Crime Smashers #4

When Sally the Sleuth and the Chief answer a call from Jay Stark at the carnival amusement park, they arrive to investigate threatening notes sent to Stark's wife, Gloria—a dancer performing at the fairgrounds. But the case takes a deadly turn when Gloria is shot dead inside her tent, and Sally must piece together a clever alibi scheme involving a masked clown, a hooked pole, and a substitute to catch the real killer.

Dan Turner drops by a Hollywood film studio to watch the climactic scene of a murder mystery being shot—only to discover that the actor playing the corpse isn't actually acting. When a real bullet pierces through the fake wound that makeup man Leo Preen painted on the victim's forehead, Turner must untangle a web of studio rivalries, secret marriages, and inheritance schemes to catch the killer. With the studio lot as his crime scene and more secrets hidden behind the makeup than on screen, the hard-boiled detective races to solve the case before the real culprit makes their escape.

Ray Hale, star reporter for the Clarion, stumbles onto a murder mystery when he discovers a drowned man tied to a dock—and soon learns the victim, jade dealer Harvey Rigby, was part of a larger waterfront theft ring. Posing as a collector to infiltrate the operation, Hale uncovers a shadowy criminal mastermind known only as "the Wanderer" who's orchestrating a string of high-value hijackings, and he'll need to go undercover aboard a cargo ship to stop the next heist before it happens.

When Inspector Madson's secretary Gail Ford stumbles upon a suspicious figure fleeing the Bates mansion, she becomes the key witness to a murder that soon follows—but the obvious suspect, the wealthy man's estranged son Gerald Bates, insists he's innocent despite the damning evidence. Racing against time and her own boss's assumptions, Gail digs deeper into the case, uncovering clues that suggest the real culprit may be closer to the crime than anyone realized.