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- Series of unrelated short stories covering elements of crime, horror, drama, and comedy about people of different backgrounds committing murders, suicides, thefts, and other sorts of crime caused by certain motivations, perceived or not.
- A woman hires Mike to find the man who murdered who father, an experienced steeplejack and window-washer who fell 20 floors to his death. Mike's investigation shows that the murdered man lost a $10,000 investment with a crooked stockbroker who seems to have disappeared, leaving a hulking henchman behind to protect his interests.
- Mike has thirty minutes to solve a murder when his lost gun is used to kill a jealous husband who had beaten him senseless the day before.
- Mike runs into an old acquaintance, the wife of an embezzler he helped send to prison, who asks for her help. When she turns up dead in her apartment, rather than in his office as scheduled, Mike investigates. He's curious why a blue-blooded lady should arrange to bury the wife of a convict and discovers that both women are involved in a shady escort service dabbling in blackmail.
- Hammer is hired by a gypsy to clear her boyfriend Carl as an accomplice in robbery. Carl's brother Van is a monkey grinder and after Hammer questions him is murdered. The monkey (Banjo) saves Hammer's life as he solves the crime and clears Carl.
- Tom O'Rough is severely beaten en route to Mike's office. He's concern that Si Loomis, a small-time crook, has won the heart of his employer, Edie Sanford, and she's about to lose her money and her company to the grifter. When Mike can't force the crook to back off and can't convince the Edie that she's fallen for a criminal, he tries to use Loomis' pretty young secretary to get enough evidence to break up the romance.
- A sister knife-throwing act working in North Africa hire Tim and Toubo as bodyguards.
- Mike is hired to retrieve incriminating letters from a blackmailer, but soon learns that the package with $50,000 was really the ransom money to payoff kidnappers. When the woman who collected the ransom from Hammer is double-crossed, she tries to get revenge on her partner but is killed before she can meet with the private detective. Hammer investigates the dead woman's friends and co-workers to mete out his kind of justice upon the kidnapping murderer.
- Mike is hired by an ex-con who now runs an amusement park in New Jersey. The former con-artist has received blackmail notes demanding $25,000 or else he reveal that the old man lied about his identity on his business license applications.
- Showgirl Ruby Duvall is roughed up by her future sister-in-law, arrogant society snob Joyce Conroy, and offered $5000 not to marry Philip and soil the family name. It seems an open-and-shut when Ruby is found dead in her dressing room after a visit from Joyce. It's all too obvious for Mike after learning of another backstage visitor that night: Ruby's violent ex-con ex-boyfriend who refused to let Ruby go.
- Mike's vacation at the 1958 World's Fair in Brussels is interrupted by a case. Wealthy Wilma Puttnam asks Hammer to investigate the people claiming to have the daughter of her late sister who died in the Nazi concentration camps. Mrs. Puttnam wants to be sure it's really Anna/Derna before paying the $5000 they're asking for.
- Mike's girlfriend, Jackie, a dancer in a chorus line, panics when a sleazy reporter points out the similarities between a pair of chorus line murders and the Jack the Ripper killings 70 years ago - both of the murdered girls were redheads and Jackie is the only redhead left in the troupe. Mike has two suspects - a doorman who hates actresses and the reporter who may be making the news instead of simply reporting it.
- A serial killer is carving up women in the neighborhood where Sam Earl, one of Mike's part-time assistants lives. The legman wants to help Mike capture the psychopath before he strikes again, but Hammer insists it's a job for the police department, until Sam's brother's fiancée is brutally stabbed.
- A man Mike helped get paroled from prison gets an anonymous letter accusing his wife of infidelity. Mike learns he's bought a gun illegally and tries to convince the ex-con's spouse to quit her glitzy job which requires her to be seen socially with a magazine editor known to have a roving eye before there's bloodshed. When the wife is found murdered and his friend's gone on the lam, Mike attempts to prove that the gun his friend bought was a different caliber than the one used to commit the crime.
- Mike's slippery friend Al Sparks skips town because of a gambling debt. He turns up in Forge River charged with murdering the female owner of the diner where he worked. Hammer discovers everyone fears Todd Stryker, the man who runs his wife's huge lumber company and wields all the power in town. Stryker's relationship with the dead woman is a secret he wants to keep.
- After discovering his office has been ransacked, Mike receives a threatening phone call ordering him off "the case" and to drop his client, Sharon O'Closkey. Mike refuses, even though he wasn't working on a case and didn't have a client named O'Closkey. When the mysterious client calls and invites the private investigator to her room, Mike quickly agrees, only to fall victim to drugged meal. When he awakens, he discovers he's in Las Vegas and his beautiful client claims he flew to Nevada willingly to help her find her missing father.
- When an elderly man living in Mike's hotel unexpectedly inherits $7500, Hammer appoints himself the man's guardian to ward off moochers and con artists.
