Brett Holliday (real name Davis Dresser) was born in 1904 in Chicago. He took up literary activity in 1924. He wrote in the genre of the “hard-boiled” detective novel. The main character is red-haired private investigator Mike Shane from Miami, who first appears in the novel Death Dividend, published in 1939. In total, this character appears in seventy novels and more than a hundred novellas and short stories. In the final list of US bestsellers for 60 years, starting from 1907, Halliday’s novels occupy the first seven places. The proposed collection presents Halliday’s action-packed works: “How It Happened”, “Worse Than Hell”, “Death Settled in the Swamps”, “She woke up in the dark.”