the wealthy owner of the building, and his brother-in-law, who owned a store on the first floor.  Milo questions whether the arson and deaths were truly the work of black rioters. Maybe the arson was separate from the rioting, a setting that merely enabled white men to cover a more serious crime. Focusing on the character and habits of Harry Masters is the key to these questions. No one makes a fortune without also making enemies; could that be why someone torched Masters’ building? People said Masters was a no-good bastard, but good at it. Maybe he had decided he wasn’t satisfied with just making a few million a year. Maybe he wanted to score big and go off somewhere with a delicious broad. It’s possible Masters engineered the whole thing, then, with the help of a couple of cheap punks connected to the Syndicate—the same punks who are now tailing and threatening March. Masters could steal money from his own company, leaving it crippled or destroyed, and disappear. He could start over in another country and might never be found. Milo just has to prove that he did it, how he did it, who helped him, where he was, and how to get him back to face the music. That’s all, nothing to it. But Milo has some helpers, too: One is a girlfriend of Harry’s, a voluptuous stripper who seems determined to drink Milo under the table. The other is a young black hipster from the neighborhood. Once Milo has won his trust, he proves to have access to key information that none of the white people suspect.

For the first time in book form—six stories from vintage men’s magazines (1952–1961) featuring Milo March, the shrewd insurance investigator and brazen secret agent created by M.E. Chaber: “The Jelly Roll Heist.” A series of thefts in Denver has the insurance executives biting their nails. Judging by the loss of a belly dancer’s navel gem, it looks like a seducer is preying on ladies with sparkly things. Or is there a more sinister gang behind it? “Hair the Color of Blood.” Milo’s on vacation at a swank Santa Monica hotel when he hears a scream. He rushes to save the damsel in distress, and the next thing he knows, he’s waking up in bed with the naked body of a red-haired corpse! “The Hot Ice Blues.” A new jewel robbery occurs every night, while Milo sits around playing Dixieland platters with a real gone chick. Is the insurance company’s star investigator really goofing off? “Murder for Madame.” Someone swipes a worthless box, tossing aside the costly pearl necklace that was inside. Now four people are desperate to retrieve the box―five if you count Milo, who can’t resist trying to figure out why. “The Red, Red Flowers.” Major March, U.S. Army Reserve, is sent undercover to Moscow, where a captured American U-2 pilot is on trial. As usual, Milo has no plan but makes it up as he goes along. He will have mere moments to retrieve a coded message and snatch the pilot from the Communists’ hands—but things don’t go exactly as expected. “The Twisted Trap.” Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you. A wealthy old policyholder claims that his sexy young wife and her psychiatrist lover have teamed up to poison him with a drug that mimics the symptoms of madness. If he should die “accidentally” as a result of this condition, his wife will get an enormous life insurance payout. Having escaped from a sanatorium, the old man insists that Milo must rescue him. But doing so may cost Milo his own sanity!

Death to the Brides was completed in 1975 but never released during the author’s lifetime, owing to the publisher’s objection to its politically charged content. So this is the only unpublished Milo March manuscript left by Ken Crossen—now in print for the first time. The book is distinctive in another way. It is the only Crossen book in which characters from two different series interact. Colonel Kim Locke, featured in three other spy novels by Crossen, lends Milo a miniature-breed military dog for an Intelligence mission. Milo has never worked with a canine before, but man and dog quickly take to each other, and the dog will soon prove himself a valuable friend in a world gone mad. The American war against the Viet Cong is supposedly over now, and the only U.S. personnel in the South are advisors and attachés. Milo arrives under cover as the new military attaché, assigned to rescue an Intelligence man held captive in the highlands of the North. He decides to present himself to the Communists as an American officer who has come to plead for the release of the prisoner on the humanitarian grounds that he is a civilian and a personal friend who was captured while on an errand of peace. But how to reach Hanoi safely? An informant sends him to Madame Lê, a beautiful young Chinese Vietnamese woman who is a restaurateur and an officer of the Viet Cong. She is willing to guide Milo on an arduous walk through the jungle. Mindful of the possibility that Madame Lê or her comrades may lure him into the hands of the Viet Cong, to be thrown into the same cell with the American he came to rescue, Milo is taken by surprise when the real danger comes from a completely unexpected quarter. Milo, who never make plans in advance—except the plan to stay alive one more day—embarks on one of the craziest stunts of his espionage career. And the little dog holds the key.

At the time, the two naive young women took it as a joke. Wilma and Jane, both bonded employees at a New York brokerage firm, were squares aspiring to be swingers. And so, at the suggestion of their new boyfriends, they left work one day carrying oversized pocketbooks. The next day it was discovered that bonds and securities worth $1.5 million were missing. And so were Wilma and Jane. How would amateurs like Wilma and Jane dispose of stolen securities? The only way is to sell them to someone with connections in the Syndicate. He in turn sells it to one of his connections, who sells it to another connection, and eventually it winds up somewhere in Europe where they can’t be traced. The boyfriends must have helped the girls by making these sales. But what if the girls spill the beans? In a way it’s no surprise when the Miami cops pull Wilma’s body out of the Everglades. Obviously she was murdered so that she couldn’t be a witness. The suspect, the man she loved, has an alibi—furnished by a Syndicate don who bought the goods. It is up to Milo March, chief investigator for Intercontinental Insurance Company, to find out who has the bonds and securities, and arrange to get them back. But first there is the matter of Jane. She is now the only person who can put the finger on the two men who committed the original crime; and those two men are the only ones who can reveal who in the Syndicate they sold the goods to. If the gun-toting thugs who are dogging Milo’s every step haven’t already killed Jane, they will when they catch up with her—unless Milo gets to her first. With her disguised identity, it may to be tough to track her down. She may be in Florida or she may be somewhere else. She’s just one more good-looking broad in the sea of desirable women that seem to surround Milo—almost indistinguishable, except for a very unusual scar that she is known to have....