Showing results for "The Key" in Short Stories

A high school boy arranges for his Pontiac Sunfire to take over his life. McSweeney's is a literary journal based in San Francisco.

"But, first, he stopped before the mirror. He was a handsome man, but, vain. No woman could resist him, he believed; few actually did. In consequence, they were objects of contempt, victims rather than recipients of love." So begins "The Lost Key" a short story by Hal Ellson published in Manhunt magazine in February 1960, narrated as an audiobook by Mike Vendetti. But what happens when Mr. Wonderful puts his moves on a female narcissist?

"Songs in the Key of Death," an anthology of music-infused crime stories by acclaimed author William Bankier. For over thirty years, starting in the 1960s, Bankier's love affair with music mixed with his hard-boiled crime stories to produce some of the most exhilarating and dramatic crime fiction of his generation. Many of Bankier's best works originally graced the pages of classic pulp magazines like "Alfred Hitchcock" and "Ellery Queen Magazine," where Ellery Queen himself declared, "No one in the genre writes about music better than William Bankier."