- Mike receives an anonymous letter with a $300 retainer hiring him to investigate the disappearance of a parking lot attendant. Mike learns that the man was defrauding the owner by marking wrong arrival times on parking tickets and pocketing the proceeds. When the man was found murdered, he traces the killer back to the company's headquarters.
- Mike's quest for peace and quiet is interrupted when he intervenes in a lover's quarrel fought in a swanky restaurant. The next day, Mike is hauled into court and forced to post a peace bond guaranteeing that he'll stay away from the man he fought with the previous evening. When the man turns up dead and his fiancée accuses Mike of the crime, Hammer has to go on the lam to clear himself of the frame-up.
- A young, recently married woman hires Mike to find her husband, who disappeared after visiting his estranged mother at her Berkshire Mountains mansion. Mike's efforts to visit the man's mother meet resistance from the woman's secretary and groundskeeper, but he manages to confront her in the estate's garden. He discovers that the man's mother is a former Broadway star whose face was disfigured by a knife-wielding thug ten years earlier. When he finds the body of a young man in a shallow grave on the property, he becomes more determined than ever to have the bride meet her mother-in-law and learn the identity of the corpse buried on the grounds.
- Mike investigates a $50,000 jewelry heist and double-murder for the insurance company. He gets a tip that the thief and murderer is hiding in a nearby hotel and kills the crook in a gunfight. When Mike learns that the dead man was a known jewel thief who never carried a gun, he suspects that he was tricked into shooting a man by his double-crossing partner and sets out to bring the other gunsel to justice.
- An Asian nightclub singer is offered $5000 by her boyfriend's snooty society mother to just disappear. She turns it down until her husband, a Merchant Marine she escaped from long ago, shows up demanding cash to go away. She shoots him in self defense, but doesn't kill him. Mike believes her story and works to clear her of a murder charge.
- Punch-drunk former boxer Kid Dakota still carries a torch for gold-digging his ex-wife Julie. The Kid got into a fight with Julie's current husband at their restaurant (which used to be his) and vowed to kill him. When the husband turns up dead a few hours later, the police have an open and shut case. Mike, however, thinks Kid's been framed by someone else who wanted the current husband dead.
- Mike is asked to investigate help a young man who has been arrested for murder in a small Pennsylvania town. He thinks the case against his client is pretty good, but when the local district attorney and deputy sheriff try to run him out of town, he decides to investigate further.
- Mike responds to a phone call from a small-time junkie requesting protection too late; he finds his friend shot to death in a Chinatown alley. Not satisfied that the police will exert themselves to find the man's killer, Mike launches his own investigation and links the crime to an earlier unsolved murder.
- A shady husband of an elderly shop owner's niece is found stabbed to death when trying to steal the old man's shop and have him sent away. The dead husband's partner is the prime suspect and tells Hammer that he didn't do it.
- Mike is hired to discretely investigate a series of attempts on the life of Carl Kunard, a successful building contractor, the most recent of which took place at the man's vacation lodge in upstate New York. Mike's suspects include Kunard's unhappy business partner, his trophy wife and his resentful son. Hammer's efforts are hindered by a fraternity pledge held in the lodge to escape the prying eyes of the university authorities.
- While waiting for his car to be repaired at a friend's combination garage/used car lot, Mike gets involved with three unsavory characters who are very interested in a Jaguar sports car that has bullet holes in the back of the driver's seat with blood stains to match.
- The wife of a professor, who is well to do, runs a theater of actors under her iron control, until one of the actors is accused of murdering her which leads his girlfriend to call Hammer for his help.
- Mike returns to his old neighborhood when gunsels working for a protection racket murder a boyhood friend. Before long, his investigation into the gang's criminal activities results in more fatalities.
- When several of Johnny Sixty's juke box machines and his ace mechanic murdered, the police focus on Sixty's business rival, Wallets Mack. Mack insists he's innocent and hires Mike to prove it. Mike's investigation turns up blackmail, an invalid wife and a pretty singer with dreams of the big time.
- Hammer agrees to help a young man retrieve a damaging photograph of himself and a beautiful girl together at his stag party who is blackmailing him for it, for fear of his wife to be finding out, that is until the girl is found dead.
- Mike is hired by an art student's parents who are concerned when she stops writing. The artist's friends and instructor aren't concerned that she's missing, but Mike connects the girl's disappearance with the copies of the Old Masters she'd been making and a forgery that covered the theft of a masterpiece from a major art museum.
- Mike is hired to find the murderer of a newspaper reporter. The trail leads to a ballroom whose hostesses, usually small-town girls with no relatives, frequently disappear.
