(1912-1968) Also wrote as: Frank Boyd
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. 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. There were 29 published novels in the series, and before that an assortment of shorter pieces published in such pulp magazines as Crack Detective. 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.
Kane, Brooklyn-born and a lifetime New Yorker, worked for many years in journalism and corporate public relations before shifting to fiction writing. At the time he was selling crime stories to the pulps he was also sustaining a career writing scripts for such radio shows as Gangbusters and The Shadow.
In addition to the Johnny Liddells, Kane wrote several suspense novels, some softcore erotica, and under the pen name of Frank Boyd, Johnny Staccato, a Gold Medal original paperback based on the fabulous, short-lived noir television series, starring John Cassavetes, about a Greenwich Village bebop pianist turned private detective.
Works
- About Face (1947);
- Barely Seen (1964);
- Bare Trap (1952);
- Bullet Proof (1951);
- Conspirators, The (1962);
- Crime of Their Life (1962);
- Dead Rite (1962);
- Dead Weight (1951);
- Due or Die (1961);
- Esprit de Corpse (1965);
- Fatal Undertaking (1964);
- Final Curtain (1964);
- Grave Danger (1954);
- Green Light for Death (1949);
- Guilt-Edged Frame, The (1964);
- Hearse Class Male (1963);
- Johnny Come Lately (1963);
- Johnny Liddell’s Morgue (1956);
- Juke Box King (1959);
- Key Witness (1956);
- Living End, The (1957);
- Liz (1958);
- Maid in Paris (1966);
- Margin for Terror (1967);
- Mourning After, The (1961);
- Poisons Unknown (1953);
- Real Gone Guy, A (1956);
- Red Hot Ice (1955);
- Ring-a-Ding-Ding (1963);
- Short Bier, A (1960);
- Slay Ride (1950);
- Stacked Deck (1961);
- Syndicate Girl (1958);
- Time to Prey (1960);
- Trigger Mortis (1958);
- Two to Tangle (1965)
As Frank Boyd:
- Flesh Peddlers, The (1959);
- Johnny Staccato (1960)
