Rocky Fortune — 1954

Ellie spent her youth raising her brothers and sisters and now, near forty, has finally found a man to marry. He is a bad one, and she is soon dead. Rocky goes after him and nearly catches a bullet.

Sent to the Ninth Avenue arena for the Grand National Rodeo, Rocky finds his new boss watching a cowboy ride a very unhappy bull -- and shortly finds himself framed for murder.

Talking tourists through a museum of ancient history, Rocky has no objection to corpses five thousand years old. He objects when somebody tries to embalm a fresh one, and it is him.

The advertisement wanted a truck driver and warned the work was hazardous. It was not overstating things: the load is nitroglycerine, and there is an escaped killer riding with it.

At Arty's pool palace the best quarterback in pro football walks up to Rocky and says he has trouble. Rocky is hired to protect a player who will not take a bribe -- and who somehow turns up in two places at once.

Mama Greenspan needs a social director at her Catskills resort, and Rocky has done the job before. He nearly dies on the drive up, and the work turns on a man mixed up in a post office robbery.

Lou, lately of New Orleans, is married to Perry and also to Marvin. Her way out of the arithmetic is to offer Rocky five thousand dollars to make it one.

The Organ Grinder has broken out of jail and is working through everyone who helped put him away. Rocky is on the list, and feeling rather like a bull entering the ring.

Working for the Park Avenue lawyer whose life he saved, Rocky is asked to help a doctor whose own son has stolen twenty-five thousand dollars in narcotics from his office. Rocky poses as a blackmailer to set the trap.

The actuaries give a man like Rocky sixty-six years. A friend who knows better says the statistics do not always hold -- and produces a fresh corpse to prove it, after an insurance executive confesses to strangling his girlfriend.

Called in to witness a wealthy woman's will, Rocky hears her say she is afraid she is going to kill her husband. He is asked to move in and watch her, and finds she may not be losing her mind by accident.

The Zenith Foundation wants an adventurous young man with no family, for experimental and highly dangerous work at unusual pay. The job is ten thousand dollars to ride a rocket to the moon.

The last show. All Rocky wants is a room. The landlady's terms turn out to be steeper than money, and her superintendent is sent to settle the account permanently.