- While eating in a hotel restaurant, Mike spots a man take a package from a woman's table. Even though the package contains a necklace with a broken clasp as the man claimed, Mike smells foul play and traces the woman who left the box. When he arrives at her house, he learns that she was pushed down her stairs and badly injured. Investigating further, he discovers she is the victim of a vicious blackmailer.
- Mike receives a desperate letter from Harris Stevens who claims that he's being held against his will in a mental hospital. The physician in charge refuses to allow Mike to see the patient, but Mike learns from a nurse that she suspects the charges are true. Mike's chances of springing his client take a turn for the worse when the nurse and the physician are found stabbed to death by a knife that Harris was making to use in a desperate escape attempt.
- Mike is asked to help a popular disk jockey who's been threatened by a powerful music producer to play her performers' songs or else. While Mike is trying to persuade the producer to back off, the disk jockey is brutally beaten, and Mike is fired as a result. When the DJ collapses from the injuries he's sustained, Mike decides he's been rehired and takes after the producer and her goons with a vengeance.
- Mike discovers his girlfriend's roommate has been murdered and launches his own investigation. He discovers that she was killed for a diamond she was trying to fence and tracks the murderer to the Brussels World Fair.
- A rich industrialist wants to hire Mike to beat up his son and heir because the young man has become engaged to woman considered beneath the family's standing. Mike turns the job down, but agrees to drive the industrialist to the family's cabin in the Catskills where the son and his fiancée are waiting out a storm. When Mike arrives, he finds the young woman dead, bloodstains on the floor and conflicting stories about how both occurred.
- Mike decides to investigate when the darkroom belonging to his girlfriend's brother is destroyed by someone looking for an incriminating photograph. Since the negative and all the copies of the photograph were destroyed Mike doesn't have a leads to go on, until he hires a fingerprint expert to dust the nightclub where the photographer worked. He learns that the man very interested in not having his picture taken was a racketeer who had been declared dead three years earlier when the plane he purportedly was flying in crashed and burned.
- While getting a shoeshine in the Bowery, Mike spots a beautiful, well-dressed blonde who is as out of place as a field of wildflowers growing out of a crack in the concrete. When the woman is mugged in an alley, Mike comes to her aid and learns that she's searching for her husband, a blues piano player, who hasn't written to her in Wyoming in over a month. Mike traces the missing husband to a penny arcade and then follows the bodies to a fashionable apartment uptown.
- A nightclub singer asks Mike to get her out of a contract that's held by a mobster. The man claims the rising star who she owes him $50,000 "for expenses" plus 30% of her salary in perpetuity. While Mike is working on the contract, the singer receives a blackmail threat. Mike tries to retrieve the indiscreet photograph, he finds the blackmailers dead and the negative gone.
- A professor embezzles a brief case full of money from his school in New York and flies to the sleepy south American backwater of San Salvidor. Hammer soon gets a letter from him, begging that he will fly down and protect him from a menacing local thug. He does, but when there he can't find the professor or the money and quickly encounters a corrupt official.
- Hammer is hired by Susan Barlow but she stands him up. He investigates and runs into her husband Hank Barlow. After a fight, Hank hires Hammer to find his wife who has been missing for several days. Hammer talks to Shelton Dean of the brokerage firm Haskell & Dean, who had called Mrs. Barlow. Haskell is a recluse and Mrs. Barlow is claiming to be his daughter.
- Working for the insurance company, Mike assists the police investigate an armed robbery of an armored car company. His investigation reveals that the sister of a crippled friend who only helped the hold-up gang because of the beatings they had given her brother. Mike can't capture the thieves without implicating the young woman.
- A friend from the old neighborhood asks Mike to travel to Chicago to claim the body of her son. While visiting the Windy City, Mike learns that the young man was murdered and the police don't appear to be interested in investigating the crime. When Mike visits the murdered man's room to pick up his personal effects, he is attacked and brutally beaten by a pair of thugs who want to know where "it" is. Mike has no idea, but he's determined to find out and make the two goons who attacked him which they'd never been born.
- Mike, vacationing in France, is asked to help a pretty American widow who is traveling on the ocean liner "Isle de France". The woman claims to see her dead husband everywhere, but the ships' officers think she is slowing going insane with grief. Mike agrees with their diagnosis until he sees the "ghost" try to throw the widow overboard; he then races against time to capture the all-to-real spirit before he can finish the job.
- Hammer is providing security for a jewelry store and catches a woman stealing a piece. Her husband is a gambler deeply in debt and Hammer takes pity and decides to help her. Hammer poses as her cousin and discovers that the poker game her husband plays in is crooked.
- When an innocent man is accused of murder, Mike is hired to find the real killer of a photographer who ran a phony modeling school and dabbled in blackmail on the side.
- Mike investigates a disheveled man's wild tale about a man that he killed six months ago dying a second time in a car accident two days ago. When his client turns up dead, Mike follows his only clue, the phone number of a pretty piano player billed as "Miss Patti".