This collection presents little-known stories in our country from the literary anthologies of Alfred Hitchcock, the famous master of hoaxes, grotesqueries and parodies of the nightmares of Gothic novels. Here you can find works written in the tradition of Edgar Allan Poe’s “scary stories,” short stories showing an ordinary person in an extreme situation, and comic thrillers. The translation of literary anthologies was written by Evgeny Andreev. An integral part of the collection is the novel by the English writer Dashiell Hammett “The Thin Man,” published by Lenizdat this year as a separate book. The works included in this collection were translated for the first time in the Soviet Union.