Seven Slayers — Paul Cain

Seven brutally ingenius tales of murder passionate and cold-blooded, written by a poet of the hard-boiled.

There's Black, a stranger in town, who gets drafted into a gang war just because he had the bad luck to trip over a corpse on his way from the station.  There's the glamorous Bella, whose boyfriends have the distressing habit of stabbing one another while she naps in the next room.  And of course there's Johnny Doolin, who hires himself out as a bodyguard--only to find that his client has no interest in staying alive.

The men and women in Seven Slayers are exactly what the title promises:  people who kill for love or money or for the sheer, perverse joy of homicide.  And this riveting collection is one of the few surviving books by Paul Cain (aka Peter Ruric, aka George Sims), a hard-drinking, enigmatic writer of the 1930s who had as many pseudonyms as he had wives and of whom Raymond Chandler wrote that he had reached in his fiction "a high point in the hard-boiled manner."