WHAT THIS STORY IS ABOUT
Greedy materialism, especially when it calculatingly shuns all the finer human emotions, can turn any man into an inhuman monster. To Emery Pride, self-made millionaire tycoon, it did precisely that. Consumed as he was by his inordinate love of the moneybags, loss of wife and daughter meant nothing to him in his aquisitive mode of life.

Blackmailed - by his own long-lost daughter, so he believed - Pride forged a diabolical plot that brought even rape and murder within his vile compass. He might have succeeded in his deadly, double-crossing scheming had he not commissioned Hank Janson to find the girl and act as go-between in the blackmail.

If our intrepid newshawk ever nursed any false ideas about the particular brand of crime in our own London Town as being any less tough and violent than he invariably finds it in Chicago and other American cities, he should be wiser after this Pride affair.

© Roberts & Vinter Ltd 1961

WHAT THIS STORY IS ABOUT
News and trouble have one thing in common. You can't run away from either without becoming more deeply involved. Events get you by the short hair in the end and the issue is better faced at the start.

Who should know that better than a newshound like Janson? But this one time he overlooked the moral by attempting to dodge an assignment, only to land himself into a web of macabre events that, strangely enough, brought a solution of the mystery he didn't want to probe. As he says himself:

"I should have stayed in Chicago and handled my own problems instead of running away and burying myself in the backwoods. A fat lot of good that had done me. For my pains, a murder had been committed on my doorstep. Other people's troubles had been dumped in my lap, involving me inextricably with the law. I had become an accessory after the fact twice over. I had failed to report important evidence to a law enforcement officer - and I had been savagely beaten up and left for dead by teenage thugs."

Nor did he know it all at that moment. There was much more grief to follow, and it was perhaps as well for the preservation of Hank's sanity that lovely Penny Keane did her own line of sleuthing to bring about a delicious reunion.

© Roberts & Vinter Ltd 1962