James Hadley Chase (real name Rene Brabazon Raymond) is the author of more than eighty detective novels. J. H. Chase is a master of the “open” detective story, in which the reader is not confronted with the fact of committing a crime, but step by step participates in its preparation. The thirteenth volume of the Collected Works includes three novels, three crime stories. They might not have existed if the private detective had not forgotten in his jacket pocket a letter from a girl who died that same day of a heart attack (“Put her among the lilies”); if the patient, the heir to her grandfather’s multimillion-dollar fortune, had not escaped from a psychiatric hospital (“Orchid Flesh”); if a random passer-by had not helped a successful businessman get home (“Dead Man’s Trap”).