When crime magazine editor George Stroud sees his boss and his boss’s girlfriend heading into her apartment together, he’s careful not to be seen. That’s because he’s just dropping off the woman in question after having his own tryst with her. Though he keeps out of sight well enough to keep his boss, publishing magnate Earl Janoth, from identifying him, Janoth is able to tell that his girlfriend has just been with another man. When they later get into an argument about that and Janoth winds up bashing her head in with a decanter, it puts George in an awful spot.
The situation only gets worse when Janoth and his right-hand man try to get Stroud to unknowingly (they think) help Janoth beat the murder rap. Since no one else had seen Janoth enter or leave the apartment, the mystery man outside the apartment is the only one who could put Janoth away. Using a phony cover story, they ask Stroud to find this man, sketching in the few details Janoth was able to extract from his girlfriend before the murder and the fake name she provided.
Having been asked to identify himself, Stroud goes to work using all of the company’s vast resources to conduct an investigation, all the while doing his best to thwart it while strategizing a way out of the mess he’s in. As the noose works it’s way around his neck he gets more and more desperate.
Fearing’s writing is spare but tight. The characters speak in a patter familiar to fans of newspaper movies in black and white. The book is also surprisingly frank about sex for its time. Any fan of crime writing should seek it out.