Before Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep, Before Dashiell Hammett's The Red Harvest, there was Carroll John Daly's The Snarl of the Beast, the first true hard-boiled detective novel. Featuring Race Williams, a private detective afraid of no man, it is a complex story of murder and inheritance in which Williams must outwit not only the police and a beautiful blonde cat burglar, but a homicidal maniac reputed to be bullet proof. Will his ready fists and forty-four revolvers be up to the task of confronting his foes against the background of deceit, double-crossing, and gunplay? And ultimately will he silence . . . The Snarl of the Beast?

Vivian "Vee" Brown leads two lives. Delicate-looking and small in stature, he lacks physical strength and endurance. But that doesn't prevent him from being an effective special operative to the Manhattan District Attorney. In this capacity he often ignores the legal niceties of due process, shooting first and asking questions later. Many citizens view him as a hair-trigger gunman whose promiscuous killings make him little better than the vicious criminals he hunts. In his other life, Brown lives in a luxurious Park Avenue penthouse, paid for not with his modest civil-servant salary, but with the royalties he earns as a phenomenally successful composer of sentimental songs-a sideline he keeps secret. Both the police and the underworld refer to him as a "Killer of Men." But the denizens of Tin Pan Alley know him as "Master of Melodies," the prince of pop music. The creation of Carroll John Daly, father of the hard-boiled private eye, Vee Brown plied his trade in the page of Dime Detective, the classic crime pulp that was second only to the legendary Black Mask in its impact on the genre.

John Carroll Daly was a popular pulp author of the early 20th century. His 'Knights of the Open Palm', published in 1923 in Black Mask magazine, is seen as founding the genre of hard-boiled detective fiction. First published in March of 1928, 'The Egyptian Lure' is one of his most enduring tales. Many crime and detective stories, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

Dime Detective Magazine was second only to Black Mask as the dean of detective/P.I./hard-boiled pulp magazines, and was the home of Carroll John Daly, Frederick Nebel, John D. MacDonald, Cornell Woolrich, Erle Stanley Gardner, and many other top-notch scribes. This book indexes all 274 issues of Dime Detective, contains several articles on the series and its writers, and as a bonus, the fifth anniversary round-robin story from the November 1936 issue, "The Tongueless Men," by William E. Barrett, Carroll John Daly, Frederick C. Davis, T.T. Flynn, and John Lawrence.