Pay-Off #5

An anthology of detective stories featuring multiple cases. One story involves Detective Malone investigating the murder of a man aboard a ship, discovering that the victim's ex-wife Floradora had been poisoned by someone, and the husband's apparent suicide was actually murder—he had rigged a weighted rope to a gun that would pull it from his hand as he fell, staging the scene to frame his wife as the killer out of hatred. Another story centers on private detective Michael Rand investigating a mysterious organization called the League of the 10,000, where members have a five-year grace period to pay dues before being eliminated, with multiple members mysteriously dying and a member named Henry Vanders suspected of orchestrating the deaths for financial gain.