Few characters have the loyal readership of Bill Pronzini's Nameless Detective. The fourteen stories in this collection span his entire thirty-five-year life on the printed page. They include It's a Lousy World, where Nameless proves that a friend did not commit the crime he was accused of; Dead Man's Slough and The Ghosts of Ragged-Ass Gulch, which take him out of San Francisco into the hinterlands; and Souls Burning, where he tries to help an old friend make one last try at setting things right.