THE SUNDAY PIGEON MURDERS: A Bingo Riggs and Handsome Kusak Mystery by Rice, Craig - 1945

Cleveland and New York: The World Publishing Co., 1945. 2nd printing of Tower Books # T-322. Publishers maroon boards with yellow lettering, soiled endpapers, very light wear to covers, pages uniformly age toned. Dust jacket is rubbed at folds, shallow loss at spine ends and flap corners, spine lightly soilesd as well as back cover. Remarkably good copy as Tower Books were notorious for their poor quality and cheap paper. The first Bingo Riggs and Handsome Kusak Mystery . Resourceful Bingo Riggs and his partner, Handsome Kusak, are in the sucker-bait business, snapping candid pics of tourists off Central Park. Their fly-by-night enterprise can be irresistible to souvenir lovers, but with one camera in a pawnshop and their developing room in the bathtub of a two-room dump near Hell's Kitchen, their venture is wretchedly underexposed - until they stumble upon an insurance fraud scheme between the allegedly dead eccentric Mr. S. S. Pigeon and his business partner and beneficiary. There's only one way for Bingo and Handsome to muscle in on that half-million-dollar claim: Kidnap Pigeon and blackmail his co-conspirator. Unfortunately, their foolproof plan comes with mobsters, a dodgy chorus girl, multiple murders, a refrigerated corpse, and the strange Mr. Pigeon himself, who, it seems, likes being a hostage. In fact, he has no intention of escaping. It's the surest way to protect his own secret - which could be Bingo and Handsome's biggest threat.. 2nd Printing. Hardcover. Very Good/Good-Very Good. Illus. by Lieberman. Book.