Pat Novak, For Hire — 1949

A thousand dollars Novak never earned turns up in his account, and the woman in his apartment wants a playing card off an incoming ship. The corpse in the closet came free.

A woman collides with Novak outside a cafe, sits down for coffee, tells him she cannot remember who she is or what the police want her for, and dies on the floor.

A jockey has lost the horse he rides tomorrow and offers two hundred to find her. At the stables Novak finds no horse and one body.

Novak pulls a shot man out of the bay alongside his boat. Dying, the stranger asks him to carry a locker key to a girl at the Empire Club and tell her it did not work out.

A redhead in a convertible pays Novak three hundred to stay away from a prizefighter he has never met. She seems very sure he is about to meet him.

A woman offers a hundred dollars to hand a gambler ten thousand and bring back the photographs he is holding over her brother. Novak dislikes everything about it, and wakes beside a body.

A priest walks into the office -- very tall, and startlingly deep-voiced -- with what he calls an errand of mercy: be waiting when a man named Joe Feldman breaks out of Alcatraz tonight. One small stop on the way back leaves a man with his throat cut and a policeman dead.

An old friend Novak has not seen in years wants to borrow a boat, and Novak with it, to pick up a package. Handing it over and saying goodbye does not go to plan.

The same client, the same three hundred dollars, the same errand -- frighten a man with an unloaded gun. This time Novak knows better, and it happens anyway.

Novak wakes to a man on his bed holding a gun and wanting to borrow a boat. The boat turns up next morning in pieces, and what is still aboard it -- a corpse, and a key from a hotel -- puts him on the trail of a woman named Rita Malloy.

A lawyer thinks the husband who came home from the army five years late is not the husband who left. Novak is hired to watch the wife -- and Hellman is away on his honeymoon.

Ticket 428 buys Novak two shirts that are not his. The man holding his shirts has three friends who want the exchange very badly, and one shirt is missing.

Fifty dollars to collect a geranium from a flower stand and carry it to an address, and no explanation. A car tries to run him down, and the flower shop turns out not to exist.

An old man is hit by a car at the corner and dies with two envelopes in his hand: one of money for Novak, one sealed for a man he never lives long enough to describe.

A stranger interrupts Novak's shave to hire him: follow a woman from the bowling alley to her boat and find out which vessel takes the green leather bag off her.

An old flame needs a boat to meet a freighter in from Shanghai, and wants to be sure her stepmother collects the right package. It looks far too easy.

The name Joe Denine meant nothing to Novak until he found the body in one of his own boats. Two gunmen are still looking for Denine, they are sure Novak knows where to find him, and nobody has told them there is no longer anywhere to look.

A priest asks Novak to the church. A stranger fires at him there, a nine-year-old altar boy steps into it, and Novak goes looking for the man who meant the bullet for him.