The Complete Cases of the Arson Dick (The Dime Detective Library) Paperback – July 21, 2019

Leslie T. White, the author of the early police procedurals collected in this book, was the real deal. Before LAPD Detective Sergeant Joseph Wambaugh hit the best-seller lists with THE NEW CENTURIONS, before Dorothy Uhnak, First Grade Detective on the Manhattan DA's Squad, won an Edgar for THE BAIT, indeed years before either one of them was even born, decades before the term "police procedural" had even been coined, Les White was enforcing the law in Southern California, and gathering material he would later use in his fiction. Starting out as a Ventura County Deputy Sheriff, he transferred to the Ventura City Police, where he became the top-ranking detective. This was followed by 10 years as a criminal investigator for the Los Angeles County DA's Office.Encouraged by his friend, Ventura lawyer and part-time pulpster Erle Stanley Gardner, to turn his experiences into fiction, White began his writing apprenticeship with short cop stories for pulp magazine like BLACK MASK, DIME DETECTIVE, and DETECTIVE FICTION WEEKLY. He eventually graduated to hardcover police novels like HARNESS BULL (which became the Edward G. Robinson film VICE SQUAD) and HOMICIDE, and to slick magazines, like SATURDAY EVENING POST and COLLIER'S.The four stories in this book all feature Todd Naughton, a young detective working out of the Arson Squad in an unnamed big city in the West. White was an early practitioner of forensic investigation (though he was simultaneously a street cop), and he occasionally investigated arsons, though he never specialized in it.Nevertheless, he knew enough to authentically depict the nuts and bolts of arson investigation. But, while he was unstinting on the authenticity, he never forgets what pulp readers were hungry for. And these stories have all the hard, fast action that pulp crime fiction fans craved.If you like writers like Wambaugh or Uhnak, do yourself a favor and discover this early pioneer of the police procedural sub-genre, who blazed the trail that they, and so many other cops-turned-writers later followed.