Kane, Brooklyn-born and a lifetime New Yorker, worked for many years in journalism and corporate public relations before shifting to fiction writing. With the exception that the hero graduated from being an investigator who worked for a large agency to becoming an owner-operated lone wolf, the last of the Liddell stories was not very different from the first of them-a notion that Kane made literal at times, as he was known to reuse whole scenes, verbatim, from earlier stories, thus cutting down on his thinking if not on his typing. There were 29 published novels in the series, and before that an assortment of shorter pieces published in such pulp magazines as Crack Detective. Kane’s name on a cover, usually in the company of an awful, punning title (Trigger Mortis, Hearse Class Male, and so on) and an enticing illustration by Harry Bennett or Robert Stanley, guaranteed an easygoing return to the world of tough guys and dangerous dames, unsavory settings and flippant dialogue punctuated by left hooks and gunfire. Frank Kane’s popular series about big-city private eye Johnny Liddell was a paperback equivalent of the B-movie westerns of the 1930s and 1940s: one read the topics not expecting to find anything different, demanding, or even first-rate about them but because one enjoyed the form.
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